Kathleen Booth died at 100

Kathleen Booth, the inventor of assembly language

Builder and programmer of the ARC and SEC turned 100 this year

Professor Kathleen Booth, one of the last of the early British computing pioneers, has died on 29 Oct, 2022. . She was 100.

Kathleen Hylda Valerie Britten was born in Worcestershire, England, on July 9, 1922.She was a British computer scientist and mathematician who wrote the first assembly language and designed the assembler and autocode for the first computer systems at Birkbeck College, University of London.[1][when?] She helped design three different machines including the ARC (Automatic Relay Calculator), SEC (Simple Electronic Computer), and APE(X)C.

Another of her pioneering work was programming simulated neural networks to identify animals. It was only four years after the first neural networks were run on computers.

In 1993, at the age of 71, she published a paper co-authored by Dr. Ian J. M. Booth, her son., entitled “Titled “Using neural nets to identify marine mammals” .