Programming for an Automatic Digital Calculator.

Author of the first assembly language & neural net pioneer. First edition of one of the first conventionally published programming books, written by computing and AI pioneer Kathleen Booth (1922-2022).

Booth studied mathematics at Royal Holloway, University of London, and then worked on aerodynamics at the Royal Aircraft Establishment, Farnborough. Between 1942 and 1962 Booth' worked at Birkbeck College as part of one of the smallest British computer groups of the time. The team created the ARC (Automatic Relay Computer), the SEC (Simple Electronic Computer), and the APE(X)C (All-purpose Electronic (Rayon) Computer), remarkable achievements given the size of the team and the resources it had access to. Kathleen's husband, Andrew Booth, often built the machines and Kathleen programmed them. After returning from a visit to the United States in 1947 where Kathleen and Andrew met John von Neumann, she wrote a paper detailing changes to the ARC using von Neumann architecture, to create the ARC2. She is credited with writing the first assembly language. In 1957, Kathleen co-founded the School of Computer Science and Information Systems at Birkbeck College and in 1958 published a book on programming the APE(X), notable for being one of the earliest books on programming and highly unusual in having a female author' (Centre for Computing History biography). In 1962, following Birkbeck's refusal to endow a chair in computer science, the Booths left for Canada, 'where Kathleen undertook research on machine translation and neural networks. She also became an advocate for women in science and engineering' and the couple founded a consultancy, Autonetics Research Associates (Guardian obituary). Booth continued working into her 70s, publishing her final paper 'Using neural nets to identify marine mammals' in 1993.

First edition; 8vo; equations, tables, and diagrams within the text, publisher's ink stamp to the rear pastedown, a little light spotting to the edges of the text block and the endpapers; original green cloth, titles to spine gilt, spine rolled, corners bumped, spine titles dulled, a few small spots and marks to the cloth; very good condition; 238pp.