There and Back Again – Andrew Booth, a British Computer Pioneer, and his Interactions with US and Other Contemporaries

Abstract : This paper explores the interchanges between Andrew Booth, an early British computer pioneer and contemporary US and other pioneers. The paper records how funding from the US Rockefeller Foundation supported Andrew Booth’s research work in the UK and allowed him to refine his ideas on computer design by visiting US pioneers each year from 1946 to 1948. This led to the construction of an electronic drum, the world’s first successful demonstration of a rotating storage device connected to a computer, to his pioneering work on natural language processing and finally and most notably to his invention of the Booth hardware multiplier which is the basis of the multiplier used in billions of chips each year.