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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 24, 2022

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Booth's list is not an assembly language. It is a suggested list of operations for a machine that has not been built. An assembly language is a machine readable mnemonic representation of low level instructions. Wheeler's assembly language could be punched onto tape, which the machine would read and then translate to the proper bit patterns. Wheeler's 1950 Programme Organization and Initial Orders for the EDSAC contains the assembler (in assembly language).

The hackaday article suggests the assembly language and assembler is found in an unavailable document called "Coding for A.R.C." However, this document is in fact available, and while it contains a table mapping "order numbers" (bit patterns) to more human-readable instructions, there remains no indication that this language is machine-readable.

The other issue with using those reports to support the claim of "a woman invented assembly language" is they were written by Andrew Booth and Kathleen Britten (later Kathleen Booth). I'm fairly sure Andrew wasn't a woman.

The hackaday and other articles refer to "autocode", which doesn't appear in either those papers or the later "Mathematical Tables and Other Aids to Computation".

Autocode is mentioned here. It appeared much later (in the mid-1960s) and was a high-level language, not an assembly language at all.