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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   36185 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 24, 2022

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Kathleen Booth, early British computer scientist, died one month ago on Sept 29 at the age of 100. The Register published an obituary for her titled "RIP: Kathleen Booth, the inventor of assembly language."

One month later, yesterday, a link to the obituary was the top (I think) post 1, 2 on both Hacker News and Reddit's programming subreddit

Many of the commenters lamented that they had never heard of this highly influential person, and other commenters suggested that the reason most people hadn't heard of her is because she was a woman.

Ironically, I would contend, the only reason we are hearing about her is because she was a woman.

Calling her the inventor of assembly language may be a stretch. One HN comment points out that the IEEE has already given a computer pioneer award to David Wheeler for inventing the first assembly language in 1949.

You can read her 1947 paper and decide if the table at the end counts as the first assembly language. It is a numbered list of 25 operations, a symbolic description of their action, and in a few cases an English description of their operation. It is, at least superficially, similar to the list of 30 operations Wheeler created for the EDSAC.

Ran out of time to delve into:

  • Grace Hopper falsely being credited for inventing COBOL

  • If Ada Lovelace invented programming, and if she did but no one knew about it and it didn't influence anyone else, should we credit her?

  • Booth's credit being recently discovered/promoted in 2018 Hackaday article

  • Margaret Hamilton being the only programmer popularly known for Apollo work, despite leading a small team of 3 people.

  • Hamilton and Booth both marrying their bosses.

  • All of these women being impressive in their own right, and exaggerating their contributions for Girl Power is a disservice to them.

Yeah, this one is so common and so annoying. As you note there are many patents predating Lamarr and Antheil's: for example by Purington (in 1940 and 1935); by Broertjes in 1929; by Chaffee in 1922; by Blackwell, Martin, and Vernam in 1926, and even by Tesla in 1903. Jonathan Zenneck's text Wireless Telegraphy (which appeared in Germany in 1909) also contains a section on frequency hopping, and adds in a footnote that “This method was adapted by the Telefunken Co. at one time,” showing that the core principle was applied as early as the opening of the 20th century. Frequency hopping was most certainly not pioneered by Lamarr.

Additionally, she was at one point married to an Austrian munitions manufacturer whose work she had access to and interest in, and German engineers before World War II were aware of frequency hopping - it is not beyond the realm of possibility that the idea could've been derived from her former husband's colleagues.

Edit: added more

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