Andrew D. Booth – Britain’s Other “Fourth Man” - History of Computing: Learning from the Past - page 29

Fig. 2. Booth's First Drum Photo Courtesy of NMSI. London

These events gave rise to the first official reference to computing at Birkbeck, in
the 1947-8 College Annual Report, which says:
An ambitious scheme is in progress for the construction of an Electronic
Computer, which will serve the needs of crystallographic research at 21-22
Torrington Square; it will also provide a means of relieving many other fields
of research in Chemistry and Physics of the almost crushing weight of
arithmetic work, which they involve. [4]

Notwithstanding the Rockefeller Foundation's funding of a machine expressly for
natural language processing, readers will note the College's emphasis on the “un-
funded” mathematical calculations although, in fairness, Birkbeck became for the
next fifteen years a leading centre for natural language research. Initially the tiny
memory on computers meant it was very difficult to do any serious natural language
processing but Andrew Booth and his research students developed techniques for
parsing text and also for building dictionaries. Numerous papers and several topics
were published as a result and this work is discussed further in section 6.
Andrew Booth, even in the days of cumbersome early machines, wrote about mak-
ing computers available as widely as possible. Nonetheless the following extract from
the College report for 1949-50 under the unpromising heading of “Desk Calculating
Machines” seems well ahead of its time:

The Committee of the Privy Council for Scientific and Industrial Research have
made a grant for a programme of research on desk calculating machines to be
carried out over the next two to three years on behalf of the National Physical
Laboratory by the Electronic Computer Laboratory at Torrington Square. [5]

This project seems to have ended prematurely without a full prototype being built but a
copy of Andrew Booth's report from 1950 has recently been found in the Science