Andrew D. Booth – Britain’s Other “Fourth Man” - History of Computing: Learning from the Past - page 30

Museum archives [6]. In it Andrew Booth evaluates the technical options for putting
computers on, if not the desktop, at least the laboratory bench. The design used dekatron
valves which operated on a decimal basis and thus provided simple counting devices.
Booth lacked any simple way to display digits electronically and proposed to use the
position of the lighted cathode as a counter in a manner similar to reading an analogue
clockface. Andrew Booth observes in the report that this feature had been regarded as a
serious shortcoming by reviewers from the National Physical labora-tory although
Booth predicts correctly that a technical solution would soon become available.
Around 1948/49, Andrew Booth redesigned the ARC2 as an entirely electronic
machine which he called Simple Electronic Computer (SEC). This was built by Nor-
man Kitz (formerly Norbert Kitz), see Figure 3, and is written up in his 1951 MSc
(Eng) dissertation [7].
Fig. 3. Norman Kitz working on SEC, December 1949. The larger drum in the forefront of the
picture is now in the Science Museum, London.
An interesting historical footnote is that Norman Kitz left Birkbeck to work for
English Electric at NPL on the DEUCE computer. From there he moved to Bell
Punch and designed the world's first electronic desktop calculator, called ANITA. So
although Andrew Booth never completed a desktop calculator at Birkbeck, it seems
likely that he inspired one of his students to do so.
Andrew Booth moved swiftly on to create his best known computers, the All-
Purpose Electronic Computers (APEC). The 1951/52 College Annual Report proudly
records that “ The APEXC calculator operated successfully for the first time on 2 nd
May 1952 ”. A year later the 1952/3 College Annual Report records that: