Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
end of the 1950s this was the UK's best selling computer by volume. After BTM
merged with Powers SAMAS to form ICT the HEC4 became the ICT 1200 range, see
Figure 6. The technical details of the HEC4 form the majority of Raymond Bird's
thesis [10].
Booth continued to build new machines. After the APEC machines, came MAC
(Magnetic Automatic Calculator). Three examples of a development of MAC named
M.2 were built by Wharf Engineering Ltd. These were for University College Lon-
don, Kings College London and Imperial College London. The Annual Report for
1957/58 notes.
The keynote of the M.2 is, as in previous machines, small size and simplicity, and
an idea of what has been achieved is provided by the fact that M.2 occupies a space
rather less than that of an office desk, consumes as much power as an electric fire, but
has roughly the speed and capacity of the much larger commercial machines which
are being provided for some of the smaller Universities. [11]
6 Natural Language Processing
The Booths with their research students published numerous topics and papers on text
processing including creating Braille output and natural language translation. A de-
tailed assessment of Booth's early work in this area can be found in a paper by Hut-
chins [12]. On November 11 th 1955 the laboratory gave an early public demonstration
of natural language machine translation, see Figure 7.
Fig. 7. Machine Translation of Natural Language 1955
Search WWH ::




Custom Search