ARC (Automatic Relay Computer)
More info
- Creator
- Andrew Booth and Kathleen Britten
- Released
- 1948
- Type
- Relay computer
- Location
- Birkbeck College, London
The relay machine two people built in a basement room at Birkbeck for a fraction of what Manchester and Cambridge spent — and very nearly as early.
Andrew Booth needed Fourier sums for his crystallography and decided to build the machine himself rather than wait for somebody else to. ARC — the Automatic Relay Computer — was running in 1948, built from relays because relays were cheap and obtainable; an electronic machine would have required funding of an entirely different order. The money came from the rubber industry's research association, which wanted crystal structures and had not commissioned a computer.
After Booth's visit to von Neumann at Princeton in 1947 the machine was rebuilt as ARC2, with a stored program and a rotating magnetic drum memory of Booth's own design. It was on that machine that Kathleen Britten wrote what is generally called the first assembly language. Manchester Baby took the first place and the headlines because it was electronic; ARC was slow, inelegant and forgotten within a decade. The drum, on the other hand, was the standard memory for the next fifteen years.