From 1943 to 1945, Booth worked as a mathematical physicist in the X-ray team at the
British Rubber Producers' Research Association (BRPRA),
Welwyn Garden City, Hertfordshire, gaining his PhD in
crystallography from the
University of Birmingham in 1944. In 1945, he moved to
Birkbeck College,
University of London, where his work in the crystallography group led him to build some of the first
electronic computers in the United Kingdom including the
All Purpose Electronic Computer, first installed at the
British Rayon Research Association. Booth founded Birkbeck's department of
numerical automation and was named a fellow at the university in 2004. He also did early pioneering work in
machine translation. After World War II, he worked on crystallographic problems research at Birkbeck College and constructed a Fourier synthesis device. He was then introduced to the work of
Alan Turing and
John von Neumann on logical automata by
Douglas Hartree. Assembly code is converted into executable machine code by a
utility program referred to as an
assembler. The term "assembler" is generally attributed to
Wilkes,
Wheeler and
Gill in their 1951 book
The Preparation of Programs for an Electronic Digital Computer, who, however, used the term to mean "a program that assembles another program consisting of several sections into a single program". The conversion process is referred to as
assembly, as in
assembling the
source code. The computational step when an assembler is processing a program is called
assembly time. Booth served as
President of
Lakehead University from 1972 to 1978. ==Personal life==