For a period of twenty years starting in 1953 it was a source of significant research in machine translation, computational linguistics, and quantum physics even though outside the official university structures in Cambridge.
Margaret Masterman was ahead of her time by some twenty years: many of her beliefs and proposals for language processing by computer have now become part of the common stock of ideas in the artificial intelligence (AI) and machine translation (MT) fields.
She was never able to lay adequate claim to them because they were unacceptable when she published them, and so when they were written up later by her students or independently "discovered" by others, there was no trace back to her, especially in these fields where little or nothing over ten years old is ever reread.
This led in later years to the key role she assigned to rhythm, stress, breathgroupings and the boundaries they impose on text and the processes of understanding.
Again, she became preoccupied for a considerable period with the nature and function of Chinese ideograms, because she felt they clarified in an empirical way problems that Wittgenstein had wrestled with in his so-called picture-theory-of-truth.
This led her to exaggerate the generality of ideogrammatic principles and to seem to hold that English was really rather like Chinese if only seen correctly, with its meaning atoms, highly ambiguous and virtually uninflected.
Subsequently, the attempt to build language processing programs which had a sound philosophical basis was a distinctive feature of the Unit's work.
This approach to language processing, and the specific form it took in the use of a thesaurus as the main vehicle for semantic operations, will probably come to be seen as the Unit's major contributions to the field as a whole, and it was Margaret who was primarily responsible for them.
Perhaps the best comment on Margaret's initiative in embarking on language processing research, and specifically on machine translation work, comes from a somewhat unexpected source.
Machine translation, after an initial period of high hopes, and some large claims, was cast into outer darkness in 1966 by funding agencies who saw little return for their money.
Despite every kind of problem, the Unit produced numerous publications on language and related subjects, including information retrieval and automatic classification.
Margaret walked the 7 miles from Millington Road in Cambridge to Orwell and purchased two North Star Horizon computers from Intelligent Artefacts (see ST Robotics).
This contrasted with the predominant language translation techniques of the time, notably Systran which used a dictionary and rule based system still used today.
She also was a founder and the major inspiration of the Epiphany Philosophers, a group which shared some membership with the CLRU and was dedicated to the study of the relationship of science and religion and the forms of religious practice.