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Maurice Wilkes at 90
Maurice Wilkes led the team at Cambridge University that built EDSAC,
the first stored program electronic computer in the world..
He recently celebrated his 90th birthday.
Read this article!
An article about
Wilkes' 90th birthday from the Cambridge University Alumni Magazine.
History
EDSAC performed its first calculation on 8 May 1949.
Many text books do not list EDSAC as the first computer or even mention
it at all. Nevertheless, it was
the first working electronic computer that had a program stored in its
memory.
The only part of the computer taht was not fully electronic was the
memory (it was electro-acoustic), but the rest of the computer was
electronic.
The first fully electronic stored program computer was the Mark 1 at
Manchester University (which Turing worked on), also not mentioned by
many text books. It was several years later that there were working
stored program electronic computers in the US. Machines in the USA like
the Harvard Mark 1 and ENIAC were NOT stored program computers as we
recognise them today.
Wilkes has had a long career in Computer Science. Maurice Wilkes was
head of Computer science at Cambridge in 1967 when I was a
student there.
After retiring from the University in 1980 he worked for a while for
Digital in
the USA:
At 90 years old Wilkes has returned to Cambridge University and is
still doing computing research!
One of the most interesting things in the article is that one of the
first uses for EDSAC was not in maths or computing, but in biology. It
was used to help determine the structure of the blood protein
myoglobin. John Kendrew got a Nobel prize in Chemistry for that work.At
that time biology was in ferment at Cambridge. During the early 50s
Crick and Watson were discovering the structure of DNA at Cambridge,
using similar techniques.
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