Maurice Wilkes, father of British computing, dies
Tuesday, 30 November 2010

Sir Maurice Wilkes, widely regarded as the Father of British Computing, passed away today, aged 97. 

 

Sir Maurice Wilkes, widely regarded as the Father of British Computing, passed away on 30 November 2010, aged 97. 

He was best known as the designer and creator of EDSAC (Electronic Delay Storage Automatic Calculator) which became the first practical stored-program computer when it ran its initial calculation on May 6, 1949 in Cambridge, England.

 

_50216467_mauricewilkesandedsacnpl

 

EDSAC, however, wasn't his only innovation. In 1951 he set to work on  developing the concept of microprogramming. This was derived from the realisation that the Central Processing Unit of a computer could be controlled by a miniature, highly specialised computer program in high-speed ROM - the so called "microcode" way of building a machine. The results of his work meant that CPU development was greatly simplified.

Maurice Wilkes was awarded the Turing Award in 1967, the Faraday Medal from the Institution of Electrical Engineers in London in 1981 and the Kyoto Prize for Advanced Technology in 1992. He was knighted in 2000.

 

sir-maurice-wilkes--001 

Further reading:

Maurice Wilkes and EDSAC

 

Banner


Intel - The Microprocessor Revolution

Silicon Valley is the legendary centre of electronics and computing excellence where big companies make large sums of money out of very small things indeed. This is the story of how Intel, the company [ ... ]



Codebreaking and Colossus

In the mid 70s it was revealed that British Intelligence had been using machines to break the German coded communications - and one of the machines was an early electronic computer called Colossus. Ca [ ... ]


Other Articles
Last Updated ( Tuesday, 30 November 2010 )