Maurice Wilkes

Maurice Wilkes (born June 26, 1913, Dudley, Worcestershire, England—died November 29, 2010, Cambridge, Cambridgeshire) was a British computer science pioneer who helped build the Electronic Delay Storage Automatic Calculator (EDSAC), the first full-size stored-program computer, and invented microprogramming.

Wilkes became interested in electronics as a boy and studied that subject in his spare time while working toward a degree in mathematics (1934) at St. John’s College, Cambridge. He then did graduate work at the university’s Cavendish Laboratory (M.A., 1936; Ph.D., 1937). His interest in computing was sparked in 1936 by a lecture by English physicist and computer pioneer Douglas Hartree. In 1937 the Mathematical Laboratory, which used mechanical computers for scientific projects, was founded at Cambridge. Wilkes was appointed university demonstrator there and was the Mathematical Laboratory’s only staff member.

During World War II Wilkes left Cambridge to work elsewhere on the development of radar and a bomb-aiming system for aircraft. He returned to the Mathematical Laboratory as director in 1945.

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In May 1946 Wilkes read American mathematician John von Neumann’s paper First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC (1945), which described the planned Electronic Discrete Variable Automatic Computer (EDVAC), in which both the data and the programs that would manipulate the data would be stored within EDVAC’s memory. This stored-program computer was an advance upon previous machines such as the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer (ENIAC), in which the program instructions were determined by the wiring of the machine. Wilkes was convinced by von Neumann’s paper that all future computers would be stored-program machines. Later in 1946 Wilkes attended a summer school on the design of electronic computers at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. On the voyage home to England, he began designing EDSAC. Work began on EDSAC in 1946, and it became operational in May 1949.

Wilkes built EDSAC chiefly to study computer programming issues, which he realized would become as important as the hardware details. Based on his experience in writing programs for EDSAC, he wrote with David J. Wheeler and Stanley Gill The Preparation of Programs for an Electronic Digital Computer (1951), the first book on computer programming. EDSAC was used for research in physics, astronomy, and meteorology, and biochemist John Kendrew used EDSAC to determine the three-dimensional structure of the muscle protein myoglobin, for which he won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1962.

In 1951 Wilkes wrote the first paper that described microprogramming, a term that he invented to describe how the stored program could be used to run the operations of the computer itself. The idea of microprogramming was first tested in 1957 on a small machine called EDSAC 1.5. The first full-size microprogrammed computer was EDSAC 2, which became operational in 1958. The successful example of EDSAC 2 inspired IBM to make its family of versatile System/360 model computers microprogrammed.

Wilkes became a professor of computer technology at Cambridge in 1965. That year he also wrote the first paper on cache memory (which he called “slave memory”), an extension of the computer’s main memory in which frequently used instructions and data are stored for quicker processing. In 1975 he wrote a paper describing client-server architecture computing, which was implemented in 1980 with the Cambridge Ring network. He retired from Cambridge in 1980 and moved to the United States, where he was a senior consulting engineer at the American manufacturer Digital Equipment Corporation in Maynard, Mass., from 1980 to 1986. He was also an adjunct professor of electrical engineering and computer science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 1981 to 1985. He returned to England, and from 1986 to 2002 he was an adviser and consultant at the Olivetti and Oracle Research Laboratory (later AT&T Laboratories) in Cambridge.

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Wilkes was elected a fellow of the Royal Society in 1956. He won the A.M. Turing Award in 1967 and the Kyoto Prize in 1992. In 1985 he published an autobiography, Memoirs of a Computer Pioneer. Wilkes was knighted in 2000.