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Maurice Vincent Wilkes (born June 26, 1913 in Dudley, Staffordshire, England) is a British computer scientist, credited with several important developments in computing. Wilkes granted permission to use this picture of his homepage under the GFDL File history Legend: (cur) = this is the current file, (del) = delete this old version, (rev) = revert to this old version. ...
Wilkes granted permission to use this picture of his homepage under the GFDL File history Legend: (cur) = this is the current file, (del) = delete this old version, (rev) = revert to this old version. ...
June 26 is the 177th day of the year (178th in leap years) in the Gregorian Calendar, with 188 days remaining. ...
1913 (MCMXIII) is a common year starting on Wednesday. ...
Map sources for Dudley at grid reference SO9390 Dudley is a town in the West Midlands of England. ...
Staffordshire (abbreviated Staffs) is a landlocked county in the West Midlands region of England. ...
Wikimedia Commons has media related to: England Travel guide to England from Wikitravel English language English law English (people) List of monarchs of England – Kings of England family tree List of English people Angeln (region in northern Germany, presumably the origin of the Angles for whom England is named) UK...
Computer science (informally: CS or compsci) is, in its most general sense, the study of computation and information processing, both in hardware and in software. ...
Originally, the word computing was synonymous with counting and calculating, and a science that deals with the original sense of computing mathematical calculations. ...
Wilkes studied at St. John's College, Cambridge from 1931 to 1934, continuing to complete a Ph.D. in physics, on the topic of radio propagation of very long radio waves in the ionosphere in 1936. He was appointed to a junior faculty position of the University of Cambridge through which he was involved in the establishment of a computing laboratory. Full name The College of Saint John the Evangelist of the University of Cambridge Motto - Named after The Hospital of Saint John the Evangelist, Cambridge, named after John the Evangelist Previous names - Established 1511 Sister College(s) Balliol College, Oxford Trinity College, Dublin Master Prof. ...
Map of the Cambridgeshire area (1904) The city of Cambridge is an old English university town and the administrative centre of the county of Cambridgeshire. ...
Doctor of Philosophy, or Ph. ...
Since antiquity, people have tried to understand the behavior of matter: why unsupported flowers drop to the ground, why different materials have different properties, and so forth. ...
The ionosphere is the part of the atmosphere that is ionized by solar radiation. ...
The University of Cambridge is the second-oldest university in the English-speaking world, with one of the most selective sets of entry requirements in the United Kingdom. ...
Wilkes was called up for military service during WWII and worked in radar and operational research. Combatants Allied Powers Axis Powers Commanders {{{commander1}}} {{{commander2}}} Strength {{{strength1}}} {{{strength2}}} Casualties 17 million military deaths 7 million military deaths World War II, also known as the Second World War, was a mid-20th century conflict that engulfed much of the globe and is accepted as the largest and deadliest...
This long range radar antenna (approximately 40m (130ft) in diameter) rotates on a track to observe activities near the horizon. ...
In 1945, he was appointed as the second director of the University of Cambridge Mathematical Laboratory (later known as the Computer Laboratory). The Computer Laboratory is Cambridge Universitys computer science department. ...
The Cambridge laboratory initially had many different computing devices, including a differential analyser. He obtained a copy of John Von Neumann's prepress description of the EDVAC, a successor to the ENIAC under construction by Presper Eckert and John Mauchly at the Moore School of Electrical Engineering. He had to read it overnight because he had to return it and no photocopy facilities existed. He decided immediately that this was the way computing must proceed. The differential analyser was a mechanical analog computer invented by Vannevar Bush in 1927. ...
This article needs copyediting (checking for proper English spelling, grammar, usage, tone, style, and voice). ...
The EDVAC as installed in Building 328 at the Ballistics Research Laboratory. ...
ENIAC ENIAC, short for Electronic Numerical Integrator And Computer, was long thought to have been the first electronic computer designed to be Turing-complete, capable of being reprogrammed by rewiring to solve a full range of computing problems. ...
John Presper Eckert, a computer pioneer, was born April 9, 1919 in Philadelphia and died June 3, 1995 in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania. ...
John William Mauchly (August 30, 1907 – January 8, 1980) was an American physicist and computer engineer who, along with J. Presper Eckert, designed ENIAC, long held to be the first electronic digital computer, and UNIVAC I, the first commercial computer made in the United States. ...
The Moore School of Electrical Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania came into existence as a result of an endowment from Alfred Fitler Moore on June 4th, 1923. ...
Since his laboratory had its own funding, he was immediately able to start work on a small practical machine, the EDSAC. He decided that his mandate was not to invent a better computer, but simply to make one available to the university. Therefore his approach was relentlessly practical. He used only proven methods for constructing each part of the computer. The resulting computer was slower and smaller than other planned contemporary computers. However, his laboratory's computer was the first practical stored program computer to be completed, and operated successfully from May 1949. EDSAC (Electronic Delay Storage Automatic Computer) was an early British computer. ...
The so-called von Neumann architecture is a model for a computing machine that uses a single storage structure to hold both the set of instructions on how to perform the computation and the data required or generated by the computation. ...
In 1951, he developed the concept of microprogramming 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. This concept greatly simplified CPU development. Microprogramming was first described at the Manchester University Computer Inaugural Conference in 1951, then published in expanded form in IEEE Spectrum in 1955. This concept was implemented in EDSAC 2, which also used multiple identical "bit slices" to simplify design. Interchangeable, replaceable tube assemblies were used for each bit of the processor. This was extremely advanced for the time. A microprogram is a program consisting of microcode that controls the different parts of a computers central processing unit (CPU). ...
Intel 80486DX2 microprocessor in a ceramic PGA package A central processing unit (CPU), or sometimes simply processor, is the component in a digital computer that interprets and executes instructions and data contained in software. ...
A computer program or software program (usually abbreviated to a program) is a step-by-step list of instructions written for a particular computer architecture in a particular computer programming language. ...
Read-only memory (ROM) is used as a storage medium in computers. ...
IEEE Spectrum is a magazine edited by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. ...
The next computer for his laboratory was the Titan, a joint venture with Ferranti Ltd. It eventually supported the UK's first time-sharing system and provided wider access to computing resources in the university, including time-shared graphics systems for mechanical CAD. The Titan computer was the name given to the Atlas 2 developed by Ferranti and the University of Cambridge Mathematical Laboratory. ...
This article is about computer-aided design. ...
A notable design feature of the Titan's operating system was that it provided controlled access based on the identity of the program, as well as or instead of, the identity of the user. It introduced the password encryption system used later by Unix. Its programming system also had an early version control system. In computing, an operating system ( aka, OS) is the system software responsible for the direct control and management of hardware and basic system operations. ...
Wikibooks has more about this subject: Guide to UNIX Unix or UNIX is a computer operating system originally developed in the 1960s and 1970s by a group of AT&T Bell Labs employees including Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, and Douglas McIlroy. ...
Wilkes is also credited with the idea of symbolic labels, macros, and subroutine libraries. These are fundamental developments that made programming much easier and paved the way for high-level programming languages. A macro in computer science is an abstraction, whereby a certain textual pattern is replaced according to a defined set of rules. ...
Other listings of programming languages are: Categorical list of programming languages Generational list of programming languages Chronological list of programming languages Note: Esoteric programming languages have been moved to the separate List of esoteric programming languages. ...
Later, Wilkes worked on an early timesharing systems (now termed a multi-user operating system) and distributed computing. In computer science, distributed computing studies the coordinated use of physically distributed computers. ...
In 1956 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society. The premises of the Royal Society in London. ...
Wilkes received the Turing Award in 1967, with the following citation: The A.M. Turing Award is given annually by the Association for Computing Machinery to a person selected for contributions of a technical nature made to the computing community. ...
- Professor Wilkes is best known as the builder and designer of the EDSAC, the first computer with an internally stored program. Built in 1949, the EDSAC used a mercury delay line memory. He is also known as the author, with Wheeler and Gill, of a volume on "Preparation of Programs for Electronic Digital Computers" in 1951, in which program libraries were effectively introduced.
Toward the end of the 1960s, Wilkes also became interested in capability-based computing, and the laboratory assembled a unique computer, the Cambridge CAP.
In 1974 Wilkes encountered a Swiss data network (at Hasler AG) that used a ring topology to allocate time on the network. The laboratory initially used a prototype to share peripherals. Eventually, commercial partnerships were formed, and similar technology became widely available in England.
In 1980 he retired from his professorships and post as the Head of the laboratory and joined the central engineering staff of Digital Equipment Corporation in Maynard, Massachusetts. Digital Equipment Corporation was a pioneering company in the American computer industry. ...
Maynard is a town located in Middlesex County, Massachusetts. ...
In 1986 Wilkes returned to England, and became a member of Olivetti's Research Strategy Board. In 1993 Wilkes was presented, by Cambridge University, an honorary Doctor of Science degree. In 2002, Wilkes moved back to the Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge, as an Emeritus Professor.
Publications
Time-sharing Computer Systems. Elsevier, 1975. ISBN 0444195254
Memoirs of a Computer Pioneer. The MIT Press. 1985. ISBN 0-262-23122-0
External links Wikiquote has a collection of quotations by or about: Maurice Wilkes - List of papers
- Home page
- Biography of Maurice Wilkes
- Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge
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