Professor Sir Maurice Wilkes (1913 – 2010)

Not only did he lead the development of EDSAC, the first stored-program digital computer to go into service in the 1940s, he and his colleagues at Cambridge University also made significant contributions to software development, and built one of the first high-speed distributed computing networks, the Cambridge Ring.
 

In the early 1950s, EDSAC, the Electronic Delay Storage Automatic Calculator, was the basis for the world's first business computer, LEO (the Lyons Electronic Office), which was used to run the operations of the eponymous tea-shop company.
 

He went up to Cambridge University in 1931 to study mathematical physics at St John’s College.

In 1934 he became a graduate student in the Cavendish Laboratory doing experimental research on the propagation of radio waves in the ionosphere.

This led to an interest in tidal motion in the atmosphere and his first book was on this subject.

It also led to an interest in computing methods and, when he returned to Cambridge in 1945 after war service, he became head of the Computer Laboratory, then called the Mathematical Laboratory.
 

In the summer of 1946, Wilkes attended the famous Moore School lectures on electronic computers in Philadelphia.

On his return, he set about building the EDSAC which began to work in May 1949.

In 1951, he published with two colleagues the first book to appear on computer programming.

At this time, he put forward his proposals for microprogramming, a system which later became adopted widely in the industry.

In 1965, he published the first paper on cache memories, followed later by a book on time-sharing.
 

In 1974, it appeared to Wilkes that the time had come when local area networks based on traditional telecommunication technology might profitably be replaced by networks of much wider bandwidth based on computer technology.

The design study for what became known as the Cambridge Ring was published in 1975.

The Cambridge Model Distributed System, a pioneering client-server system, described by Wilkes and Roger Needham in 1980, was based on this ring.
 

From 1980 Wilkes worked in industry, first with DEC in Massachusetts and later with the Olivetti Research Laboratory in Cambridge, England. This laboratory was acquired by AT&T in 1999.

In 2002, Wilkes moved back to the Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge, where he was an Emeritus Professor.
 

Wilkes was a Distinguished Fellow of the British Computer Society, a Fellow of the Royal Society, and a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering. He was a Foreign Associate of both the US National Academy of Sciences and the US National Academy of Engineering.

In 1981, he received the Faraday Medal from the Institution of Electrical Engineers in London and in 1992 he received the Kyoto Prize for Advanced Technology.

He was knighted in 2000.