24 Facts About Maurice Wilkes

Sir Maurice Vincent Wilkes was a British computer scientist who designed and helped build the Electronic Delay Storage Automatic Calculator, one of the earliest stored program computers, and who invented microprogramming, a method for using stored-program logic to operate the control unit of a central processing unit's circuits.

At the time of his death, Wilkes was an Emeritus Professor at the University of Cambridge.

Maurice Wilkes was born in Dudley, Worcestershire, England the only child of Ellen, nee Malone and Vincent Joseph Maurice Wilkes, an accounts clerk at the estate of the Earl of Dudley.

Maurice Wilkes was appointed to a junior faculty position of the University of Cambridge, through which he was involved in the establishment of a computing laboratory.

In 1945, Maurice Wilkes was appointed as the second director of the University of Cambridge Mathematical Laboratory.

One day Leslie Comrie visited Maurice Wilkes and lent him 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.

Maurice Wilkes had to read it overnight because he had to return it and no photocopying facilities existed.

Maurice Wilkes decided immediately that the document described the logical design of future computing machines, and that he wanted to be involved in the design and construction of such machines.

Maurice Wilkes decided that his mandate was not to invent a better computer, but simply to make one available to the university.

Maurice Wilkes used only proven methods for constructing each part of the computer.

In 1950, along with David Wheeler, Maurice Wilkes used EDSAC to solve a differential equation relating to gene frequencies in a paper by Ronald Fisher.

Maurice Wilkes is credited with the idea of symbolic labels, macros and subroutine libraries.

Later, Maurice Wilkes worked on an early timesharing system and distributed computing.

Toward the end of the 1960s, Maurice Wilkes became interested in capability-based computing, and the laboratory assembled a unique computer, the Cambridge CAP.

In 1974, Maurice Wilkes encountered a Swiss data network that used a ring topology to allocate time on the network.

Maurice Wilkes received a number of distinctions: he was a Knight Bachelor, Distinguished Fellow of the British Computer Society, a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering and a Fellow of the Royal Society.

Maurice Wilkes was a founder member of the British Computer Society and its first president.

Maurice Wilkes is known as the author, with David Wheeler and Stanley Gill, of a volume on Preparation of Programs for Electronic Digital Computers in 1951, in which program libraries were effectively introduced.

In 1972, Maurice Wilkes was awarded an honorary Doctor of Science by Newcastle University.

Maurice Wilkes was awarded the Faraday Medal by the Institution of Electrical Engineers in 1981.

The Maurice Wilkes Award, awarded annually for an outstanding contribution to computer architecture made by a young computer scientist or engineer, is named after him.

In 1993 Maurice Wilkes was presented, by Cambridge University, with an honorary Doctor of Science degree.

Maurice Wilkes was awarded the Mountbatten Medal in 1997 and in 2000 presented the inaugural Pinkerton Lecture.

Maurice Wilkes was knighted in the 2000 New Years Honours List.