Professor Sir Maurice Wilkes (1913 – 2010)

Maurice V. Wilkes, who died last month aged 97, was one of the most important figures in the development of practical computing in the UK. 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.