University of Cambridge Mathematical Laboratory
British Computer Society
Digital Equipment Corporation
|Notable awards||Turing Award|
Wilkes was born in Dudley, Worcestershire, England and read Mathematics 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.
The Cambridge laboratory initially had many different computing devices, including a differential analyser. Wilkes 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 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.
In August 1946 Wilkes traveled by ship to the United States to enroll in the Moore School Lectures, of which he was only able to attend the final two weeks because of various travel delays. During his time in the United States he visited all of the relevant American sites of computing progress and became intimately familiar with the ENIAC, for a while even living next door to Mauchly on Philadelphia's St. Marks Street.
Since his laboratory had its own funding, he was immediately able to start work on a small practical machine, the EDSAC, once back at Cambridge. 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.
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 for the first time 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.
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.
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.
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.
Later, Wilkes worked on an early timesharing systems (now termed a multi-user operating system) and distributed computing.
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 1956 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society.
He was a founder member of the British Computer Society (BCS) and its first president (1957-1960).
Wilkes received the Turing Award in 1967, with the following citation: "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." In 1968 he received the Harry H. Goode Memorial Award, with the following citation: "For his many original achievements in the computer field, both in engineering and software, and for his contributions to the growth of professional society activities and to international cooperation among computer professionals."
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 1994 he was inducted as a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery. He was awarded the Mountbatten Medal in 1997. He was knighted in the 2000 New Year Honours List. In 2002, Wilkes moved back to the Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge, as an Emeritus Professor.
In his Memoirs Wilkes writes:
It was on one of my journeys between the EDSAC room and the punching equipment that "hesitating at the angle of the stairs" the realization came over me with full force that a good part of the remainder of my life was going to be spent finding errors in my own programs.
Maurice Vincent Wilkes (born June 26, 1913, in Dudley, Staffordshire, England) is a pioneering British computer scientist and winner of the 1967 Turing Award. He developed the first stored-program computer in 1949, and invented the concept of microprogramming in 1951. He is also credited with originating the fundamental software concepts of symbolic labels, macros, and subroutine libraries.