Wilkes, Maurice Vincent (1913– )

English mathematician who led the team at Cambridge University that built the EDSAC (electronic delay storage automatic calculator) in 1949, one of the earliest of the British electronic computers.

Wilkes was born in Dudley and studied at Cambridge. During World War II he became involved with the development of radar. He was director of the Cambridge Mathematical Laboratory 1946–80. In the late 1940s Wilkes and his team began to build the EDSAC. At the time, electronic computers were in their infancy. Wilkes chose the serial mode, in which the information in the computer is processed in sequence (and not several parts at once, as in the parallel type). This design incorporated mercury delay lines (developed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA) as the elements of the memory.

In May 1949 the EDSAC ran its first program and became the first delay-line computer in the world. From early 1950 it offered a regular computing facility to the members of Cambridge University, the first general-purpose computer service. Much time was spent by the research group on programming and on the compilation of a library of programs. The EDSAC was in operation until 1958.

EDSAC II came into service in 1957. This was a parallel-processing machine and the delay line was abandoned in favour of magnetic storage methods.