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Clive Akass talks to Sir Maurice Wilkes, who built the first operational programmable electonic digital computer. And you get a chance to be beaten by it at what is probably the first-ever computer game.
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Sir Maurice Wilkes: 'The extraordinary thing is that progress was enormously fast in those first 10 to 15 years and in the last 15 years it has been as fast or even faster. People were always saying that the computer field will settle down ... But it hasn't. It has retained its excitement.' Picture: Jason Bell |
Even today, if you have a sense of history, you can get a shiver down your spine running the first code of the world's first operational general-purpose electronic digital computer (see box below left). Any novice programmer knows the thrill of getting code to run for the first time. The team who built the Electronic Delay Storage Automatic Calculator (Edsac) at Cambridge University had been doing nothing so simple as tweaking a few lines of code: they had spent more than three years building the computer and learning to program it from scratch. Suddenly, after months of debugging, it worked: a teleprinter began printing out a table of squares. It was 6 May 1949, and you could see it as the beginning of the modern world.
The Edsac kept going for nearly 10 years, but the man responsible for it is still going, rather more strongly than you would expect at the age of 89. Sir Maurice Wilkes drives daily to the Cambridge Computer Laboratory, where he has an office as emeritus professor, and his mind is as agile as ever.
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| First game shows how quickly computing developed This screenshot from an Edsac emulator shows what is probably the first computer game, It dates from less than three years after Edsac went live and shows how fast computing moved even then. And it can still beat you if you are not careful. If you have not got our cover disk you can download the emulator, together with some equally excellent documentation and background material, from Cambridge Computer Lab site Related articles 
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