Maurice Wilkes

Sir Maurice Vincent Wilkes was an English computer scientist and the second director of the University of Cambridge Mathematical Laboratory, where in 1949 he led the design and construction of EDSAC, the Electronic Delay Storage Automatic Calculator, one of the earliest practical stored-program computers. In 1951 Wilkes introduced microprogramming, a method of using stored program logic inside a computer own control unit to implement its instruction set, a technique that became a standard approach to processor design for decades. He served as the first president of the British Computer Society from 1957 to 1960 and later held positions with Digital Equipment Corporation, Hewlett-Packard and Olivetti Research Laboratory after retiring from Cambridge. Wilkes received the ACM Turing Award in 1967, was knighted in 2000, and also received the Faraday Medal in 1981 and the Mountbatten Medal in 1997.