EDSAC

EDSAC was an electronic stored-program computer built at the University of Cambridge and first operational in 1949. It pioneered practical computing services for university researchers.

Mercury delay line: A memory device that stores data as sound pulses circulating through a column of mercury. EDSAC used mercury delay lines to hold numbers and instructions while they circulated for reuse.
Maurice Wilkes: A British computer scientist who led the design and development of EDSAC at Cambridge. Wilkes directed the project and shaped EDSAC’s practical design.
Numerical analysis: The study of algorithms for approximating mathematical problems with numerical computation. EDSAC accelerated calculations that Cambridge researchers had previously performed by hand or with desk machines.
Maurice Wilkes and the EDSAC team: The Cambridge group that designed, built, and operated EDSAC under Maurice Wilkes’s direction. Their engineering and programming practices made the machine available for sustained research use.
EDSAC instruction set: The machine-level operations available to EDSAC programs, including arithmetic, branching, and input-output instructions. Its instruction format determined how programmers expressed calculations for the machine.
Mathematical Laboratory, Cambridge: A Cambridge University research center that became a major site for early computing. The laboratory housed EDSAC and organized its computing service for university researchers.
X-ray crystallography: A method for determining atomic and molecular structures from the diffraction of X-rays by crystals. Researchers used EDSAC to process calculations arising from crystallographic investigations.
Cambridge Diploma in Computer Science: A postgraduate course established at Cambridge in 1953 to teach computer science and programming. EDSAC helped create the institutional setting for Cambridge’s early formal computer education.
Initial Orders: A short program loaded into EDSAC to read and execute further programs from punched tape. These orders made routine program loading possible without manually entering every instruction.
ENIAC: An early electronic general-purpose computer completed at the University of Pennsylvania in 1945. Unlike ENIAC’s original configuration, EDSAC was designed from the outset as a stored-program computer.

Linked from 4 pages

Manchester computersCompared with: It offers a contemporary British comparison to Manchester’s approach and development path.