Sir Maurice Wilkes

[FrancisL]

I have just read his obituary (in print,) he was 97, as would my dad have been.
Scientist who built the first practical digital computer
Anyone here heard of the first business computer? LEO?
Or remember eating in a Lyons tea-shop

Francis

http://www.controldraw.co.uk

http://www.s88control.blogspot.com

 

[GregLocock]

Yes. No.

Cheers

Greg Locock


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[jmw]

No. Yes.

His vision was less about producing bleeding-edge designs than about developing machines that could reliably do calculations for the university's scientists and engineers –

One guesses that modern computing i.e. Microsoft's spellchecker is at fault here.... that should read "leading-edge" I assume.
The latter half of that sentance is badly let down by GiGo....

You know, if the war time generations were as leaky or as untrustworthy as modern government or military staff, then I might have know a more about the Bletchley Park computers, and indeed what went on there, than I do - my Grandfather was with Naval Intelligence during the war and made a great many trips to Bletchley park. I only know that he went there often because my mother also worked in Naval Intelligence and told me so. But even she only knew nothing of what he did there, what went on there or what he knew.

So, no to the first question but a yes to the Lyons corner house question (what is the relevance?) - famous for their "tweenies" Nigel Lawson's (former UK chancellor of the Exchequer) family started the Lyons Corner house chain.

JMW

http://www.ViscoAnalyser.com

 

[jmw]

Incidentally, the Telegraph obituary is more informative... and contains a nice quote:

Wilkes sought to allay public fears by describing the stored-program computer as “a calculating machine operated by a moron who cannot think, but can be trusted to do what he is told”.

And, presciently, suggested:

In 1964, however, predicting the world in “1984”, he drew a more Orwellian picture: “How would you feel,” he wrote, “if you had exceeded the speed limit on a deserted road in the dead of night, and a few days later received a demand for a fine that had been automatically printed by a computer coupled to a radar system and vehicle identification device? It might not be a demand at all, but simply a statement that your bank account had been debited automatically.”

This is the point at which he should have joined with Leo Szilard et al (The voice of Dolphins) in renouncing his science..... for the ills it brought on humanity....

In fact, he appears to have had very little to do with Bletchley park, being involved with the development of Radar so to consider him as the father of modern computing may be a bit of a stretch; step-father maybe.

On the plus side the conventional thinking was that such machines should undertake a very few major projects while his view, which dominated, was that such machines should engage in a lot of small projects. This is the sort of debate that is ongoing, as it should be, in other fields of research.
For example, fusion reactors. The influence of governments is to create a few massive generating plants while many others suggest the direction should be toward a great many small economical generators, not a few large machines supplying the entire energy demands of society but a great many machines that power perhaps a single house or a single machine..... this is the sort of thinking that may be neglected or rejected. This decision of Wilkes may well have paved the way for the development of the Personal computer.
Had the conventional view prevailed then perhaps there would be just a few major computers working on major projects, a couple of Cray supercomputers running (badly as it runs out) weather forecasting and climate models.... and even then we have to wonder because the way things work now a great many different calculations or models can be tested by exploiting the "screen-saver mode" of thousands of individual computers....

So perhaps this is his most important contribution, and not the computer itself which, if he hadn't developed it, some one else would... the Telegraph obituary shows this through its reference to the three different working groups; that is, not the computer itself but how it should be used.

JMW

http://www.ViscoAnalyser.com

 

[Compositepro]

JMW, 'bleeding edge' design means designs that are so advanced that they are unprofitable because costs are so high or there is not a developed market for the product.

 

[jmw]

Ah! A new one on me - and after all these years..

JMW

http://www.ViscoAnalyser.com