EDSAC
Categories: Early computers | One-of-a-kind computers
EDSAC (Electronic Delay Storage Automatic Computer) was an early British computer. The machine, having been inspired by John von Neumann's seminal EDVAC report, was constructed by Maurice Wilkes and his team at the University of Cambridge Mathematical Laboratory in England. The project was supported by J. Lyons & Co. Ltd., a British firm, who were rewarded with the first commercially applied computer, LEO I, based on the EDSAC design. It ran its first programs[1] on May 6, 1949, calculating a table of squares and a list of prime numbers.
Hardware description
EDSAC was the world's first practical stored program electronic computer, although not the first stored program computer (see the Small-Scale Experimental Machine). As soon as EDSAC was constructed, it immediately began serving the University's research needs. None of its components were experimental. It used mercury delay lines for memory, and derated vacuum tubes for logic.
In 1953, David Wheeler, returning from the University of Illinois, designed an index register as an extension to the original EDSAC hardware.
Applications of EDSAC
- In 1951, Miller and Wheeler used the machine to discover a 79-digit prime—the largest known at the time.
- In 1952 A.S. Douglas developed OXO, a graphical version of noughts and crosses (tic-tac-toe) for the EDSAC. This may well have been the world's first computer/video game.
- In the 1960s the EDSAC computer was used to gather numerical evidence about solutions to elliptic curves, which led to the Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer conjecture.
Further developments
EDSAC's successor, EDSAC 2, was commissioned in 1958. In 1961 an EDSAC 2 version of Autocode, an Algol-like high-level programming language for scientists and engineers, was developed by D. F. Hartley.
In the mid-60s, a successor to the EDSAC 2 was planned, but the move was instead made to the Titan, a prototype Atlas 2—the latter having been developed from the Atlas Computer of the University of Manchester, Ferranti, and Plessey.
Notes
External links
- An EDSAC simulator – Developed by Martin Campbell-Kelly, Department of Computer Science, University of Warwick , England
- 50th Anniversary of EDSAC – Dedicated website at the University of Cambridge Computer Laboratoryde:Electronic Delay Storage Automatic Calculator