Maurice Wilkes

Quotes

• “Since 1954, the raw speed of computers, as measured by the time it takes to do an addition, increased by a factor of 10,000. That means an algorithm that once took 10 minutes to perform can now be done 15 times a second. Students sometimes ask my advice on how to get rich. The best advice I can give them is to dig up some old algorithm that once took forever, program it for a modern workstation, form a startup to market it and then get rich.”
• “A source of strength in the early days was that groups in various parts of the world were prepared to construct experimental computers without necessarily intending them to be the prototype for serial production. As a result, there became available a body of knowledge about what would work and what would not work.”
• “In the judgment of design engineers, the ordinary means of communicating with a computer are entirely inadequate. [...] Graphical communication in some form or other is of vital importance in engineering as that subject is now conducted; we must either provide the capability in our computer systems, or take on the impossible task of training up a future race of engineers conditioned to think in a different way.”
• “The artificial intelligence approach may not be altogether the right one to make to the problem of designing automatic assembly devices. Animals and machines are constructed from entirely different materials and on quite different principles. When engineers have tried to draw inspiration from a study of the way animals work they have usually been misled; the history of early attempts to construct flying machines with flapping wings illustrates this very clearly.”
• “Surveying the shifts of interest among computer scientists and the ever-expanding family of those who depend on computers for their work, one cannot help being struck by the power of the computer to bind together, in a genuine community of interest, people whose motivations differ widely.”

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Key facts

Born

John Maurice Vincent Wilkes , ( 1913-06-26 ) 26 June 1913, Dudley , Worcestershire, England

Died

29 November 2010 (2010-11-29) (aged 97), Cambridge , Cambridgeshire, England

Education

St John's College, Cambridge ( BA , MA , PhD )

Known for

EDSAC Microprogramming Cache memory

Spouse

Nina Twyman ​ ​ ( married</span>"}]]}'>m. 1947 ; died 2008 ) ​

Children

one son, two daughters

Awards

Turing Award (1967) Distinguished Fellow of the British Computer Society (1973) Faraday Medal (1981) Harold Pender Award (1982) Mountbatten Medal (1997)

Fields

Computer science

Institutions

University of Cambridge Cavendish Laboratory Telecommunications Research Establishment Mathematical Laboratory British Computer Society Digital Equipment Corporation Hewlett-Packard AT & T Olivetti

Thesis

The reflexion of very long wireless waves from the ionosphere (1939)

Doctoral advisor

John Ashworth Ratcliffe

Doctoral students

Michael Kay Peter Wegner David Wheeler

Website

www .cl .cam .ac .uk /archive /mvw1

via Wikipedia infobox

Wikidata facts

Official website

www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mvw1

Image

Maurice Vincent Wilkes 1980 (3).jpg

via Wikidata · CC0