Comment: My mind-blowing evening with £2.5bn worth of British computing talent

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By Steve Cassidy

Posted on 3 Apr 2008 at 08:43

PC Pro's contributing editor, Steve Cassidy, spends an astounding evening with a 94-year-old computing legend and the cream of British IT entrepeneurs

Now I know what it takes to make me properly speechless: it is being introduced to a room full of British computing entrepreneurs, in a university college founded in 1448, before listening to a speech from a Professor of Computer Science, born in 1913.

The professor is Maurice Wilkes (pictured, see his Wikipedia entry here), the college was Queens', and the room with the Harry Potter decor and ambience was the Old Hall.

The occasion, and the audience, though, is what I want to draw your attention to - but first, let's have a rapid tour of the man who they came to honour, and who chose to accept that honour from that specific group.

Maurice Wilkes built EDSAC; you can read that story in any number of websites (but oddly, not in any books on Amazon - putting in EDSAC brings up a Delia Smith cookbook), and it's fair to say that this is one of the first half-dozen or so computers anywhere that deserve the term.

It is not to skip over that achievement to leave the description there. I could turn this article into a nicely filled, lovingly detailed (and these days, almost completely irrelevant) essay in what EDSAC did, and how much faster your mobile phone is these days, but that would be to greatly misrepresent the whole atmosphere and outlook. Not just of Wilkes and his endearing little speech: but also of the other 100-odd technologists assembled in the room.

Computing's elder statesman

Wilkes is 94. He had taught a reasonable number of the diners in earlier years, and from the perspective of nearly a century thinking about the fundamental nature of computing, he wanted to share a few ideas. You will no doubt be relieved to hear, as I was, that he considers computing to have "turned out quite well", based on principles which he started to evaluate back in the 1930s, under the tutelage of a mentor who, he remembered, was already looking at the general concept of things being computable, while equipped with nothing faster than undergraduates with sprung-wound, oil-lubricated desk calculators.

He also appraised Cambridge as an institution, and drew everyone's attention to the early identification of large scale change and how Cambridge had quite happily been doing that for an extended timespan (say, ten generations as measured in Wilkes lifespans thus far). Middle-aged organisations, he observed, seemed to be more unsettled by the forces of change.

You might expect, if you took an industry view of Wilkes and his career (research; RADAR development in the war; commercial spells inside the now vanished monolith of Digital Equipment Corporation; academic longevity inside the Computer Lab at Cambridge) that he would be full of rollicking ancdotes of hot pools of solder inside EDSAC, or running around with the clamp for extracting blown valves in mid-compute, now on display in the William Gates building. But in what might be his last speech he compressed all that down into one statement: "if you know what it is you want to achieve, then it helps if you know how to do it."