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For his contributions to early computer design including random access digital storage, virtual memory and multiprograming.
"We just got on with our work, day by day, and enjoyed what we were doing. The University gave us the freedom to get on with it." |
Tom Kilburn dominated the field of British computer engineering in its formative years. His early work with Frederic Williams at the University of Manchester in 1947 concentrated on the digital storage of information on a cathode-ray tube.
The result of their work was the Williams tube - the first random access electronic storage device. To test it, in 1948 Kilburn led the work on designing and building "The Baby", a small-scale experimental machine. The Baby was the first stored-program computer, the first computer in the world that could hold user program and data in electronic storage and process it at electronic speeds. By 1949 the Baby had developed into the full sized Manchester Mark 1.
In the early fifties Kilburn led the development of two new pioneering computers, a point contact transistor computer (1953) and a floating point computer (1954). All three machines were turned into commercial machines by local manufacturers.
Kilburn then led the development of the ATLAS system, which pioneered many modern concepts such as paging, virtual memory and multi-programming and influenced the development of computer systems throughout the world. In 1962, it was considered the most powerful computer in the world.
Tom Kilburn was Professor of Computer Engineering (1960) then Computer Science (1964) at the University Manchester, retiring in 1981. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society, a founder member of the Fellowship of Engineering and a recipient of the Royal Medal of the Royal Society.