Computer ◆ Conservation ◆ Society

EDSAC

EDSAC, Electronic Delay Storage Automatic Computer, was built by Maurice Wilkes and colleagues at the University of Cambridge Mathematics Lab, and came into use in May 1949. It was a very well-engineered machine, and Wilkes designed it to be a productive tool for mathematicians from the start. It used mercury delay line tanks for main store (512 words of 36 bits) and half megacycle/sec serial bit rate. Input and output on paper tape, easy program load, nice rememberable machine order-code. See Resurrection issue 2 for some of Wilkes' design decisions.

Simulators of EDSAC included here are:


64 edsac.zip an emulator by Lee Wittenberg, for MS-DOS

to Martin Campbell-Kelly’s website containing an emulator for Windows and for Mac together with many example programs.