Maurice Wilkes

Wilkes was running the Cambridge Mathematical Laboratory when he got a late place on the Moore School Lectures in the summer of 1946, the course where the ENIAC team explained what they had learned. He read von Neumann's EDVAC report on the boat home and built EDSAC, which ran on 6 May 1949. The Manchester Baby had beaten him by ten months, but the Baby was an experiment. EDSAC was put at the disposal of the rest of the laboratory, making it the first machine to do ordinary work for people who had no idea how it functioned.

Two more things arrived in 1951. Microprogramming: let the instruction set be a small program held in fast read-only memory rather than hardwired logic, so it can be changed after the wiring is done. And the book, written with David Wheeler and Stanley Gill, which was the world's first textbook on programming and introduced the idea of a ready-made library of subroutines. The Turing Award followed in 1967.

He also gave the profession its most honest self-description. Some time in 1949, on the stairs up to the machine room with a paper tape in his hand, it came to him that a good part of the remainder of his life was going to be spent finding errors in his own programs.