The EDSAC Replica Project

  • Andrew Herbert

The aim of the EDSAC Replica Project is to build a fully functional replica of the Cambridge University Electronic Delay Storage Automatic Computer (EDSAC) as it was when it ran it’s first programs in 1949. Built by a team led by M.V. Wilkes, EDSAC was the world’s first practical electronic digital computer providing a computing service to the university as a whole. Three Nobel Prizes were attributed to the giant leap in computing power that EDSAC delivered to Cambridge scientists.

Andrew will describe EDSAC and its principles of operation, showing what is possible in a machine that can only obey 5-600 instructions a second and has just 512 of store, but which is not weighed down with the volume of code required by a modern operating system or programming language. He will then go on to describe the challenges in replicating 1940’s technology in the 21st Century and some of the ways in which modern computers are helping in the task.

Speaker Details

A computer scientist, Herbert is former Chairman of Microsoft Research, for the Europe, Middle East and Africa region. His research interests include networks, operating systems, programming languages and distributed computing.

Prior to joining Microsoft Research in 2001, he was Director of Advanced Technology at Citrix Systems Inc. (1998), Founder of Digitivity Inc. (1996) and Founder of ANSA. In 1985 Herbert was a faculty member in the Computer Laboratory at the University of Cambridge where he worked with Roger Needham and Maurice Wilkes on seminal developments in operating systems, local area networks (LANs) and distributed computing. In 1979 Herbert helped Needham and Wilkes edit “The Cambridge CAP Computer and Its Operating System,” and in 1982 he co-authored “The Cambridge Distributed Computing System” with Needham. In 2003, Herbert co-edited a monograph of papers written in tribute to Needham, “Computer Systems: Theory, Technology and Applications,” with Karen Spärck Jones.

In the 2010 honours list Herbert was awarded an Officer of the British Empire (OBE) for services to computer science. He is a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering, a Fellow of the British Computer Society, an Emeritus Fellow of Wolfson College Cambridge, a visiting professor at University College London, a member of St. John’s College Cambridge, and a liveryman of the City of London Worshipful Company of Information Technologists.

In 1975 he graduated from the University of Leeds with a B.Sc. in computational science and in 1978 with a Ph.D. from Cambridge University in computer science.

Now retired, Herbert is the director of a project to construct a replica of the pioneering Cambridge EDSAC computer as it was in May 1947 when it ran its first program. The project is sponsored by Cambridge University and the Computer Conservation Society and the replica will be constructed at The National Museum of Computing.

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