Historic computer rebuilt in museum as tribute

The project has been commissioned by the Computer Conservation Society (CCS) to inform the general public about Britain’s computer heritage and, hopefully, to inspire future students of computing and engineering as a result.

The EDSAC, which stands for Electronic Delay Storage Automatic Calculator, was a general-purpose research tool built at Cambridge in the 1940s under direction of the late Prof Sir Maurice Wilkes. It ran its first programmes on 6 May 1949, when it calculated a table of squares.

Plans have now been approved to recreate the computer, which was over two metres high and occupied a floor area of 20 square metres.

It will be built in full public view at The National Museum of Computing at the UK’s former code-breaking centre at Bletchley Park. The project is expected to take three to four years and is being funded by a consortium led by the computing entrepreneur, Hermann Hauser.

David Hartey, chairman of CCS and a former president of the British Computer Society, said: ‘The EDSAC was a brilliant achievement that laid the foundations for general purpose computing and introduced programming methods adopted worldwide and still in use.’