Maurice Wilkes

The EDSAC was built in a climate of optimism and enthusiasm, and it was a great adventure.

The stored program concept is the single most important idea in computing.

When I look back on the early days, I am struck by how much we achieved with so little.

The design of a computer is an art as much as a science.

Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it.

The future of computing lies in distributed systems.

It was a time when one could still understand the whole machine.

The greatest challenge in computer science is to make computers easier to use.

The EDSAC was not just a machine; it was a community.

The microprogram concept was a way of bringing order out of chaos.

We were building something entirely new, and there were no textbooks to guide us.

The beauty of a computer program lies in its elegance and efficiency.

The early days of computing were characterized by a spirit of collaboration and sharing.

The most important thing is to get the architecture right.

The EDSAC was a tool for scientific discovery, and it opened up new possibilities.

The challenge of computer science is to manage complexity.

We made mistakes, but we learned from them.

The stored program computer is a universal machine.

The early computers were very noisy, but we got used to it.

The microprogram is a bridge between hardware and software.