Hardware description

EDSAC was the world's number 1 practical stored program electronic computer, although not a number one stored program computer (look at a Small-Scale Experimental Machine). When soon when EDSAC was constructed, it immediately began serving a University's the food and drug administration needs. None of its components were experimental. It used mercury delay lines for memory, and derated vacuum tubes for logic.

Around 1953, David Wheeler, returning from either a University of Illinois, designed an index register as an extension to the original EDSAC hardware.

Applications of EDSAC

In 1951, Miller & Wheeler utilized a machine to discover a 79-digit prime—a big known at the instance.

In 1952 A.S. Douglas developed OXO, a graphical version of noughts and crosses (tic-tac-toe) for the EDSAC. This can swell stand been the world's number one computer/video game.

In a Sixties a EDSAC computer was wont to gather numerical grounds to believe just about solutions to elliptic curves, which led to the Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer conjecture.

Further developments

EDSAC's successor, EDSAC 2, was commissioned around 1958. Around 1961 an EDSAC Two version of Autocode, an Algol-like high-level programing language for man of science & engineers, was developed by D. F. Hartley.

In a mid-60s, the successor to the EDSAC Two was planned, however the move was instead manufactured to the Titan, a epitome Atlas Two—a latter with been developed from either a Atlas Computer of the University of Manchester, Ferranti, and Plessey.

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