Tom Kilburn
British electrical engineer
Died when: 79 years 159 days (953 months)Star Sign: Leo
Tom Kilburn CBE FRS (11 August 1921 – 17 January 2001) was an English mathematician and computer scientist.Over the course of a productive 30-year career, he was involved in the development of five computers of great historical significance.
With Freddie Williams he worked on the Williams–Kilburn tube and the world's first electronic stored-program computer, the Manchester Baby, while working at the University of Manchester.
His work propelled Manchester and Britain into the forefront of the emerging field of computer science.A graduate of Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, Kilburn worked on radar at the Telecommunications Research Establishment (TRE) in Malvern under Frederic Calland Williams during the Second World War.
After the war ended, he was recruited by Williams to work on the development of computers at the University of Manchester.
He led the development of a succession of innovative Manchester computers that incorporated a host of ground-breaking innovations and developments, including the Ferranti Mark 1, the world's first commercial computer, and the Atlas, one of the first time-sharing multiprocessing computers that incorporated job scheduling, spooling, interrupts, instruction pipelining and paging.
Related People
British electrical engineer
British electrical engineer
Electrical engineer