EDSAC at 60—A Celebration of 60 Years Since the First Program Ran on the EDSAC at Cambridge

On 6 May 2009, a seminar was held at the Computer Laboratory, Cambridge to celebrate the 60th anniversary, to the day, of the first program to be run on the electronic delay storage automatic calculator (EDSAC) computer. The seminar formed part of the University of Cambridge 800th anniversary programme. This brief paper gives an introduction to the seminar together with a transcript of the closing remarks made by Sir Maurice Wilkes, then aged 95, at the end of the event. This is followed by the two papers presented at the seminar, the first, EDSAC: a programmer remembers, is by David Barron and describes what it was like to be involved in those pioneering days. The second, Inventing the User: EDSAC in Context, is by Doron Swade and locates EDSAC in the context of the history of the internal stored program.