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Cambridge University was very unusual, if not unique, among British universities in that it had established a centralised computation facility—the Mathematical Laboratory—in 1937, long before the advent of stored-program computing. The laboratory contained a variety of computing machinery, including desktop calculating machines and a differential analyser. During 1947–1949, the laboratory built the EDSAC, the world's first practical stored-program computer. The EDSAC provided a massive increment in computing power that rendered the earlier equipment largely obsolete. However, the pre-existing computing infrastructure and practices profoundly shaped how the EDSAC was used and what it was used for.

DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-02152-8_7

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