Awards, Honours, and Leadership Positions
In 1956 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society.
He was a founder member of the British Computer Society (BCS) and its first president (1957–1960). Wilkes received the Turing Award in 1967, with the following citation: "Professor Wilkes is best known as the builder and designer of the EDSAC, the first computer with an internally stored program. Built in 1949, the EDSAC used a mercury delay line memory. He is also known as the author, with Wheeler and Gill, of a volume on Preparation of Programs for Electronic Digital Computers in 1951, in which program libraries were effectively introduced." In 1968 he received the Harry H. Goode Memorial Award, with the following citation: "For his many original achievements in the computer field, both in engineering and software, and for his contributions to the growth of professional society activities and to international cooperation among computer professionals."
In 1980 he retired from his professorships and post as the head of the laboratory and joined the central engineering staff of Digital Equipment Corporation in Maynard, Massachusetts.
He was awarded the Faraday Medal by the Institution of Electrical Engineers in 1981. The Maurice Wilkes Award, awarded annually for an outstanding contribution to computer architecture made by a young computer scientist or engineer, is named after him. In 1986, he returned to England, and became a member of Olivetti's Research Strategy Board. In 1987, he was awarded an Honorary Degree (Doctor of Science) by the University of Bath. In 1993 Wilkes was presented, by Cambridge University, with an honorary Doctor of Science degree. In 1994 he was inducted as a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery. He was awarded the Mountbatten Medal in 1997 and in 2000 presented the inaugural Pinkerton Lecture. He was knighted in the 2000 New Year Honours List. In 2001, he was inducted as a Fellow of the Computer History Museum. In 2002, Wilkes moved back to the Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge, as an Emeritus Professor.
In his memoirs Wilkes wrote:
As soon as we started programming, we found to our surprise that it wasn't as easy to get programs right as we had thought. Debugging had to be discovered. It was on one of my journeys between the EDSAC room and the punching equipment that 'hesitating at the angles of stairs' the realization came over me with full force that a good part of the remainder of my life was going to be spent finding errors in my own programs.
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