Teversham Engineering rebuilds EDSAC on SolidWorks

The computer, which ran its first program on 6 May 1949, will be recreated at the National Museum of Computing, at Bletchley Park. Alan Willis, managing director at Teversham Engineering, makes the point that in reverse engineering EDSAC, the project turns conventional computer design – in which one generation of computers is used to design the next – on its head. Using one of only three surviving chassis (the machine itself comprised 140) and no drawings, Teversham was able to record the original dimensions and remodel EDSAC in SolidWorks. Willis explains: "Volunteers from the EDSAC project came in and said, 'Do you think you can work with that?'. Knowing what we have done with SolidWorks in the past and the skill levels that we have, we felt we could do it justice. Taking something that is a bit of history, and to make it work again with so little information was an exciting challenge". And he continues: "Reverse engineering using SolidWorks was a piece of cake. Ease-of-use and flexibility are the biggest benefits. We were able to quickly model the common chassis shape, and then configure it into lots of variants for the different valve configurations. No rework was needed – first time, every time, it was correct." "It is fascinating watching a computer that is really a direct descendant of EDSAC used in the production of the EDSAC Replica," comments Andrew Herbert, manager of the EDSAC replica project. "EDSAC was the first computer in the world designed from the outset to provide a computing service, and it helped a large number of Cambridge University's scientists and engineers to solve practical problems and assist in fundamental research," he continues. "Here, in the production of the replica, we have a marvellous example of how powerful and adaptable computing has become over the six decades since the trail-blazing EDSAC first ran." EDSAC – Electronic Delay Storage Automatic Calculator – was built to help scientists at Cambridge University to tackle problems that could not have been solved before. Prof (later Sir) Maurice Wilkes, who designed the original EDSAC, had the idea of making a machine that would be a workhorse for Cambridge scientists. EDSAC could execute about 850 instructions per second. The computers being used to recreate the sheet metalwork for the EDSAC replica, using SolidWorks, are three million times faster.