The "father" of British computing, Sir Maurice Wilkes, has died at the age of 97.

Sir Maurice was the designer and creator of Edsac, a computer that ran its first program in May 1949.

The Cambridge machine was the first widely-useable stored program machine and was very influential on the nascent British computer industry.

It set standards for how computers should be used in academia and business that have lasted until the present day.

Following work on developing radar during World War II, Sir Maurice returned to Cambridge to begin designing the machine that would become Edsac.

Prior to the war he had studied mathematics at Cambridge and been heavily involved with the rather limited calculating machines used in the department.

Study of the design documents for what would become the US Edvac machine convinced him that computers were the future and he started the project to build one at Cambridge.

His efforts were helped by a trip to the US to attend a series of lectures, known as the Moore School, run by the American scientists who had built the pioneering Eniac computer and were working on its successor Edvac.

"Maurice Wilkes was the first to turn these ideas into a fully-functional electronic stored-program computer when the Cambridge Edsac ran its first program in May 1949," said computer historian Professor Simon Lavington.