Department of Computer Science and Technology, University of Cambridge
computer science division at the University of Cambridge
The Department of Computer Science and Technology, formerly the Computer Laboratory, is an academic department within the School of Technology at the University of Cambridge.
As of 2023, it employed 56 faculty members, 45 support staff, 105 research staff, and about 205 research students. The current Head of Department is Professor Alastair Beresford.
History
The department was founded as the Mathematical Laboratory under the leadership of John Lennard-Jones on 14 May 1937, though it did not get properly established until after World War II. The new laboratory was housed in the North Wing of the former Anatomy School, on the New Museums Site. Upon its foundation, it was intended "to provide a computing service for general use, and to be a centre for the development of computational techniques in the University".
In October 1946, work began under Maurice Wilkes on EDSAC (Electronic Delay Storage Automatic Calculator), which subsequently became the world's first fully operational and practical stored program computer when it ran its first program on 6 May 1949. It inspired the world's first business computer, LEO. It was replaced by EDSAC 2, the first microcoded and bit-sliced computer, in 1958.
The Cambridge Diploma in Computer Science was the world's first postgraduate taught course in computing, starting in 1953.
In 1961, David Hartley developed Autocode, one of the first high-level programming languages, for EDSAC 2. Also in that year, proposals for Titan, based on the Ferranti Atlas machine, were developed.
“Department of Computer Science and Technology, University of Cambridge” enters the record as computer science division at the University of Cambridge. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Department, Computer and Science can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Contemporary correspondence, administrative files and participant testimony can test how later narratives organized the event or institution. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 16, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7895212. VIAF identifies the subject as 149181453. The Library of Congress control number is nb2006027585. Authority coordinates are 52.211, 0.092. 2 of 5 selected statements include explicit references; 2 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2023, 1937, 1946 and 1949.
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This entry incorporates text from “Department of Computer Science and Technology, University of Cambridge” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.