Frederic C. Williams

Sir Frederic Calland Williams (26 June 1911 - 11 August 1977) was a British engineer born in Romiley, Stockport, educated at the University of Manchester and with a doctorate from Oxford in 1936, who contributed to radar development at the Telecommunications Research Establishment during World War Two. In 1946 he became head of the Electrical Engineering Department at the University of Manchester, where with Tom Kilburn and Geoff Tootill he built the Manchester Baby, the first electronic stored-program digital computer, and invented the Williams tube, an early cathode-ray-tube based memory device. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1950 and received the Hughes Medal in 1963 and the Faraday Medal in 1972.