Tom Kilburn was born in Dewsbury, England, in 1921. He received a PhD from the University of Manchester (1948).
Kilburn's early work with Frederic Williams at the University of Manchester in 1947 concentrated on the digital storage of information on a cathode-ray tube and resulted in the first random access electronic storage device for computers, the Williams-Kilburn Tube.
To test it, in 1948 Kilburn led the work on designing and building "the Baby," a small-scale experimental computer. The Baby was the first stored-program computer-the first computer in the world that could hold both user program and data in electronic storage and process it at electronic speeds.
In the early 1950s, Kilburn led the development of two new pioneering computers that were turned into commercial machines by UK manufacturers.
Kilburn then led the development of the Atlas computer system, which pioneered such modern concepts as paging, virtual memory, and multiprogramming, influencing the development of computer systems for generations. In 1962, it was considered the most powerful computer in the world.
Kilburn was professor of computer engineering (1960), then computer science (1964) at the University Manchester, retiring in 1981. He was a Fellow of the Royal Society. Kilburn passed away on January 17, 2001.
