At the heart of Melbourne Museum, there’s an exhibit that looks like a set of old metal gym lockers, stuffed with racks of valves, wires and other old electronic equipment. It’s actually a computer, Australia’s first and only the fourth built in the world. Despite its humble appearance, in the minds of many, it’s the most significant computer around today. Because it’s the only machine of its era left on the planet.
“Of the handful of computers operating before 1950 it’s the only one still intact,” says Peter Thorne, of the sprawling behemoth. “Also, we’re pretty confident now that it was the first computer in the world to play computer music, which is essentially the birth of multimedia. That happened in 1951, exactly 50 years ago.”
Called CSIRAC – after the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (later CSIRO) which built the machine in 1949 – it weighed a couple of tonnes and sucked enough electricity to power an entire suburban street.
“It used vacuum tubes or valves which lit up,” says Thorne, recently retired from Melbourne University’s computer science department and an expert on computer history.
“These were the electronics of the time and they weren’t terribly reliable”. Indeed, compared to computers available today, CSIRAC’s grunt seems laughable. It ran at 0.001 megahertz, with 2000 bytes of memory and a mere 2500 bytes of storage. By comparison, a typical desktop PC today has a processing speed of 500 megahertz, with 64 megabytes of memory and a hard disk containing 10 gigabytes (10,000 million bytes) of storage.
Nonetheless, to the people who used it, CSIRAC was magic.
“Before CSIRAC, if you wanted to do mathematical calculations in Australia, you hired a person, usually a woman, who used a calculating machine – either mechanical or hand-cranked,” says Thorne.
“He or she could do about one operation a second, whereas CSIRAC could do 1000 operations a second. You only used CSIRAC for an hour at a time but you could do the amount of work that would otherwise have taken 20 people a week.”
The newfound computational power was initially used by scientists researching everything from the thermal properties of buildings to the mysteries of the cosmos. It had a hand in the design of several early Australian skyscrapers and was instrumental in performing the river flow analysis needed to build the Snowy Mountains hydro-electric scheme. And it substantially increased the reliability of weather forecasting.
Later there were commercial applications, such as loan repayment calculations – the kind of thing a bank can do for you now as you stand at the counter, but which in those days was considered quite remarkable.
But it was CSIRAC’s ability to play music that has helped ensure its place in computing history. It seems the first tunes were played between 1951 and 1953, and these are now believed to be the earliest played anywhere in the world.
By 1954, however, things were changing. A new generation of faster computers was on the horizon. The transistor had been invented and it was clear any move to build a transistorised version of CSIRAC would be a very substantial project. Despite its impressive record, CSIRO subsequently terminated the project.
After the computer project in Sydney was terminated, CSIRAC was transferred to Melbourne University where it was used by university and CSIRO staff for another nine years. It was here that its circle of influence widened, with the first computing courses run for people outside the university.
Word got out to the ordinary citizens too, although early expectations were not always realistic. Staff were often besieged by calls from the public wanting answers to questions in the television quiz shows that were popular at the time, for example.
While other early computers were cannibalised so their parts could be used for later models, CSIRAC’s use as a computing workhorse actually helped ensure its survival. By the time it was turned off in 1964, it was the oldest working computer in the world.
Sadly, it’s not an option to make CSIRAC operational again today. Time has taken a toll on this fragile dinosaur.
So what exactly would happen if anyone tried to relive the magic by switching it on?
“A lot of its components would not stand having voltages applied to them again,” says Thorne. “I think it would probably catch fire.”
Master of Environment 