CSIRAC – Australia’s first computer

CSIRAC was the brainchild of Trevor Pearcey, a physicist who came from Britain in 1945, part of the team of radar ‘boffins’ who were to transform southern radio astronomy.

The aim was to build a machine for experimental computing. Pearcey designed it, Maston Beard, an Australian engineer, built it. CSIRAC, when finished, weighed two tonnes, covered 40 square metres and was made up of nine steel cabinets containing 2000 valves. It required enough electric power to run a village.

CSIRAC was at the cutting edge of modern computing, having been preceded only by SSEM (1948) and EDSAC (1949) in Britain and BINAC (1949) in the United States. Yet this behemoth could manage only 0.001 megahertz (compared with 500 in your PC) and 2000 bytes (compared with 64 megabytes plus 10 000 million in stored memory).

Nonetheless, CSIRAC was able to perform impressively, calculating weather forecasts, bank loans, star positions, the flow of rivers in the Snowy Mountains Scheme, building designs, and producing the world’s first computer music. Geoff Hill, CSIRAC’s programmer, came from a musical family and, beginning in 1951, had the computer perform ‘Colonel Bogey’ and ‘Auld Lang Syne’.

After a spell at the University of Sydney in the Radiophysics Division, CSIRAC was loaded onto a vast truck and carried to Melbourne, where it gave a range of services for nine more years, offering the first computer courses outside a university. Then came the transistor and, after 15 years of excellent service, CSIRAC was finally turned off in 1964.

Robyn Williams