Evrim Yazgin
Cosmos science journalist
On 14 November 1949, Australia’s first computer was switched on.
CSIR Mk1 (later renamed CSIRAC) was designed and built by Trevor Pearcey with help from Maston Beard and Geoff Hill.
Pearcey, a radar scientist, began working on the machine in 1947 after emigrating to Australia from the UK. He joined the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), which in 1949 became the CSIRO – still Australia’s national science agency.
At the time, CSIR Mk1 was only the 4th stored-memory electronic computer to be built in the world.
“Prior to 1948 various electromechanical machines (non-electronic computers) were built in USA and Germany,” says Angus Macoustra, the CSIRO’s Acting Chief Information Officer. “CSIR Mk1/CSIRAC was one of only a handful of machines which executed a stored program prior to 1950.”
After running the first program in 1949, the computer became fully operational in 1951. It was transferred to the University of Melbourne from the University of Sydney. It continued to operate until November 1964.
The machine could perform 1,000 operations a second – a thousand times faster than the best mechanical calculators at the time.
CSIRAC could store about 2 kilobytes of data – equivalent to a short email or a page of plain Roman alphabetic text.
The whole machine weighed about 2 tonnes and used 30kW of power – about the same as 30 modern toasters.
According to the Pearcey Foundation – established in 1998 after the death of CSIR Mk1’s builder – CSIRAC is the holder of several records. It was the first computer to play electronic music and the first to do numerical weather forecasting. It is also the only first-generation computer surviving anywhere in the world. It is on permanent display at the Scienceworks museum in Melbourne.
It was built for simplicity and breadth of application. The computer was made of 2,000 valves or vacuum tubes which were used in first-generation computers for logic circuitry. These first generation computers were replaced after the advent of the computing revolution spurred on by the invention of the integrated silicon circuit chip in the 1960s. They still power personal computers today.
“Australia was a technology leader 75 years ago, and this tradition has continued, from developing the Micro Bee home computer in the 1980s which used floppy disks to designing the Google Maps program,” Macoustra says.
Since the 1990s, supercomputers have substantially increased the power of number crunching and scientific enquiry.
The most powerful supercomputers can perform about a quadrillion (1 with 15 zeroes) floating point operations per second.
And 75 years after CSIR Mk1, Macoustra notes the ongoing involvement of the CSIRO in computing developments in Australia.
“In 2009 CSIRO introduced Australia’s first accelerated computing using GPUs (Graphic Processing Unit),” he says. “Earlier this year we launched our high-performance computer Virga which uses energy-efficient direct liquid cooling and performs 60 times faster than that first GPU machine back in 2009.”
Another computing revolution could be on the horizon as well, with the development of artificial intelligence algorithms and quantum computers potentially breaking through into new ground and outperforming even the most powerful supercomputers in the next decade.
