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World's Oldest Working Computer On Display
riflemann writes: "The Sydney Morning Herald has
an article today about the world's oldest working computer finally
having a permanent place in a Melbourne Museum. It's good to see such
a historical computer, over 50 years old, being put on display permanently." Seeing this makes me remember reading Cryptonomicon - of course, the definition of what's the oldest and working is up for grabs, but as a BA in History, it's cool to see stuff like this put on display for all to see.
It doesn't work, it's just intact. There's actually an archival issue here. Do we keep CSIRAC "as it was", or do we restore it to working (and keep replacing valves as they burn out at the rate of at least one per day)?
When I was at the University of Melbourne, we were lucky enough to get a guided tour by one of the original members of the computational machinery laboratory. It's quite easy to see how the meme of the computer as ominous "electronic brain" took hold when you can literally walk through it.
CSIRAC not only had a hard disk (one platter, with a motor which delivered such low torque that you needed to put some pressure on the drive belt with a screwdriver to get it to spin up; I believe one of the engineers still has the screwdriver), but it also had a high level language, the interpreter for which fit in its (off the top of my head) 768 words of memory.
Oh, and another anecdote: When CSIRAC lived in The University of Melbourne, it was first housed next to the particle physics laboratory, which caused some scheduling problems, because CSIRAC wouldn't work when the cyclotron was firing. They also had difficulty with the mercury memory in hot weather, but I suspect all the early computers had that problem.
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