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Looking Back At Australia's First Digital Computer
An anonymous reader writes "Sometimes, it's the oldest machines that are the most fascinating. PC & Tech Authority has posted this gallery of photos of the first automatic electronic stored-program computer in Australia and one of the first in the world — CSIRAC. The photos show a machine massive in size — the main system comprised nine steel cabinets containing 2000 valves that weighed over 7000kg. Using valve technology and World War II radar systems as a starting point, the machine was used for various purposes including weather forecasting, forestry, loan repayments and building design. It boasted a 1000Hz memory clock and a serial bus that transferred one bit at a time. The system generated so much heat, cool air needed to be blown up through the cabinets from the basement below. In addition to being Australia's first computer, it is also said to have been the first computer to play digital music anywhere in the world. When CSIRAC was turned off for the last time, a witness described it as 'like something alive dying.'" Museum Victoria has some short but informative pages about CSIRAC, too, including this one about programming the thing, and another about the dangers and annoyances of working on it.
"a serial bus that transferred one bit at a time." .. good one.
"Like all other first-generation computers, CSIRAC had its own unique design. Its programs had to be developed from scratch. To do so, users needed to know the workings of the machine, as well as how to convert instructions into software it could understand." ... that's all we get? I wouldn't exactly call that informative... this is Slashdot, not Fox News.
Groan,
A serial bus can be more than one bit wide, but never mind....
What a load of bullshit.
Just more sour grapes from the jealous.
Hop back to your $7/hr minimum wage, slave.
Don't get sick now, you know you can't afford it.
It is a serious computer - it has a physical keyboard.
1000 Hz - you could come very close to hand-cranking it!
sPh
Wifi: patented! For shame australia. I am legitimately disgusted.
Well get fucked and use a captital A next time.
-- Australia
In 1949, mercury delay line memory was ok, but by 1955 it was hopelessly outdated.
I'm pretty surprised they didn't retrofit with core memory at some point, but then again, the rats nest of wiring in those photos doesn't inspire a lot of confidence in the upgradeability of the system.
Please note CSIRAC was developed by the CSIRO. Yes this is the same organisation that some people have unfairly labelled as a patent troll regarding their licensing claims over technology they developed in relation to Wi-Fi. The CSIRO is a wonderful organisation that Australians should rightfully feel very proud of as they have long rich history of developing technologies that push the boundaries of science and benefit humanity. Take a look at http://www.csiropedia.csiro.au/display/CSIROpedia/Achievements+by+decade to see the great volumes of innovation and excellent achievements of the CSIRO.
Disclaimer: I work at the CSIRO and I feel immensely privileged to work in an organisation that not only developed CSIRAC, but is devoted to advancing society through a multitude of diverse cutting edge scientific research endeavours.
In 1955, it was the first computer in the world to play music. Coincidentally, 1955 was the first time the RIAA tried suing a university.... for 1 million dollars!
This space for rent
Behind-The-Scenes at New Zealand's First Nuclear Reactor!
I don't know if Slashdot will still be around whenever that eventually happens.
Welcome back to the one day Trollfest where TechLeadNY has just been dismissed for a duck. Pretty piss, poor effort, really.
Interestingly, all the CSIRAC history forgets to mention it was located at Chisholm Institute of Technology's Caulfield campus (now Monash) for a long time as a display of one of the earliest computers ever made. I worked there and had the keys into the display, I now wish I'd added a bit of graffiti to the mercurary delay lines.
I have sitting right in front of me a copy of:
University of Melbourne
Computation Laboratory
Programming Manual
for the Automatic Electronic Computer
CSIRAC
(based upon papers by T.Pearcey and G.W.Hill)
August 1959
It's only 36 pages long, but is a fascinating read describing the internals of the computer as well as source code for things like division, sin and other fundamental things. I only have it because a company I was working for in the late '80s was about to throw it out in the trash and I walked past at the right time and grabbed it.
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
Why not play with the emulator now CSIRAC Emulator Very cool !
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Agreed - dont hold your breath ... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Zealand's_nuclear-free_zone
There is a book about it :
McCann, D. and Thorne, P. 2000. The Last of the First: CSIRAC: Australia's First Computer. Department of Computer Software Engineering, The University of Melbourne.
Too bad there is no ISBN so I have no idea where to get a copy outside of the Melbourne Museum where the machine is currently pretending to work.
In the second picture you can see a wood case with boxes. That is its /lib and the smaller box is its /usr/local/lib. There are paper tapes inside cardboard boxes with libraries of functions such as multiply integer and real square root.
Its "assembly language" sort of looked like "(D0)->H1" for save 10 input bits into H. That was later changed to "0 D HL". "103 -> S" was changed to "3 7 K S" which is jump to address 103 or Jump 3x32+7. Of course there was no assembler in the early days so it was all punched using tables.
The mercury delay lines are interesting. You can put about half a kbit in one tube but you have to keep refreshing it as the sound of a bit goes from one end to the other and then gets regenerated.
the main system comprised nine steel cabinets containing 2000 valves that weighed over 7000kg
By my math that's about 14000 metric tons in valves alone. That's 80% of the displacement of the HMS Dreadnought, the first modern battleship.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
I don't think God hates trigonometry. Nor does God hate the 21st letter of the Hebrew alphabet. But God allegedly does hate Sparlock the Warrior Wizard.
In case someone reading the article is too young to recognize the term, a "valve" is an electron tube, one of those things that would sometimes have to be replaced in the back of a radio or TV set. Yes, they got quite hot and any large array of them required special cooling. Even a radio or TV set could warm a room.
The photos are interesting.
In keeping with the traditions of most tech oriented sites, the comments rapidly devolve into political rants and pro/anti Apple statements.
Have gnu, will travel.
Got him, yes! Piss off, you're out!
> weighed over 7000kg
Actually, it weighed over 15400 lbs.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
One thing I've never understood is why these early computers (apparently) used power-hungry standard vacuum tubes, requiring huge cooling systems, rather than the vacuum tubes used in portable radios.
In the 1930s/40s - not sure when - battery-operated radios (portable for going to the beach, as well as non-portable for people who had no electricity before rural electrification) were common. These had vacuum tubes with a filament voltage of 1.1-1.5VDC at maybe 50mA; the filament served as the cathode to conserve power. The B+ battery was anywhere from 22.5V to 90V and, because they were expensive, were expected to last a long time. The tubes had numbers of the form 1xx, like 1S5 (a pentode/diode).
So 2000 of these would use only about 150 watts for the filaments, which is less than many modern desktops. I don't have a number for the B+ power consumption. I vaguely recall from a schematic I saw ages ago that there were high-valued resistors, maybe around 10K-100K ohms, in series with some of the plates in the low-level signal circuits, so it might not have been very much. Maybe someone else knows.
Of course higher-power tubes might be needed to drive the I/O such as relays etc., but it seems the main logic circuitry could have been relatively low power.
The active components are valves, they have 2000 of them, and the thing weighs 7000kg. That's 3.5 kg per valve. Valves used as digital switches. Sounds like the design is not particularly weight-efficient.
It's not just WiFi, we've invented a vaccine that protects your women from cervical cancer and are getting royalties on that too. Just like WiFi it's cents per item if not less.
You don't hear about that (and the "other countries price gouging", because of course the USA, UK, etc, etc help fund their public research that way too), because other industries don't try to rip the inventor off as much as does the US computer industry.
<Richie> Welcome back to the one day Trollfest where TechLeadNY has just been dismissed for a duck. Pretty piss, poor effort, really.</Richie>
Username begins with "Tech": Check
Slashdot ID > 2500000: Check
Attacks.... Australia??? This guy must have snoozed through the shill orientation class.
It appears as if someone hasn't visited parallel dimension Alpha-Niner....
Interesting fact: The micro that runs the blinkenlights on the CSIRAC panel these days has more grunt than the original computer. The things you learn at Linuxconf...
Vik :v)
I have to pay to access the internet and lease a domain. I think I have to pay for everything I use that is computer related, except the headaches - but then I have to pay for Aspirin so... where's all the free stuff?
USA can make networking breakthrough after breakthrough without patents ruining it for everyone
BAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!!
Did they patent any of their wonderful 'discoveries' so that they could leech off of others for decades? Or did Australians not figure that scam out until later?
Australia got scammed out of royalties for plenty of things. A research paper on the photoconductivity properties of selenium, published in 1907 by Professor O U Vonwiller from the University of Sydney, provided the key technology for the subsequent invention of the xerographic process in the United States by Chester Carlston in 1937. The result was the Xerox copier.
Australia got scammed out of plenty of royalties and manufacturing jobs there.
Wifi: patented! For shame australia. I am legitimately disgusted.
For sure Patented because the research into fast fourier transform and echo cancellation were sufficiently costly that the CSIRO *should* collect royalties on it's inventions so it can make more technology inventions because that's what it does!!!, it's not gear towards profit. The CSIRO is a legitimate user of the patent system because it is using the patent system they way it is intended to be used, where the actual creator and developer of the technology is being paid for the work it has done and can fund more technology development.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
It's not my fault that your country is known primarily for racism and government-led patent trolling.
Australia, in 1857, was the first country in the world to grant the vote to Women, indigenous people and allow them to stand for seats of parliament. There were no riots and no one died. So fuck you very much for your misguided and misinformed post.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
According to Wikipedia, it was "the fourth stored program computer in the world. It is the oldest surviving first-generation electronic computer and was the first in the world to play digital music."
If that isn't significant enough for Slashdot, what is?
You are full of wrong. Australia gave women the vote in 1902. New Zealand gave women the vote in 1893.South Australia gave women the vote in 1895. Aborigines had the vote in some states prior to Federation, but this was not universal until 1962. Read Wikipedia and the Australian Electoral Commission. You are entitled to your own opinions, but not your own facts.
Reliability was the highest priority among first-generation computer designers when choosing radio tubes (also called valves). J. P. Eckert was co-designer of the ENIAC, which was the first thing that might be called a working computer. Eckert spent a lot of engineering time on tube reliability. He selected tubes that seemed especially long-lasting and likely to work correctly out of the box. He drove them with circuits that treated them as gently as possible: lower voltages to preserve filaments, for example. While I have no knowledge of the relative reliability of compact tubes compared to full-sized ones, I'd have to guess that the smaller tubes were significantly less reliable. If the average tube life is 2,000 hours, then a 2,000 tube machine won't run for very long between tube replacements. ENIAC had over 17,000 tubes.
Image #14 is labeled as a "console teleprinter." It is really a storage drum, which was a a geometric alternative to the disk drive. Drums had a row of fixed-location heads for recording and playback. There was one head per track, which eliminated the moving arm. I once had a similar drum from an IBM 610 "calculator." It weighed about 30 pounds and stored 1,200 BITS. Perfect doorstop.
Australia gave women the vote in 1902. New Zealand gave women the vote in 1893.South Australia gave women the vote in 1895. Aborigines had the vote in some states prior to Federation, but this was not universal until 1962.
Great, thanks for clearing that up.
You are full of wrong. You are entitled to your own opinions, but not your own facts.
So because I'm wrong does it mean that that Australia is a racist country? Some dickheads are, and if Australia was a racist country we wouldn't have the diversity of peoples we have. So thanks for pointing out my error in dates but it still shows that an Australian state was the first in the world to give Women and Aboriginals the right to vote including the right to stand for office, and that it was bloodless revolution.
i.e. the way democracy *should* work!
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
Umm, no. What I said is that you are entitled to your opinions, not your own facts. If you think don't Australia is a racist country then that is your opinion. Whether you are right or wrong is simply someone else's opinion.
I didn't think Australia was all that racist until I travelled out west. It was a shock to me the way that people spoke (black & white people) of other races. It is my opinion that in the cities Australia is multicultural and quite tolerant, but in many (but not all) of the small country towns they party like it's 1912, not 2012.
BTW, the Maori in NZ gained the right to vote in 1840 with the Treaty of Waitangi. From that point, Maori and Caucasion/Pakeha were all treated the same. If you needed to be a land owning man to vote, then race was irrelevant. When universal suffrage was granted in 1983, all men and women could vote in the national elections. If an Australian colony (there were no states in the 1800s) gave the vote to all before NZ did, then that's great, but which was it (I'd like to read up on that history)?
Umm, no. What I said is that you are entitled to your opinions, not your own facts. If you think don't Australia is a racist country then that is your opinion. Whether you are right or wrong is simply someone else's opinion.
I understand that but the statement the troll said was "your country is known primarily for racism and government-led patent trolling". Australia certainly contains racist people but the definition of Australia as a racist country is not acceptable because our country protects equality by law. Discrimination in Australia is against the Law. I could no more accept that *primary* characterisation of Australia, as a Country, than I could of New Zealand, Canada, UK, US etc.
If you say Apartheid Africa was known as a racist Country, Nazi Germany etc then yes it's some thing that they were known for. It's because those things are against the law in Australia that the characterisation doesn't make sense as anything other than a troll, which it is. We certainly have more to do, like Immigration and Marriage equality and a Human Rights Charter but it's more than my opinion, it's a fact of law.
I didn't think Australia was all that racist until I travelled out west. It was a shock to me the way that people spoke (black & white people) of other races. It is my opinion that in the cities Australia is multicultural and quite tolerant, but in many (but not all) of the small country towns they party like it's 1912, not 2012.
This is a reasonable characterisation. It takes time and I think that one of the ways for our country to grow is to allow immigration to occur to country towns. They have a shortage of many of the types of Human Resources that good immigration policy could solve. I think that because they struggle so much it creates a Catch-22 situation of fear, that creates racism. But I have had similar experiences.
BTW, the Maori in NZ gained the right to vote in 1840 with the Treaty of Waitangi. From that point, Maori and Caucasion/Pakeha were all treated the same. If you needed to be a land owning man to vote, then race was irrelevant. When universal suffrage was granted in 1983, all men and women could vote in the national elections.
New Zealand has always been, as a primary characterisation, a strong advocate for Human Rights issues and is ahead of Australia in many respects. I have had many Maori friends over the years, one of my mates is an Islander, so yeah I completely recognise that Australia has followed New Zealand's lead there.
If an Australian colony (there were no states in the 1800s) gave the vote to all before NZ did, then that's great, but which was it (I'd like to read up on that history)?
I only said that because I was watching a documentary on women's suffrage and I'm sure it said 1857, I only watched it the night before. It was fascinating the political manuvering that went on, the last minute the conservative party amendments to the legislation that allowed white and aboriginal woman to not only vote but to stand for office because they thought no one would possibly vote for it, and they did, it passed into law.
I'm also certain that it said that South Australia was the first place in the world to achieve it. If I haven't recalled correctly it's on the ABC website somewhere, way to tired to find a link. I checked the wiki for South Australia and it said Official settlement began on 28 December 1836, when the colony was proclaimed at The Old Gum Tree by Governor John Hindmarsh.. - Cheers
My ism, it's full of beliefs.