Fifty-Year-Old Computer Being Restored

James Green directs us to "a Sunday Age (Melborne) article which describes the discovery of a 52 year old computer found in a dusty warehouse weighing in at 2,000 kilograms. Attempts are underway to get the CSIRAC up and running as a museum piece next year." They say it uses 30 kilowatts per hour; I think they mean 30 kilowatt-hours per hour.

Comments

And before it gets said

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There's only one of these things, so no one can build a beowolf cluster out of it.

I have to wonder whether this will have any impact on the MS antitrust suit, since perhaps MS can point to this thing and say: "Look, it's competition, and it's not running Windows!" Maybe this's why the Justice Department has become a bit more open to the idea of settling through arbitration!

How long 'til it hits the 'net?

[h2odragon]

52 years old... If they restore it to actual operational status I'll bet they don't run it for very long at a time. Spare tubes and such are gonna be a bear to find. Power shouldn't be a big deal, there's almost certainly some local power company that'd eat the bill to have a "Sponsored by" sign on it.

I wanna know if they'd put it on the 'net, assuming of course they could find implementors for the necessary software. I'd be willing to do a little work on that, just to see it done. Show up the guy with the TRS80 you can telnet to.

Somebody beat me to the inevitable Beowulf comment.

52 years old?

[LocalEmperor]

Well if the museum doesn't want it, we can always give it to our public schools. They are in need of an upgrade.

LocalEmperor

The truth.

[Matt2000]

There's a truth about the first computers that people rarely discuss anymore, and its about time somebody set the record straight.

We all know that most of the first computers didn't work at all, they were little more than great empty cabinets with flashing lights. The real truth on how they computed isn't rooted in the development of the vacuum tube or the transistor, it was due to the hundreds of midgets who lived inside the machine and worked day and night on mathematics problems.

Those first computers had to be built to confuse the ruskies, we all agree on that, but at what cost? What was the human toll in pushing those little guys faster and faster, first 1000 times faster than regular humans, then millions of times. Those first years were lessons in heat dissipation of a different sort, let me tell you 720 midgets in a box need a special kind of cooling.

Let's not let history slip from our memories and cause us to forget the real, tiny heroes of the information age.

Hotnutz.com

First Synth

[MrCreosote]

Not only was CSIRAC the 4th stored program computer in the world, and oldest surviving, it was also probably the first computer to generate music

Some information

[Goonie]

I'm a postgrad student in the CS department Melbourne University, where several people who were involved with CSIRAC still work. There are a couple of misconceptions here on Slashdot(which I don't recall being in the article, BTW).

1. IMHO, there is no possibility of the machine EVER being fired up again, unfortunately. While it's a nice dream, it's likely that trying to restart the thing would do nothing but cause a large fire. These are 50-year-old vacuum tubes, people!
2. I believe that n emulator has been written for it, and many of the original programs (on paper tape) have been saved and run on the emulator.
3. The machine WILL be displayed publically in Melbourne, probably at the new Museum of Victoria that's just about completed. This will complement Sydney's Powerhouse Museum, which has a piece of Babbage's Difference Engine.

It's a fascinating device to look at - at first glance, it looks like a piece of old radar junk you'd find in a disposals store, until you talk to some of the people who understand the thing. It all starts to make sense then - the mercury tube memory is particularly clever. Even more fascinating is some of the software written for it, such as the "autocoder" program which looks suspiciously like a proto-compiler, written at or before the same time as FORTRAN and COBOL.

Check out this CSIRAC site.