Happy 75th birthday to Australia’s first computer
On 14 November 1949, Australia’s first computer ran its first test program.
CSIRAC (Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Automatic Computer) was the fourth stored-program computer in the world. It was capable of an impressive (for 1949) processing speed of 1000 instructions per second, and played the first ever computer-generated music, “Colonel Bogey,” at Australia’s first computer conference, in 1951.
CSIRAC is now on display at Scienceworks in Victoria and is the world’s oldest stored-program electronic computer still in existence.
It’s also the 60th anniversary of Csironet, CSIRO’s first computing service and network.
You can read more about CSIRAC here.
You can learn more about Australia’s modern supercomputers at ICRI, when the Pawsey Supercomputing Research Centre features as part of a session on Greening research infrastructure.
Other sessions will cover Building infrastructures and scaling up: Data sharing on a global scale, as well as The role of RIs in training the digital workforce.
Pawsey is part of Australia’s NCRIS program
One of CSIRAC’s creators Trevor Pearcey, surveying the CSIRAC machine (1952).
International Conference on Research Infrastructures
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