CSIRAC: Last Surviving Grandfather of Computers
For decades forgotten in a warehouse, one of the grandfathers of modern computers — and only the fifth to go live — has been restored.
THE WORLD WAS a different place in 1949: vinyl LP records had just been invented, the now-iconic Volkswagen Kombi van debuted on the market, the world’s first jet-powered airliner took its maiden flight, and the People’s Republic of China was proclaimed by Mao Zedong.
But behind the scenes, it was also the beginning of a powerful technological revolution: the dawn of the computer age. Within months of each other, scientists and engineers had created the first stored-memory electronic computers: large, lumbering machines weighing several tonnes and packed with vacuum tubes and miles of copper wiring. Just four of these strange beasts had come to life in Britain and the United States — the ancestors of the devices that went on to transform the world.
And in November 1949, the fifth such electronic marvel — under construction for two years — finally ran its first program. Its name was CSIRAC, and it was built in faraway Australia.
What’s amazing about CSIRAC is that the researchers who built it had little idea of the work going on elsewhere in the world: scientific…
