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The Trailblazing First Generation Computer the World Forgot
At the dawn of the computer age, Australians developed a 2.5 tonne behemoth named CSIRAC — now recognised as one of the grandfathers of modern computers.
IN NOVEMBER 1949, CSIRO scientists in Sydney independently created what is now recognised as only the fourth digital stored program computer in the world: CSIRAC. It came hot on the heels of other first-generation computers created in the UK and the US only a year earlier.
Using vacuum tubes instead of microchips, the noisy behemoth filled a room and consumed enough electricity to power a suburban street. While paltry by today’s standards, CSIRAC was a stunning achievement at the very dawn of the computer age.
“It had a presence like Stonehenge, a scale that was impressive — big grey cabinets filling a room, humming like a power station,” recalled Peter Thorne, who, at the age of 19, began working on CSIRAC in the 1950s; he went on to head up computer engineering at the University of Melbourne.
Before CSIRAC, a ‘computer’ was a job — someone who wrangled equations on a mechanical calculator. Complex calculations would be split into many parts and distributed to individual ‘computers’ — row after row of mathematics…
