It filled a room the size of a double garage and had only a fraction of the brainpower of the cheapest electronic organiser. But Australia's first computer, the fourth in the world, was a supercomputer for its time - revolutionising everything from weather forecasting to banking, and playing the first ever computer music. Cathy Johnson reports on the world's only surviving first-generation computer. (This page contains Real Audio G2 - click here for help)

At the heart of Melbourne Mus eum, there's an exhibit that looks like a set of old metal gym lockers, stuffed with racks of valves, wires and other old electronic equipment. It's actually a computer, Australia's first and only the fourth built in the world. Despite its humble appearance, in the minds of many, it's the most significant computer around today. Because it's the only machine of its era left on the planet. "Of the handful of computers operating before 1950 it's the only one still intact," says Peter Thorne, of the sprawling behemoth. "Also, we're pretty confident now that it was the first computer in the world to play computer music, which is essentially the birth of multimedia. That happened in 1951, exactly 50 years ago." To use the computer, operators sat at a separate console. Programs were fed into the computer on punched paper tapes.

(CSIRO Division of Building Construction and Engineering) Called CSIRAC - after the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (later CSIRO) which built the machine in 1949 - it weighed a couple of tonnes and sucked enough electricity to power an entire suburban street. "It used vacuum tubes or valves which lit up," says Thorne, recently retired from Melbourne University's computer science department and an expert on computer history. "These were the electronics of the time and they weren't terribly reliable". Indeed, compared to computers available today, CSIRAC's grunt seems laughable. It ran at 0.001 megahertz, with 2000 bytes of memory and a mere 2500 bytes of storage. By comparison, a typical desktop PC today has a processing speed of 500 megahertz, with 64 megabytes of memory and a hard disk containing 10 gigabytes (10,000 million bytes) of storage. Nonetheless, to the people who used it, CSIRAC was magic. "Before CSIRAC, if you wanted to do mathematical calculations in Australia, you hired a person, usually a woman, who used a calculating machine - either mechanical or hand-cranked," says Thorne. "He or she could do about one operation a second, whereas CSIRAC could do 1000 operations a second. You only used CSIRAC for an hour at a time but you could do the amount of work that would otherwise have taken 20 people a week." Storage dreams But once the instructions could be stored in the machine's electronic memory, along with the data, the computer could run at its own speed and could respond to more complex instructions. "If a computer is finding its own way, you can put in branched or conditional instructions - 'If this is negative, do this'," says Thorne. "The computer can actually weave it's way through calculations autonomously. Once it's set up, it can run without intervention. This was the great dream." The British were the first to achieve the dream, with their two machines known as SSEM (or Baby) and EDSAC built in 1948 and 1949 respectively. The Americans followed closely with BINAC, and CSIRAC was fourth. With the doors of its metal cabinets removed, CSIRAC innards could be tested by programmers. (Copyright: CSIRO Telecommunications and Industrial Physics ) "It was the first computer outside the US and the UK, and it was all Australian made," recalls Thorne, who worked on CSIRAC during the latter part of its 15-year life. "That's why it's an important artifact for Australia. Here we were right around the world from where everyone would have thought computing was started and we were actually right in the forefront of things. We were the third nation to enter the digital age." CSIRAC was largely the brainchild of Trevor Pearcey, a physicist who worked on advanced radar systems in Britain during the war. But the lack of international communication systems at the time meant the developments here were very much independent of those in the northern hemisphere. Play it again, CSIRAC The newfound computational power was initially used by scientists researching everything from the thermal properties of buildings to the mysteries of the cosmos. It had a hand in the design of several early Australian skyscrapers and was instrumental in performing the river flow analysis needed to build the Snowy Mountains hydro-electric scheme. And it substantially increased the reliability of weather forecasting. Later there were commercial applications, such as loan repayment calculations - the kind of thing a bank can do for you now as you stand at the counter, but which in those days was considered quite remarkable. But it was CSIRAC's ability to play music that has helped ensure its place in computing history. It seems the first tunes were played between 1951 and 1953, and these are now believed to be the earliest played anywhere in the world. CSIRAC's first programmer, Geoff Hill, came from a musical family and he programmed the computer to play popular musical melodies which could be heard through a loudspeaker originally installed for a quite different purpose - to indicate with audible "beeps" when particular points of interest in the program had been reached. listen to CSIRAC play the world's first computer music Like all the software at the time, the music programs were stored on hand-punched paper tapes. These were recently decoded by academic Paul Doornbusch, who travelled to Australia from Holland especially for the task. Working closely with original programmers and engineers, Doornbusch's team wrote new programs which emulated the old computer exactly. Then by using a valve amplifier - built from CSIRAC-era components - they achieved an authentic reproduction of the computer's original primitive sounds. listen to CSIRAC play 'Colonel Boogey' The above sound files are recreations of some of the original music tracks CRIRAC played. A specially-built valve amplifier was used to authenticate the early computer's primitive sound. Copyright: Paul Doornbusch Computational cunning By 1954, however, things were changing. A new generation of faster computers was on the horizon. The transistor had been invented and it was clear any move to build a transistorised version of CSIRAC would be a very substantial project. Despite its impressive record, CSIRO terminated the project - a decision which reportedly left designer Trevor Pearcey deeply disappointed until his death in 1998. In Pearcey's view, Australia had thrown away a chance to led the world in digital computing. It's no lightweight laptop, but CSIRAC - all two tonnes of it - was a supercomputer in its time. (CSIRO Division of Building Construction and Engineering) But Peter Thorne believes development of a large-scale hardware industry in Australia was unlikely anyway. "I really think it was a bit optimistic to think we could have been manufacturing and exporting big computers in those days when we were connected to the rest of the world largely by sea," he says. "But CSIRAC was still a huge success. It really kick-started us into the computer age, I think probably quite a number of years earlier than we would have been if we had just waited for technology to be imported." The training alone, especially in software, has had an enduring impact. "The way you got maximum benefit out of this very slow machine with limited storage was you wrote very cunning programs. Fitting everything in to make it do all these things was a real work of art. The local software people were very good and we're still very good at software." Switched-off technology After the computer project in Sydney was terminated, CSIRAC was transferred to Melbourne University where it was used by university and CSIRO staff for another nine years. It was here that its circle of influence widened, with the first computing courses run for people outside the university. Word got out to the ordinary citizens too, although early expectations were not always realistic. Staff were often besieged by calls from the public wanting answers to questions in the television quiz shows that were popular at the time, for example. It took a truck this size to transport CSIRAC from Sydney to Melbourne. (Photograph F. Hirst: University of Melbourne Collection) "People were disappointed to learn it didn't have an infinitely large memory and that what you put into it, you lost when you turned it off," Thorne recalls. Interestingly, Trevor Pearcey himself had foreseen the development of databases and the internet that would see this widely-held concept of computer as "electronic brain" essentially realised. "I knew, and I think we all knew, we were in at the beginning of something extraordinary," says Thorne. "But our thinking was we would continue to build more and more powerful but big computers. What I don't think I foresaw was miniaturisation and the impact that would have in terms of allowing everyone to have personal computers in their homes and so on." While other early computers were cannibalised so their parts could be used for later models, CSIRAC's use as a computing workhorse actually helped ensure its survival. By the time it was turned off in 1964, it was the oldest working computer in the world. Sadly, it's not an option to make CSIRAC operational again today. Time has taken a toll on this fragile dinosaur. So what exactly would happen if anyone tried to relive the magic by switching it on? "A lot of its components would not stand having voltages applied to them again," says Thorne. "I think it would probably catch fire." CSIRAC can be viewed in Melbourne Museum's digital technology exhibit, @digital.au Links ABC TV's Quantum story on CSIRAC - transcript ABC Online's TechTalk Forum for discussion of computing & IT matters Australian Computer Museum Society Inc's Timeline of Computing History Melbourne University's Computer Science Department CSIRAC Australian Science Archives Project Guide to the Records of CSIRAC