In August 1951, a group of scientists gathered at the University of Sydney to attend the first Australian conference on automatic computing machines.
In 1951 there was a major conference held at the University of Sydney which marked the beginning of a new science in Australia, Computer Science.
On June 14, 1956 the computer CSIRAC was officially recommissioned at the new Computation Laboratory at the University of Melbourne.
The recent publication of A Vision Splendid – The History of Australian Computing is a timely reminder of the seventy years or so Australia has been involved in the digital revolution.
So you’ve decided to become an IT professional when you grow up? Good choice! You’ve already discovered the satisfaction of getting a program to work – that will continue to excite you for the rest of your life. You’ll also find that debugging the things that don’t work is equally rewarding.
This is an extract from Ann Moffatt’s book, The IT Girl, which is to be published in November 2020.
From the start she thrived on this new technology that used abstract logic, and still relishes looking back at those early,
adventurous days with all card systems and low-level programming languages.
