Computing History

The Pearcey foundation is involved in many activities that aim to preserve and promote our ICT history and legacy.

 

The Pearcey Foundation's computing history activities that record our history past and as it happens include:

  • Pearcey Virtual Museum for Australian ICT Heritage, Capabilities and Heroes
  • Oral History Project
  • Maintaining Pearcey related pages on Wikipedia
  • Being the custodian of the IDG Pearcey portrait
  • Working with the Museum of Victoria on maintaining the CSIRAC display
  • Contributing to SoftwareHistory.org

Computing History

Aug 21, 2025

Oral History of Australian Computing

Australia has a rich and dynamic history of invention, innovation, and commercial success in developing electronics products in computing and allied fields. Many of these achievements are within living memory. In this series of interviews by documentary expert Karl von Moller we hear first hand from the people who pioneered this era of modern electronics innovation in Australia.

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Jun 23, 2025

Grandmother of the Web

Mary Lee Woods enjoyed a short career in Australia at Mount Stromlo. Her son, Tim Berners-Lee, is known as the “Father of the Web”. Mary accepted the name “Grandmother of the Web’. She should be celebrated for her own career in programming.

Author:
Barbara Ainsworth
Curator, Monash Museum of Computing History
Faculty of Information Technology
Monash University, Melbourne, Australia

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Nov 11, 2024

Biography - Trevor Pearcey

Mrs Barbara Ainsworth, Curator of the Monash Museum of Computing History has published a new biography of Dr Trevor Pearcey, Dean of the School of Computing and Information Systems (1980-1984).

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Dec 27, 2021

Historical Papers

This section contains a collection of papers and notes about Australian ICT history.

Dec 23, 2021

CSIRAC - Among the First Electronic Stored Program Computers

In historical terms, CSIR Mk1/CSIRAC was one of the first stored program, electronic, computers.

Prior to 1948 various electromechanical machines (non-electronic computers) were built in USA and Germany. Early electronic, but not stored program machines, were ENIAC (USA) and numerous Colossuses (Colossi?) at Bletchley Park (UK).

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Nov 29, 2021

Early Australian Internet

In 1986, a year after the Internet domain name system was deployed, Australia's.au country code Top-Level Domain (ccTLD) came into being at the approval of the University of Southern California's Information Sciences Institute (performing IANA's function at the time).

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