Computing History
The Pearcey foundation is involved in many activities that aims to preserve our ICT history.
The Pearcey Foundation's computing history activities include:
This section contains a collection of papers and notes about Australian ICT history.
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).
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).
On June 14, 1956 the computer CSIRAC was officially recommissioned at the new Computation Laboratory at the University of Melbourne.
This paper gives an overview of early Australian computing milestones up to about 1970 and demonstrates a mesh of influences. Wartime radar, initially from Britain, provided basic experience for many computing engineers. This is an excellent perspective on how Australia influenced the development of the digital computer as we know it today.
Nobody much remembers it now, but 40 years ago Australia built one of the world’s largest computer networks. In 1981 Australia’s Department of Social Security (DSS) began planning an ambitious network to connect all of its 210 Australian offices in real time.
