Category Archives: 1949

CSIRAC

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The CSIRAC was Australia’s first digital computer and the fifth stored-program machine in the world. It’s first test was run in November, 1949 and it was built by a team of engineers and scientists led by Trevor Pearcey and Maston Beard.

Input was done on punched paper tape instead of cards, was run through a single console, and had CRT displays. Since it had no OS of any kind, a programming language called INTERPROGRAM was created for it much later by Geoff Hill. In 1955 the machine was moved to the University of Melbourne, where it served as the country’s only academic computing center until 1964.

In 1964 the system was shut down and sat in storage through the 60s and 70s until being exhibited from 1980-1992. A conference on the machine in 1996 proved further interest in it’s historical impact, and it was put on display in the Melbourne Museum in 2000. It has not been operable since shutting down, but programs were kept and an emulator was written. It still exists today in the same location, where millions of visitors see it every year.

Thomas Watson, Jr.

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watsonjrFrom Time Magazine’s Builders and Titans:

As the eldest son of the president of IBM, Thomas Watson Jr. grew up tortured by self-doubt. He suffered bouts of depression and once burst into tears over the thought that his formidable father wanted him to join IBM and eventually run what was already a significant company. “I can’t do it,” he wailed to his mother. “I can’t go to work for IBM.”

Yet 26 years later, Watson not only succeeded his father but also would eventually surpass him. IBM is now synonymous with computers, even though the company did not invent the device that would change our life, nor had it shipped a single computer before Tom Jr. took over.

But he boldly took IBM–and the world–into the computer age, and in the process developed a company whose awesome sales and service savvy and dark-suited culture stood for everything good and bad about corporate America. No wonder the Justice Department sought (unsuccessfully) to break it up.

Williams Tube

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williamstube2 As a result of a trip to the U.S.A. in June 1946, Dr F.C. (Freddie) Williams started active investigation at TRE into the storage of both analog and digital information on a Cathode Ray Tube. Storage of analog information could help solve the problem of static objects cluttering the dynamic picture on a radar screen (because). Storage of digital information could solve the problem holding up the development of computers worldwide, i.e. lack of a storage mechanism that would work at electronic speeds. By November 1946 he was able to store a single bit (with the “anticipation” method), based around a standard radar CRT, and filed a provisional patent for the mechanism in December 1946.

The general principle behind the storage of binary information was to plant charge in one of two different ways at an array of spots on a CRT using standard techniques. The type of charge at any spot, representing a 0 or 1, could be sensed by a metal pick-up plate on the outside of the CRT screen, thus “reading” the “value” of the spot. However, the charge dissipated very quickly, so values were preserved indefinitely by continuously reading their value and resetting the charge as appropriate to the value.

Manchester Baby Machine

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babyThe Small Scale Experimental Machine, the Baby, was built in 1947 and 1948 to subject the Williams-Kilburn Tube to a searching test of its speed and reliability. It also demonstrated the feasibility and potential of a stored-program computer. It was quickly decided to press ahead to develop a realistic useable computer based on the same principles. As early as October 1948 a request was made from the government to Ferranti Ltd. to manufacture a commercial machine to Prof. Williams’ specification.

By the Autumn of 1949 the engineering team had produced a working computer with a larger store and more powerful instruction set, and with the addition of a hardware multiplier, address modification registers (“B-lines”), a two-level store comprising a set of Williams-Kilburn Tubes and a Magnetic Drum Store, and input/output from/to 5-hole paper-tape teleprinter. To improve reliability for the CRT store they were now using CRTs specially manufactured for them by GEC (with the particular assistance of Laurie Allard). With a programmable fast drum connected as well, this was the first working two-level store.