CSIRAC
CSIRAC at the Melbourne Museum
CSIRAC was the first computer in an Australian University and the first in Victoria. It provided a computing service to scientists, engineers and the Melbourne business community until 1964.
CSIRAC still exists intact and is on display at Museum Victoria: CSIRAC, making it the oldest surviving electronic computer in the world.
An excellent book about CSIRAC is Last Of The First, by Doug McCann and Peter Thorne. This book provides a comprehensive overview of CSIRAC, published by the University of Melbourne, and available free as a PDF(PDF, 4.9 MB).
In historical terms, CSIR Mk1/CSIRAC was one of the first stored program, electronic, computers.
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27 Jun 2016
We don't think twice about playing music via a computer - we have them in our pockets, and in our homes and offices, with music on tap. But playing music on a computer was once an almost unthinkable leap of the imagination and the most devilishly difficult programming challenge.
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15 Jun 2016
Computing underpins every aspect of our lives, from smart phones to the robots that assemble our cars.
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14 Jun 2016
14 June is an important date in Australian computing history and in particular for the Pearcey Foundation. It's the date CSIRAC was switched on at The University of Melbourne and began the first university computing facility in Australia.
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22 Oct 2015
How does the CSIRAC continue to be relevant today? Australia's first computer weighed two tonnes, filled a large room and had a tiny fraction of the capacity of today's typical smartphone. But why would such a machine continue to be relevant today?
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23 Jan 2012
The new world of computer science met the old on 23rd January 2012 when senior executives from CSIRO's ICT Centre paid a visit to CSIRAC - Australia's first electronic digital computer.
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18 Nov 2009
The 60th Anniversary Celebration of CSIRAC was wheld at the Melbourne Museum, Nicholson St., Carlton, Victoria, Australia on Wednesday 18th November 2009.
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