Initiatives
The Pearcey Foundation is actively involved in many initiatives to help promote and accelerate the Australian ICT industry.
The Pearcey Foundation is involved in many projects important to the ICT industry.
Heritage Project - an expansive program to document and capture Australia's ICT heritage including a book, online resources and even a virtual museum.
Pearcey Institute - to perform research and studies relating to the impact of ICT in industry and society. These in-depth examinations are an important input into policy discussions.
Public Policy - Bringing together of fragmented ICT groups through forums and debates to help analyse, formulate and review policies relating to ICT and the digital economy.
CSIRAC - dedicated to the preservation and promotion of CSIRAC, as one of the world's first stored program digital computers and the first computer to play music.
Computing History - small projects that help preserve and promote Australia's computing history and contributions to global technology advancements.
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).
The Pearcey Foundation is actively involved in contributing to thought leadership in ICT issues e.g. economic studies, digital economy benefits.
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).