History of Computers - CSIRAC

CSIRAC, which stands for Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization Automatic Computer, is Australia's first digital programmable computer but also the world's first computer to create digital music. It is also the fourth stored program computer in the world. It is the only surviving intact first generation computer in the world. It was designed and built by a team led by Trevor Pearcey and Maston Beard between 1947 and 1949.[1]

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Overview

The CSIRAC is comprised of nine metal cabinets, a hard disk drive, a control console, input and output devices, racks, a printer, storage delay lines, an offline-paper tape editing area, and paper tape readers and punches. [3] It was composed of 2000 vacuum tubes and was entirely serial. [4] Being Australia's first computer, the CSIRAC was used to do most everything, having applications from designing skyscrapers to analyzing river flow.[5]

Significance

Before the CSIRAC, Australians had to use a hand-cranked or mechanical calculating machine to do mathematical calculations that could only do one operation per second, as compared to the CSIRAC which could 1000 operations per second. [6] Thus, the CSIRAC greatly increased computing power in Australia. This new computational power was used for various applications in the real world. Additionally, it serves as a huge milestone in its creating of digital music. It sparked a revolution in the way computers could be used in showing the possibility of rich musical capabilities.