As a journalist at Computerworld Australia:
When the 1.2 tonne, $149,000 (£60,000) DEUCE II computer was officially opened on September 11 1956, it was heralded as one of the first three computers in Australia and was quickly put to use as what the newspapers of the day called the £50 an hour "super-brain".
The computer, dubbed UTECOM, was built in England, then dismantled and shipped to Australia. Measuring an impressive four metres wide, one metre deep and two metres tall, it took three months to install in a designated room at what was then the NSW University of Technology.
Reflecting on how far computing has come since those days, ex-UTECOM programmer John Webster, now of the Australian Computer Museum Society, reminisces about the past 50 years of computing in Australia and his involvement with "super-brain".
How have you been involved with computing in Australia?
UTECOM [the University of Technology Electronic COMputer] was started in 1956 and I started there in mid-1960 and worked on that until it closed down [and was dismantled] at the end of 1966. IBM and its new System 360/50 replaced it. I'm in the Australian Computer Museum Society and our aim is to preserve whatever we can that's related to the Australian History of computing. We've got a lot of old equipment in our warehouse. Most of the machines they've got at the university here that haven't been thrown out are things we'd like to see preserved.
Other, less tangible aims, is to try, in a couple of years, to get together with the Australian Computer Society to contact the people in Australia who worked with computers then - and they may just have been people behind the desk who used computers -to find where they worked, how they were trained, what they did, what the machines meant for them, what it meant for their families. I think it's fairly important.
We're also trying to judge what the Australian cultural outlook is about computers, and the effect on our lives. They affect almost our mental development, our outlook towards developing products.
How do you think computers have affected Australian society?
Surely it's a type of industrial revolution on its own. There were a number of people who spent their lives doing calculations using little machines: mechanical calculators. All vanished very quickly once computers came. You could do years of work in only a couple of hours, even in the 1950s and 60s. Now, computers are billions of times cheaper and faster too.
What was computing like in the 1950s and 60s?
A lot of the staff at the UTECOM computer were about to leave to go work for Remington Rand and their Univac computer. Our two major engineers on UTECOM went; a couple of other heavies went. I was a first-year student in 1960, trying to become a lecturer in mathematics of all things. About mid-year, they said to me, "How would you like to work on a computer, on the university's computer?" And being a 16-year-old kid - and they owned my scholarship - I thought they meant, "We'd like you to work on our computer". The next question was "What do you know about computers?" and I said, "C-O-M-P-U-T-E-R". That was it.
The following week I was led down to the computer, and essentially I was expected to learn the machine code - the machine instructions that drive the machine. And Ron Smart and [colleagues] had so little time to spare that I was hunting around for someone to help me get more complicated instructions. So I went to the engineers, and they gave me logic diagrams that showed how the bits flow through the machines, to show what happens when they go through addition, subtraction and all that. And by doing that, I learnt the machine instructions so well that within a few months of arriving, we suddenly had a very large clientele. A lot of programming was done in machine language.
It was very exciting.
These days, kids who play games and try to discover cheats, develop smart bits of software - and you could probably include hackers in there - are probably somewhat similar-minded. We have the same style of excitement. I found nothing better than having some two-tonne item sitting on the concrete floor, getting it to do what I want. It gave me a bit of a high. Of course, all I was doing was crunching numbers and re-arranging data.
The Australian Computer Museum Society's booklet on UTECOM mentions that at that time in the 50s, "almost all computers were still women operating calculators". Was this what the industry was like?
I know in the early days of the electrically operated punch-card machines, the use of card drivers - women were probably used for that. I believe women are better typists than men on average, that's just from my personal experience. Women were core computer operators in those days. A lot of women were doing computing - of course the Second World War was important.
One of the guys over in England [whom] I communicated with was upset because when he registered his occupation as "Computer Programmer" following his marriage to one of his co-workers, [the register office for marriages] would not allow that. They put him down as "Production Clerk", because there was no registered job title as computer programmer. Her job title was "Computer", and they allowed that, because they'd heard of a computer, but they hadn't heard of computer programmers. This would have been just after the War.
In those days, someone who was very useful in computing was so valuable, though, of course, they'd have to be skilled as well as trained.
UTECOM was purchased from the UK English Electric Company on September 11, 50 years ago. It was only one day later when the University of Sydney unveiled its first, self-built computer, SILLIAC. What prompted the NSW University of Technology (now the University of NSW) to buy UTECOM, instead of designing and building its own?
I'm sure Rex Vowels, the professor, wanted to build a machine. It happened in later years - we were building our own computers in Electrical Engineering. But I think the problem back in 1954 [when the decision to purchase the computer was made] was that so many big institutions around the world with whom we were kind of in competition already had access to a machine. In Australia we had only CSIRAC; and UTECOM and SILLIAC were many tens of times faster than CSIRAC. Therefore, [if we built a computer] we'd be depending on CSIRAC, then spending many more years building the machine and all the ancillary equipment.
So it was a matter of catching up with other organizations?
It was a matter of joining them.
The most important thing is probably that UTECOM came with a fairly enormous quantity of ready-written software in many scientific, mathematical and engineering fields. And that was a great start.
When UTECOM arrived, the university knew it had to do a lot of lecturing and training, educating people to use the machine. They probably could not have guessed in advance whether it would mean having to write machine instruction programs themselves, or use programs that already existed. If the programs already existed, then people could use them to get a real head start. But they had to wait for other programs to be written - the average person probably couldn't really write them.
I suppose, people who use COBALT and FORTRAN and the like don't have to worry about intricacies of timings within the machine and the placement of information with various storage components in the machine, but then they have to worry about timing dependencies when reading your outputting data to the machine. We had to worry about all that stuff.
What, in your opinion, is the most significant event in the history of computing in Australia?
I can think of two things, really. One is the communications: the ability and universality of communications today and the improving technology permitting such an enormous growth in communications capability. The second, perhaps, is the ability to store an increasingly vast amount of information in smaller and smaller devices.
IBM releasing the 360 range [which replaced UTECOM in 1965] had a dramatic effect worldwide on commercial enterprises, which outnumber all other kinds of organizations.
What would you say are the main hurdles for computing now?
Things are transforming all the time. Some of the disciplines we learned even five years ago are no longer relevant. We have to keep studying. Now, ICT jobs have expanded in number too, so we need to train more people. So many people have to learn to use such a wide variety of software that instead of being able to concentrate in a small field and learn it and work in that field, people are being forced to learn a wider range of topics, which I think is detrimental.
I think there is so much commercial drive behind a lot of developments rather than well-researched scientific style.
I'm starting to wonder whether people will burn out with all the involvement of computing devices in their lives. A lot of people my age are retired and after a few months, they start saying things like, "Thank God I can finally throw away this pager, or mobile phone, and don't have to be a full-time member of a communication society and can stop worrying about work when I'm not in the workplace."
How do you think technology will progress in the future?
I think the likelihood is that we will see increasing diversity of the use of really, really small computing devices. I wouldn't be at all surprised to see a very rational argument for us to have microchips in the next 10 to 15 years. And fields like entertainment may even be drivers for the technology.
These nano-machines and things are going to be a very large part of our lives, probably inside our bodies and not just around it. I can't see why people driving a car couldn't have an honest, innate sensation of what the traffic around it, without having to look.
