CSIRAC

Welcome to the Melbourne Museum, and specifically, to a site of global technological importance: C-S-I-R-A-C, or the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation Automatic Computer. As you look upon these massive,…

Take a close look at the massive racks that make up the body of C-S-I-R-A-C. You are seeing approximately 2,000 vacuum tubes, or 'valves' as they were called in 1949. …

Perhaps the most fascinating part of C-S-I-R-A-C's design is its memory. Today, we take solid-state electronic memory for granted, but in 1949, storing data was a massive hurdle. …

C-S-I-R-A-C holds a 'previously unheralded place of honor' in history: it was likely the first computer in the world to play digital music. In the mid-1950s, long before the famous experiments at Bell Labs in America, Australian…

How did one 'talk' to a computer like C-S-I-R-A-C? There were no keyboards, monitors, or mice. …

One of the most frequent questions visitors ask is: 'Will C-S-I-R-A-C ever run again?' The answer, according to curators like David Demant, is a firm 'no.' This is a classic museum dilemma: 'restoration versus preservation.' To…

As we conclude our look at C-S-I-R-A-C, we must reflect on its creator, Trevor Pearcey, and the bittersweet legacy of this machine. Pearcey was a visionary who understood that computers would change the world, yet he felt that…

Standing here at the end of our tour, it is staggering to think that this seven-ton behemoth, with its 2,000 glowing valves and its circulating mercury sound waves, is the direct ancestor of our modern world. C-S-I-R-A-C was a…