Connections in the History of Australian Computing - History of Computing: Learning from the Past - page 4

Also there was a substantial equipment display including the CSIRO Differential Ana-
lyser , manual calculators, considerable punched card equipment - and - the CSIRO
Mark 1 Electronic Computer [16].
The computer was heavily used, a high-level language was developed alongside
the world's first computer music program [17]. Trevor wanted to start on Mark 2 and
CSIRO approached Australian industry for commercial support. This was not forth-
coming and CSIRO did not want to fund computer development. After considerable
agonising the Mark 1 was transferred to the University of Melbourne and renamed
CSIRAC in 1956. There it provided a successful service until 1964 [18].
CSIRAC was preserved by Museum Victoria, it received Heritage Status in 2009,
and is believed to be the only intact first generation computer [19].
5 John Ovenstone and WREDAC
Immediately after WW2, and in the shadow of German terror weapons, Britain and
Australia agreed to develop rocket technology at a munitions factory north of Ade-
laide. A corridor was allocated from there stretching 1,800 km north-west to the ocean
near Broome in WA, and this test range was christened Woomera [20].
As the Long Range Weapons Establishment (LRWE) installed tracking cameras,
radar, recording equipment and started rocket test firings from 1949, it quickly be-
came obvious that their room full of girls with desk calculators took too long to proc-
ess the flight data. They knew of Trevor Pearcey's work and sent a group to the 1951
computer conference. Shortly after that they started building a copy of the CSIRO
Mark 1 as the LRWE Electronic Digital Automatic Computer , or LEDAC [21].
Management had a change of heart, cancelled LEDAC , and directed LRWE to pur-
chase a Ferranti Mark 1 . However, the Ferranti machine wasn't ready, availability
kept slipping and its price kept rising.
Also in 1951 LRWE hired a brilliant maths graduate, John Allen-Ovenstone, and
sent him to Cambridge to do a doctorate under Douglas Hartree. John had used the
CSIRO computer and reached Cambridge shortly after their first computer, EDSAC 7 ,
came into operation. When he returned late in 1953 nothing had changed, and he
wrote a detailed specification for the computer that LRWE needed [22].
John visited the UK and found Ferranti's PEGASUS too complicated, and English
Electric's DEUCE wasn't ready, but Elliotts was willing to build a special version of
their 400 series. Their internal “odd jobs” code, “403”, became LRWE's computer.
Initially called “Cobber”, then the Elliott 403 , and following LRWE's name change to
the Weapons Research Establishment (WRE), it was WREDAC . The CPU was
shipped in mid 1955 and the output processor some months later. By late 1956 WRE-
DAC was working well [23].
John Ovenstone managed WREDAC but he saw a much bigger picture. He organ-
ised a week long computer conference in June 1957 at WRE. There were 25 papers on
programming, 23 on engineering, and from John's vision: 15 on business applica-
tions. There were demonstrations of WREDAC and their analogue computer, Elliotts'
7 Electronic Delay Storage Automatic Calculator largely based on von Neumann's work [13].