Connections in the History of Australian Computing - History of Computing: Learning from the Past - page 6

When SILLIAC was finally turned off in 1968, parts were given to a variety of
people, including 14 schoolchildren who wrote in asking for mementos [32].
John Bennett continued lecturing, supporting computing as a profession and, with
Trevor Pearcey, founded the Australian Computer Society.
7 UTECOM
At the same time as SILLIAC was being built, Sydney's other university, the New
South Wales University of Technology, received a large grant from the state govern-
ment to study nuclear power. The new head of Electrical Engineering, Rex Vowels,
proposed purchasing a computer to support multiple disciplines [33]. Government
policy meant the purchase had to be British, and in 1954 that meant a Ferranti Mark 1 ,
Lyons LEO 1 or English Electric DEUCE . They felt that the DEUCE , derived from
Alan Turing's ACE design, was the most advanced and ordered the University of
Technology Electronic Computer , ie UTECOM . This was shipped from the UK in mid
1956 and it was used from September [34].
Work on UTECOM paralleled SILLIAC with intense student, research and com-
mercial activity. An early user was Professor of Philosophy (and ex radar engineer)
Charles Hamblin. At the 1957 computer conference he presented a somewhat ab
struse maths method “Reverse Polish Notation” and showed how this simplified pro-
gramming and even hardware design. English Electric engineers at the conference
understood the significance and their next major machine, the KDF9 , used its push-
down/pop-up stack memory extensively [35].
UTECOM went through two rounds of upgrades and its owner changed its name to the
University of NSW before it was replaced by an IBM 360 in 1966, and mostly scrapped.
8 Murray Allen's ADA
In 1949 the Australian government started the Snowy Mountains Hydro-electricity
project. This required an unprecedented level of engineering design and, specifically,
mathematical modeling of the overall system. A first attempt at this by manual calcu-
lation had taken “many man-years”, and they needed to do a whole series [36].
The Snowy folk approached David Myers at the CSIRO Section for Mathematical
Instruments (SMI) and found that they already had a project underway that seemed a
good match. The SMI had a brilliant young engineering graduate, Murray Allen, who
was developing a new computer as his PhD project. This used a new electronic de-
vice, the transistor, which promised speed, reliability, heat, and size advantages over
vacuum-tube technology. Murray's project was to rework the US Bendix D-12 Differ-
ential Analyser design using transistors. 10 This was electronic, digital, programmable
and automatic - it was ADA , the Automatic Differential Analyser [37].
Construction started in 1956 when reliable transistors became commercially avail-
able. 11 Adolph Basser contributed funding and the Snowy Authority wanted ADA-2
10 The D-12 was based on Northrop's 1950 Magnetic Drum Digital Differential Analyzer
(MADDIDA).
11 Philco surface-barrier germanium transistors.