Connections in the History of Australian Computing - History of Computing: Learning from the Past - page 7

for their exclusive use. ADA was ceremonially opened in March 1958 - but its life was
short. Its memory was a CSIRO built magnetic drum:
“One afternoon tea [early in 1961 [38]] there was a mighty crash and the drum
was essentially destroyed - a piece of lint had lodged under a head and dug a
great channel. ADA was done for.” [39]
9 David Wong's SNOCOM
During the development of ADA one of Sydney Uni's graduate students, David
Wong, was given the task of determining what the Snowy Mountains Hydro-electric
Authority (SMHA) really wanted to do, and what ADA-2 should be capable of. David
concluded that while ADA had 60 integrators, the full problem would require 400.
Also, the SMHA had many non-differential computing jobs, and he showed that while
these could be expressed in differential form, it was complicated. David went one step
further and programmed a representative differential problem on Sydney University's
digital computer SILLIAC . His conclusion that a general-purpose computer would do,
plus its specification, earned his Master's degree, and a PhD project - to build it [40].
There were some constraints on the project: little money, little time, and little help.
Then, in early 1957, the design of a small commercial US computer, the LGP-30 , was
published by its designer, Stanley Frankel [41]. The Librascope General Purpose
computer used valve logic and a drum memory and was surprisingly similar, in a gen-
eral way, to ADA . David, with Murray Allen, set about expanding the LGP-30's
description to a design they could build with the modules developed for ADA [42].
A simulator for the Snowy Computer - SNOCOM - was written on SILLIAC [43]
and software development started. Much was done through a 500 km teleprinter link
from SMHA headquarters in Cooma!
SNOCOM was delivered to SMHA at Cooma in August 1960. By 1962, 50 pro-
grammers kept SNOCOM busy for two shifts a day, and it was augmented by an
Elliott computer. In 1967 SNOCOM was retired to student work at Sydney Uni, then
presented to the Powerhouse Museum [44].
10 Murray Allen, Trevor Pearcey and CIRRUS
Following the transfer of CSIRAC to the University of Melbourne a very disappointed
Trevor Pearcey returned to the UK Radar Research Establishment (RRE) late in
1957. Their fast, and largely secret, vacuum-tube computer TREAC had been operat-
ing since 1953 and Trevor worked on compilers and a subroutine library stored in
read-only ferrite-rod memory. He also had contact with Maurice Wilkes and the brand
new EDSAC 2 at Cambridge. This also had read-only memory, here used to control
instruction execution - it was the first microprogrammed computer [45, 46].
In 1959 Trevor returned to Australia and joined the CSIRAC Laboratory in
Melbourne. At the same time Murray Allen left Sydney University and joined the
University of Adelaide to establish their computer department. Murray got his staff
and students thinking about a big computer project and he talked to Trevor and the
Weapons Research computing team. Their initial goal was to produce a cheap,