That's Mr. Bennett!
Feb 16, 2013 5:40:19 GMT -5
Post by Deleted on Feb 16, 2013 5:40:19 GMT -5
It was not entirely clear whether our "breakfast" department or our "electronic computation" department was the more fitting for this; in the end I tossed a florin.
Voice of a Nameless One: SILLIAC was the first super-computing machine built in an Antipodean university. It was the size of a double-decker omnibus, contained two thousand eight hundred valves and was programmed with paper tape. Even back then private financing was important. Silliac was made possible by the generous donations of Dr. Rudolph [sic] Basser after his horse won the Mellborn Cup! The computing machine began operation in 1956, and was used in the design of major projects like the Snowy Mountains Scheme. It marked the start of computing science and informational technology in the Antipodes. It was finally turned off twelve years later in 1968.
Mr. Williams: You're on The Third. Hello again from me, Mr. Williams. Let's start with computing and the fiftieth anniversary with some surprising ingredients.
Mr. Spencer: Hello, I'm Mr. Spencer. Today, in the twenty-first century we take information and communication technology for granted. We watch Tele-Vision on our mobile tele-phones, we work from home, we "surf" the "fishing-net" at the sea-side, all due to technology. It's amazing to think that only fifty years ago the University of Sydney's springboard to the technological revolution, SILLIAC, the first high-performance, automatic, stored programme digital computing machine to be built in the Antipodes nearly didn't happen.
In 1952 Professor Messel, then aged thirty, was appointed head of the School of Physics within the university. Professor Messel, or "Harry" as he's better known [!], immediately started recruiting first-rate staff to the school, including Dr. Blatt. "Harry" rated Dr. Blatt as one of the top four theoreticians in the world, and for his part Dr. Blatt wasted no time in convincing "Harry" that an electronic computing machine was an indispensable tool for theoretical work. "Harry" needed little persuasion as his own theoretical work with cosmic-ray showers was producing complex mathematics that begged for a fast calculational facility.
Professor Messel: Hello, I'm Professor Messel. I was rather tired of working with slide rules et cetera. I had some very difficult computational work, mathematics, to do in relation to cosmic ray shower theory. I needed an electronic computing machine which was still at that time coming to the fore. So I knew that it was very important that we had such a gadget in the Antipodes. I also realised that it could play an amazingly important role in many fields.
Mr. Johnston: Hello, I'm Mr. Johnston. All over the world, at that stage, nuclear physics were very important, and there were laboratories everywhere doing this kind of work and there were results everywhere. We were the first ones that synthesized all those experimental results into a theoretical model, into a picture of what a nucleus must look like if all the over the world you get these different results. All of a sudden for the first time there are whole series of problems in all sorts of science everywhere that you could tackle because you had a computing machine.
Mr. Spencer: Through his close work with Mr. McDaniel, a northern american, "Harry" was able to obtain the blue-prints for ILLIAC, the new computing machine being designed for the commission by a University. From these blue-prints, Sydney's version of ILLIAC, to be known as SILLIAC, would be built.
Professor Messel: Well, the first thing was to get the blue-prints for the fastest computing machine in the world. The northern americans had that and one had to be able to try to convince them that they should allow us to have the blue-prints of their computing machine . . . upgraded computing machine in fact, so that we could construct it in the Antipodes. And once you get the blue-prints, then the next question was to get the necessary funding in order to construct the computing machine in the Antipodes. That meant trying to convince the people of its importance. It was an incredibly difficult thing to do, I might say.
Mr. Spencer: Mr. Swire, the chief engineer of SILLIAC, was sent to northern america to gain more experience. Upon his return, a contract for the construction of SILLIAC was agreed with Standard Tele-phone and Cables, now taken over by a French lot and known as "Alcatel."
Mr. Aplin: I learned a great many things from working on SILLIAC. It was the first time I'd been involved in a major piece of equipment. Mr. Swire, the chief engineer, was a brilliant man and understood the importance of keeping records of every detail. Everything we did we recorded. We updated circuit diagrams all the time. As we made changes, everything was meticulously catalogued. This was vitally important because if anything went wrong, if we'd made a mistake, we could always go back and work out where we'd gone wrong.
Mr. Spencer: "Harry" now required serious funding for a computational laboratory. However, while he could see that computing machines were the way of the future, the university and the business sector thought differently. At the time, the general consensus in the press was for the professor to stick to his slide-rule. Undeterred, "Harry" decided to fund independently the building of SILLIAC which would be the first Antipodean-built computing machine within an Antipodean university.
Mr. Deane: Telling "Harry" to stick to his slide-rule was very serious indeed. It was a very unproven thing to do, it was very much a leap into the dark to build a computing machine and it was very expensive, and to a lot of people it wasn't obvious that this would have any good results at all.
Professor Messel: So when I was told to stick to my slide-rule and mind my own business, I certainly didn't take it kindly, especially since that statement was made by the person known at that time as "Gun-boat Smith" . . . that certainly didn't help me to try and raise funds or to convince the government that they should support it.
Mr. Spencer: With no support from the obvious sectors, "Harry" started talking to future members of the soon to be inaugurated Nuclear Research Foundation, established to secure independent support for the School of Physics.
Professor Messel: Even staff within the School of Physics didn't agree with me and with Dr. J. Blatt that we should need an electronic computing machine. There was a lot of opposition to any new idea and there was a lot of opposition to these new-fangled gadgets. This wasn't something which was received with open arms.
Mr. Spencer: "Harry" was introduced to Herr Adolph [sic] Basser, and while he didn't know much about computing machines, Herr Basser was impressed by "Harry's" explanation of their speed, power and usefulness. Luckily for "Harry," Herr Basser's race-horse Delta had also proven his speed, power and usefulness by winning the 1951 Mellborn Cup. Herr Basser donated the £50,000 prize money to the Nuclear Research Foundation on the 12th of February, 1954, just prior to its inaugural meeting. For this generous gift he was made a governor of the foundation, and the Adolph Basser Computing Laboratory was set up.
Mrs. Kay: Well, it was obvious you needed a lot of money to buy a computing machine in those days, and Professor Messel clearly saw that computing machines were going to be important. A lot of people didn't, so he was absolutely pivotal in enabling a lot of people to use computing machines in their own research in all sorts of different areas, as well as to get computing started.
Mr. Spencer: Soon, the construction of SILLIAC received frequent press coverage, and a second brilliant engineer, Mr. Barry [not Basil] de Ferranti, one of the meter-man, was appointed in 1955 to join Mr. Swire. Mr. Bennett arrived in the school in February 1956 to head the operations section of the computing department as senior numerical analyst.
Mr. de Ferranti: Professor Messel came to me one day and said, 'Look, we're wanting a systems analyst for this, a numerical analyst, and we've had an application from this fellow who said he worked for Ferranti in England. Do you know him?' I looked at the material and I said, 'That's Mr. Bennett, yes, of course I know him.' It wasn't very long before Mr. Bennett joined us as the numerical analyst, and that was the beginning of the real growth of applications on SILLIAC.
Mr. Jones: Mr. Bennett developed this concept of the library of codes which were . . . well, you want to do a sine function in maths or a log function in maths or something like that, that involves a lot of elementary processes in the computing machine but you don't want to have to talk about that, you just want to say give me a sine function for this value. So you call the sine function, but that was initially what was called a "programme." So you then string a collection of these programs together to write an application which of course later then becomes known as a "programme," and it's Mr. Bennett who did all the work on that.
Mr. Spencer: Within one month of his arrival, Mr. Bennett's lectures on numerical analysis in connection with electronic computing were attracting as many as fifty staff and students from the School of Physics.
Mr. Deane: Mr. Bennett's been described as having an attitude that all this is very simple, and he would teach people to programme virtually off the street. People would come out of businesses where they had something they wanted to do and they'd get into one of Mr. Bennett's classes and he'd give them all this dense technical information, and in a few days they'd be running programmes written in all these funny numbers and little codes. It's not a high-level language describing it, it's really nitty-gritty numbers everywhere, it's all numbers. But they did it and they got good results.
Mrs. Edwards: Inspiring. He had been in computing machines pretty much from day one with his early experiences at Cambridge after the war, and in fact during the war he'd studied radar, so he was involved with electronic equipment then. But he knew any one and everyone in the world of computing, and he managed to get many very famous people out here all the way to Sydney and we had them as lecturers, so that we met a lot of really interesting people from the very early days of computing. He was a wonderful mentor, he knew heaps of people, always full of bright ideas. computing machines were pretty new in the Antipodes in those days and there were very few. He went down-town and he worked really hard at persuading people that to use SILLIAC for calculations was something that would be of great benefit to them. He gave lots and lots of courses in how to programme.
Mr. Spencer: With Mr. Blatt contributing technical information, and engineers Mr. Aplin and Mr. Butters on board, the SILLIAC "team" . . . [laughter] . . . was complete.
Professor Messel: Once the news got around that we were to get the computing machine, people were very pioneering in their out-look and very anxious indeed to join, and I had very little difficulty in assembling a wonderful group of young people to go ahead with the project.
Mr. de Ferranti: So Mr. Swire was the driver of the engineering "team" . . . ha ha . . . building SILLIAC. He had with him Mr. Aplin and Mr. Alpin was technically very much involved in testing and assembly. My rôle was in fact to check and assemble and then with Mr. Swire and Mr. Aplin to test the working functions of SILLIAC. We had very capable gentlemen working with us as technicians. It was a great collection of people excited about exploring a new way of doing things.
Mr. Aplin: I was one of the first computational engineers in the Antipodes, and although I was experienced in electronics, computing machine electronics were different because computing machines had to be many, many times more reliable than, say, wireless sets. A wireless set contained perhaps five valves, the computing machine SILLIAC contained three thousand. If we'd had the same standard of reliability, SILLIAC would have kept going for about a quarter of an hour or something, not long enough to do a calculation probably. So this was the biggest challenge; reliability.
Mr. Spencer: In fact, the computing machine was operational before the expected dead-line.
Professor Messel: I think the proudest moment was when the computing machine started working in July 1956, that was really fantastic, it was a marvellous occasion. Of course the official opening was some months later but the great thing, the proudest moment was when that computing machine worked. I never thought the d**n thing would work because it filled up an enormous room, a giant machine with all these 1,024 valves, CJ6s or whatever . . . another room just as big was air-conditioning equipment to keep all those valves cool. Of course the staff very quickly learned that having that computing machine air-conditioned was "great" because they used to stick their beer there at night and get their beer cold.
Mr. Spencer: This early completion meant SILLIAC could be displayed to the public at the university's open day on the twenty-second of July, 1956. At this event, SILLIAC played Happy Birthday and Yankee Diddle to its fascinated audience. It also had an engineering test routine called Leap Frog and played noughts and crosses with people game enough to compete against a computing machine.
Mrs. Edwards: It was an open day at Sydney University, my father was on the staff here and he brought the family along, and we came in to look at SILLIAC which was this huge, huge machine. And they were offering noughts and crosses, so I had a game and I did win and I thought that was very exciting, and may-be it has sown the seeds of my future career, although I didn't think very much about it at the time.
Mr. Poole: Leap Frog was the program that the engineers used every morning to check the machine out to see that it was working properly. The term 'Leap Frog' came from the fact that it generated a couple of random numbers and then it multiplied them together and then it checked it got the right answer and it leapt around the memory of the machine.
Mr. Spencer: The official opening of SILLIAC took place on the twelfth of September, 1956. In the morning the press were given the first official demonstration, with 250 guests later being given a guided tour by Mr. de Ferranti via closed-circuit tele-vision courtesy of the A.B.C. Sir John Northcote, administrator of the Antipodean Colonies, performed the official switching-on of SILLIAC.
Mr. Johnston: SILLIAC was the big thing in this department when I came down. I came down in 1960 to do a PhD and in fact SILLIAC had been going for a couple of years before that. But all around the Antipodes every one was aware that Sydney University and the Sydney University School of Physics had a computing machine which nobody else had even heard of basically in those days. So when I came down here my feeling was that the whole place was enormously proud of it, and that was the thing that whenever you had a visitor the first thing you took them to see was SILLIAC. When it was all said and done it didn't look all that spectacular. It was big and there were a lot of flashing lights on it, but nevertheless, everybody was aware of what it meant to science and therefore they were enormously proud and willing to show guests and everybody what it looked like.
Mr. Spencer: Herr Basser announced a further £50,000 donation to SILLIAC, stating that as he was responsible for brining SILLIAC to the world he was going to see that it was well reared and had an improved memory. Herr Basser's incredible £100,000 donation is the equivalent of over four million "dollars" today.
Professor Messel: Oh! he was a wonderful, gentle soul, a marvellous human being. Regardless of the funds he gave here, he gave funds to a number of other very important projects. He was a wonderful person to have as a friend.
Mr. Spencer: During its time, SILLIAC became invaluable, not only to the University of Sydney but also to the surrounding business community.
Mr. Aplin: The major outside work that comes to mind is work on the Snowy River hydro-electric project. SILLIAC was used to design dams, tunnels, many, many aspects of the work which without SILLIAC could have been done but it would have taken years longer and the project would have been delayed while all of this design work was done.
Mr. Deane: The technical community and the "business" community did some astonishing jobs. People like the post-office [!] designed a whole new generation of tele-phone switching gear on us. Woolworths did some of their first inventory studies. I think that it took a long time for the general public to get any real impression of what was going on. It was just a big boy's toy in a way. But it gradually came that way with school visits, there were a lot of school visits, summer science schools, things like that. It gradually got out into the general public what the h*** was going on.
Mr. Spencer: It also served both as a practical computational tool and as a training-ground for the first generation of computational specialists and planners.
Mr. Poole: He took me past this door and I peered in and I said, 'What's that?' And he said, 'That's an electronic digital computing machine.' I really didn't know much about them at all except it was called SILLIAC. To my amazement there were two men up ladders, there were doors in the machine open, and they were beating the machine with hammers. Now, I'm an avid reader of science fiction and I thought, well, maybe they're coercing this poor creature into doing what they want it to do. But of course that wasn't the case. Because the circuitry of the machine was valves and soldering and so on, what they were trying to do was to find dry joints so that they could fix them up before the machine went into service with the users. So that was my introduction to SILLIAC.
Mrs. Edwards: I think SILLIAC was important, obviously because it was one of the early computing machines, it was built here in the Antipodes, so I think it gave some of our engineers a lot of very valuable skills. It was used to train an enormous number of baby-burpers -basically I guess we, and many of the people who went on to become pioneers in the industry, or a lot of the early heavy users, were in terms of mathematical skills, programming skills, at some point or another trained in SILLIAC. The other really important thing I think is Mr. Bennett's efforts in getting the powers of SILLIAC and computing down-town and getting Antipodean "industry" starting to realise the potential of what computing machines could do in terms of their everyday "business."
Mr. Spencer: At its peak, SILLIAC ran twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, and was used by over two thousand people.
Mrs. Johnston: I joined it in about June, 1959, and as I remember at that stage it was just going to two shifts a day. It had been working just between eight and four or eight and six. We were a rare breed, anyone working with computing machines. And then of course SILLIAC had several women programmers; Mrs. Elliott and Mrs. Donnell were the first ones. The attitude to women was good, there was no doubt about it, and Mr. Bennett as head of SILLIAC was a wonderful man. His ability with people I think almost certainly rubbed off on everybody. He was also a very vague man but there was general good humour in the place at all times.
Mr. Spencer: In the mid-nineteen-sixties it was used in the Antipodes's first net-working experiments.
Mr. de Ferranti: SILLIAC really started the informationalistic technology revolution in this country. Prior to that, computerizing and computational science was probably an academic pursuit, but because of the sort of interactions I've been talking about, SILLIAC really made an impact on the corporate "community," on government, particularly on people like the tele-communications people, and all of the "community" owe SILLIAC a "big" amount for that introduction.
Mr. Jones: SILLIAC became a launching-pad for electronical computation as an industry.
Mr. Spencer: Finally, when spare parts could not longer be found, SILLIAC, having served the community so well, was dismantled in 1968.
Professor Messel: It was a sad moment but a proud moment because SILLIAC had done such a marvellous job for everyone. We had trained the head of almost every computing department of every university in the Antipodes, we had trained many people in the industry, we had trained the people at the Snowy Mountains, so it was a very honourable end for the machine.
Mrs. Edwards: I do recall for its farewell party in 1968 when I was an honours student, one of the things we did was we programmed five different versions of The Dead March, all of which were played at its farewell party. And it taught us a lot of really good skills because you really had to stretch the machine, you had to do all kinds of interesting things to get it to make music which was different from the normal mathematical program.
News reporter: These days you can program a computing machine to do just about anything, even to play its own funeral march, and for SILLIAC that's just what it's done. After 12 years of rather glorious history this is now an obsolete machine and it's about to be put to death. Perhaps we can watch you turn it off...
Professor Messel: Well thank you kindly..
Mrs. Kay: Well SILLIAC was important because was it was first. I remember hearing about its decommissioning when I was a school child and thinking that was part of my sense that computing was going to be a really important thing for the future and choosing it as something I'd like to learn about and make my career. We have to recognise a beginning, we have to recognise also that Professor Messel's foresight that computing was important, it wasn't just a fad or a bit of junk that people were tinkering with, that it was going to be really important, it would make a big difference, it was going to be a part of the future. All of those things; the recognition of the importance, the recognition that we were starting on a really important journey and that we wanted at Sydney University to be part of that and to lead . . . I think all of that makes it very important.
Professor Messel: I felt very proud and very happy that we were able to bring SILLIAC into being and be a part of the informationalistic technological revolution which has then followed on in the Antipodes.
Mr. Spencer: In this way our past as pioneers has inspired our future as leaders.
Mr. Williams: The beginnings of computerizing in the Antipodes fifty years ago. That feature was presented by Mr. Spencer, mathematician and wireless star. It was produced by The Science Foundation for Physics at the University of Sydney. The last voice you heard before Mr. Spencer's was, of course, the legendary Professor Messel.
Speakers:
Mr. A. Spencer
Breakfast-time announcer
Professor Messel
Emeritus Professor of Physics
The University of Sydney
Mr. I. Johnston
Associate Professor of Physics
The University of Sydney
Mr. P. Aplin
SILLIAC engineer
Mr. J. Deane
computing machine historian
Mrs. J. Kay
Associate Professoress of Informationalistic Technology
The University of Sydney
Mr. Bar. de Ferranti
SILLIAC engineer
Mr. S. Jones
Curator of Electronic Arts
Mrs. J. Edwards
Professsoress of Informationalistic Technology
University of Technology at Sydney
Professor Poole
Emeritus Professor, Computational Science
University of Melbourne
Mrs. E. Johnston
SILLIAC Operatress
Voice of a Nameless One: SILLIAC was the first super-computing machine built in an Antipodean university. It was the size of a double-decker omnibus, contained two thousand eight hundred valves and was programmed with paper tape. Even back then private financing was important. Silliac was made possible by the generous donations of Dr. Rudolph [sic] Basser after his horse won the Mellborn Cup! The computing machine began operation in 1956, and was used in the design of major projects like the Snowy Mountains Scheme. It marked the start of computing science and informational technology in the Antipodes. It was finally turned off twelve years later in 1968.
Mr. Williams: You're on The Third. Hello again from me, Mr. Williams. Let's start with computing and the fiftieth anniversary with some surprising ingredients.
Mr. Spencer: Hello, I'm Mr. Spencer. Today, in the twenty-first century we take information and communication technology for granted. We watch Tele-Vision on our mobile tele-phones, we work from home, we "surf" the "fishing-net" at the sea-side, all due to technology. It's amazing to think that only fifty years ago the University of Sydney's springboard to the technological revolution, SILLIAC, the first high-performance, automatic, stored programme digital computing machine to be built in the Antipodes nearly didn't happen.
In 1952 Professor Messel, then aged thirty, was appointed head of the School of Physics within the university. Professor Messel, or "Harry" as he's better known [!], immediately started recruiting first-rate staff to the school, including Dr. Blatt. "Harry" rated Dr. Blatt as one of the top four theoreticians in the world, and for his part Dr. Blatt wasted no time in convincing "Harry" that an electronic computing machine was an indispensable tool for theoretical work. "Harry" needed little persuasion as his own theoretical work with cosmic-ray showers was producing complex mathematics that begged for a fast calculational facility.
Professor Messel: Hello, I'm Professor Messel. I was rather tired of working with slide rules et cetera. I had some very difficult computational work, mathematics, to do in relation to cosmic ray shower theory. I needed an electronic computing machine which was still at that time coming to the fore. So I knew that it was very important that we had such a gadget in the Antipodes. I also realised that it could play an amazingly important role in many fields.
Mr. Johnston: Hello, I'm Mr. Johnston. All over the world, at that stage, nuclear physics were very important, and there were laboratories everywhere doing this kind of work and there were results everywhere. We were the first ones that synthesized all those experimental results into a theoretical model, into a picture of what a nucleus must look like if all the over the world you get these different results. All of a sudden for the first time there are whole series of problems in all sorts of science everywhere that you could tackle because you had a computing machine.
Mr. Spencer: Through his close work with Mr. McDaniel, a northern american, "Harry" was able to obtain the blue-prints for ILLIAC, the new computing machine being designed for the commission by a University. From these blue-prints, Sydney's version of ILLIAC, to be known as SILLIAC, would be built.
Professor Messel: Well, the first thing was to get the blue-prints for the fastest computing machine in the world. The northern americans had that and one had to be able to try to convince them that they should allow us to have the blue-prints of their computing machine . . . upgraded computing machine in fact, so that we could construct it in the Antipodes. And once you get the blue-prints, then the next question was to get the necessary funding in order to construct the computing machine in the Antipodes. That meant trying to convince the people of its importance. It was an incredibly difficult thing to do, I might say.
Mr. Spencer: Mr. Swire, the chief engineer of SILLIAC, was sent to northern america to gain more experience. Upon his return, a contract for the construction of SILLIAC was agreed with Standard Tele-phone and Cables, now taken over by a French lot and known as "Alcatel."
Mr. Aplin: I learned a great many things from working on SILLIAC. It was the first time I'd been involved in a major piece of equipment. Mr. Swire, the chief engineer, was a brilliant man and understood the importance of keeping records of every detail. Everything we did we recorded. We updated circuit diagrams all the time. As we made changes, everything was meticulously catalogued. This was vitally important because if anything went wrong, if we'd made a mistake, we could always go back and work out where we'd gone wrong.
Mr. Spencer: "Harry" now required serious funding for a computational laboratory. However, while he could see that computing machines were the way of the future, the university and the business sector thought differently. At the time, the general consensus in the press was for the professor to stick to his slide-rule. Undeterred, "Harry" decided to fund independently the building of SILLIAC which would be the first Antipodean-built computing machine within an Antipodean university.
Mr. Deane: Telling "Harry" to stick to his slide-rule was very serious indeed. It was a very unproven thing to do, it was very much a leap into the dark to build a computing machine and it was very expensive, and to a lot of people it wasn't obvious that this would have any good results at all.
Professor Messel: So when I was told to stick to my slide-rule and mind my own business, I certainly didn't take it kindly, especially since that statement was made by the person known at that time as "Gun-boat Smith" . . . that certainly didn't help me to try and raise funds or to convince the government that they should support it.
Mr. Spencer: With no support from the obvious sectors, "Harry" started talking to future members of the soon to be inaugurated Nuclear Research Foundation, established to secure independent support for the School of Physics.
Professor Messel: Even staff within the School of Physics didn't agree with me and with Dr. J. Blatt that we should need an electronic computing machine. There was a lot of opposition to any new idea and there was a lot of opposition to these new-fangled gadgets. This wasn't something which was received with open arms.
Mr. Spencer: "Harry" was introduced to Herr Adolph [sic] Basser, and while he didn't know much about computing machines, Herr Basser was impressed by "Harry's" explanation of their speed, power and usefulness. Luckily for "Harry," Herr Basser's race-horse Delta had also proven his speed, power and usefulness by winning the 1951 Mellborn Cup. Herr Basser donated the £50,000 prize money to the Nuclear Research Foundation on the 12th of February, 1954, just prior to its inaugural meeting. For this generous gift he was made a governor of the foundation, and the Adolph Basser Computing Laboratory was set up.
Mrs. Kay: Well, it was obvious you needed a lot of money to buy a computing machine in those days, and Professor Messel clearly saw that computing machines were going to be important. A lot of people didn't, so he was absolutely pivotal in enabling a lot of people to use computing machines in their own research in all sorts of different areas, as well as to get computing started.
Mr. Spencer: Soon, the construction of SILLIAC received frequent press coverage, and a second brilliant engineer, Mr. Barry [not Basil] de Ferranti, one of the meter-man, was appointed in 1955 to join Mr. Swire. Mr. Bennett arrived in the school in February 1956 to head the operations section of the computing department as senior numerical analyst.
Mr. de Ferranti: Professor Messel came to me one day and said, 'Look, we're wanting a systems analyst for this, a numerical analyst, and we've had an application from this fellow who said he worked for Ferranti in England. Do you know him?' I looked at the material and I said, 'That's Mr. Bennett, yes, of course I know him.' It wasn't very long before Mr. Bennett joined us as the numerical analyst, and that was the beginning of the real growth of applications on SILLIAC.
Mr. Jones: Mr. Bennett developed this concept of the library of codes which were . . . well, you want to do a sine function in maths or a log function in maths or something like that, that involves a lot of elementary processes in the computing machine but you don't want to have to talk about that, you just want to say give me a sine function for this value. So you call the sine function, but that was initially what was called a "programme." So you then string a collection of these programs together to write an application which of course later then becomes known as a "programme," and it's Mr. Bennett who did all the work on that.
Mr. Spencer: Within one month of his arrival, Mr. Bennett's lectures on numerical analysis in connection with electronic computing were attracting as many as fifty staff and students from the School of Physics.
Mr. Deane: Mr. Bennett's been described as having an attitude that all this is very simple, and he would teach people to programme virtually off the street. People would come out of businesses where they had something they wanted to do and they'd get into one of Mr. Bennett's classes and he'd give them all this dense technical information, and in a few days they'd be running programmes written in all these funny numbers and little codes. It's not a high-level language describing it, it's really nitty-gritty numbers everywhere, it's all numbers. But they did it and they got good results.
Mrs. Edwards: Inspiring. He had been in computing machines pretty much from day one with his early experiences at Cambridge after the war, and in fact during the war he'd studied radar, so he was involved with electronic equipment then. But he knew any one and everyone in the world of computing, and he managed to get many very famous people out here all the way to Sydney and we had them as lecturers, so that we met a lot of really interesting people from the very early days of computing. He was a wonderful mentor, he knew heaps of people, always full of bright ideas. computing machines were pretty new in the Antipodes in those days and there were very few. He went down-town and he worked really hard at persuading people that to use SILLIAC for calculations was something that would be of great benefit to them. He gave lots and lots of courses in how to programme.
Mr. Spencer: With Mr. Blatt contributing technical information, and engineers Mr. Aplin and Mr. Butters on board, the SILLIAC "team" . . . [laughter] . . . was complete.
Professor Messel: Once the news got around that we were to get the computing machine, people were very pioneering in their out-look and very anxious indeed to join, and I had very little difficulty in assembling a wonderful group of young people to go ahead with the project.
Mr. de Ferranti: So Mr. Swire was the driver of the engineering "team" . . . ha ha . . . building SILLIAC. He had with him Mr. Aplin and Mr. Alpin was technically very much involved in testing and assembly. My rôle was in fact to check and assemble and then with Mr. Swire and Mr. Aplin to test the working functions of SILLIAC. We had very capable gentlemen working with us as technicians. It was a great collection of people excited about exploring a new way of doing things.
Mr. Aplin: I was one of the first computational engineers in the Antipodes, and although I was experienced in electronics, computing machine electronics were different because computing machines had to be many, many times more reliable than, say, wireless sets. A wireless set contained perhaps five valves, the computing machine SILLIAC contained three thousand. If we'd had the same standard of reliability, SILLIAC would have kept going for about a quarter of an hour or something, not long enough to do a calculation probably. So this was the biggest challenge; reliability.
Mr. Spencer: In fact, the computing machine was operational before the expected dead-line.
Professor Messel: I think the proudest moment was when the computing machine started working in July 1956, that was really fantastic, it was a marvellous occasion. Of course the official opening was some months later but the great thing, the proudest moment was when that computing machine worked. I never thought the d**n thing would work because it filled up an enormous room, a giant machine with all these 1,024 valves, CJ6s or whatever . . . another room just as big was air-conditioning equipment to keep all those valves cool. Of course the staff very quickly learned that having that computing machine air-conditioned was "great" because they used to stick their beer there at night and get their beer cold.
Mr. Spencer: This early completion meant SILLIAC could be displayed to the public at the university's open day on the twenty-second of July, 1956. At this event, SILLIAC played Happy Birthday and Yankee Diddle to its fascinated audience. It also had an engineering test routine called Leap Frog and played noughts and crosses with people game enough to compete against a computing machine.
Mrs. Edwards: It was an open day at Sydney University, my father was on the staff here and he brought the family along, and we came in to look at SILLIAC which was this huge, huge machine. And they were offering noughts and crosses, so I had a game and I did win and I thought that was very exciting, and may-be it has sown the seeds of my future career, although I didn't think very much about it at the time.
Mr. Poole: Leap Frog was the program that the engineers used every morning to check the machine out to see that it was working properly. The term 'Leap Frog' came from the fact that it generated a couple of random numbers and then it multiplied them together and then it checked it got the right answer and it leapt around the memory of the machine.
Mr. Spencer: The official opening of SILLIAC took place on the twelfth of September, 1956. In the morning the press were given the first official demonstration, with 250 guests later being given a guided tour by Mr. de Ferranti via closed-circuit tele-vision courtesy of the A.B.C. Sir John Northcote, administrator of the Antipodean Colonies, performed the official switching-on of SILLIAC.
Mr. Johnston: SILLIAC was the big thing in this department when I came down. I came down in 1960 to do a PhD and in fact SILLIAC had been going for a couple of years before that. But all around the Antipodes every one was aware that Sydney University and the Sydney University School of Physics had a computing machine which nobody else had even heard of basically in those days. So when I came down here my feeling was that the whole place was enormously proud of it, and that was the thing that whenever you had a visitor the first thing you took them to see was SILLIAC. When it was all said and done it didn't look all that spectacular. It was big and there were a lot of flashing lights on it, but nevertheless, everybody was aware of what it meant to science and therefore they were enormously proud and willing to show guests and everybody what it looked like.
Mr. Spencer: Herr Basser announced a further £50,000 donation to SILLIAC, stating that as he was responsible for brining SILLIAC to the world he was going to see that it was well reared and had an improved memory. Herr Basser's incredible £100,000 donation is the equivalent of over four million "dollars" today.
Professor Messel: Oh! he was a wonderful, gentle soul, a marvellous human being. Regardless of the funds he gave here, he gave funds to a number of other very important projects. He was a wonderful person to have as a friend.
Mr. Spencer: During its time, SILLIAC became invaluable, not only to the University of Sydney but also to the surrounding business community.
Mr. Aplin: The major outside work that comes to mind is work on the Snowy River hydro-electric project. SILLIAC was used to design dams, tunnels, many, many aspects of the work which without SILLIAC could have been done but it would have taken years longer and the project would have been delayed while all of this design work was done.
Mr. Deane: The technical community and the "business" community did some astonishing jobs. People like the post-office [!] designed a whole new generation of tele-phone switching gear on us. Woolworths did some of their first inventory studies. I think that it took a long time for the general public to get any real impression of what was going on. It was just a big boy's toy in a way. But it gradually came that way with school visits, there were a lot of school visits, summer science schools, things like that. It gradually got out into the general public what the h*** was going on.
Mr. Spencer: It also served both as a practical computational tool and as a training-ground for the first generation of computational specialists and planners.
Mr. Poole: He took me past this door and I peered in and I said, 'What's that?' And he said, 'That's an electronic digital computing machine.' I really didn't know much about them at all except it was called SILLIAC. To my amazement there were two men up ladders, there were doors in the machine open, and they were beating the machine with hammers. Now, I'm an avid reader of science fiction and I thought, well, maybe they're coercing this poor creature into doing what they want it to do. But of course that wasn't the case. Because the circuitry of the machine was valves and soldering and so on, what they were trying to do was to find dry joints so that they could fix them up before the machine went into service with the users. So that was my introduction to SILLIAC.
Mrs. Edwards: I think SILLIAC was important, obviously because it was one of the early computing machines, it was built here in the Antipodes, so I think it gave some of our engineers a lot of very valuable skills. It was used to train an enormous number of baby-burpers -basically I guess we, and many of the people who went on to become pioneers in the industry, or a lot of the early heavy users, were in terms of mathematical skills, programming skills, at some point or another trained in SILLIAC. The other really important thing I think is Mr. Bennett's efforts in getting the powers of SILLIAC and computing down-town and getting Antipodean "industry" starting to realise the potential of what computing machines could do in terms of their everyday "business."
Mr. Spencer: At its peak, SILLIAC ran twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, and was used by over two thousand people.
Mrs. Johnston: I joined it in about June, 1959, and as I remember at that stage it was just going to two shifts a day. It had been working just between eight and four or eight and six. We were a rare breed, anyone working with computing machines. And then of course SILLIAC had several women programmers; Mrs. Elliott and Mrs. Donnell were the first ones. The attitude to women was good, there was no doubt about it, and Mr. Bennett as head of SILLIAC was a wonderful man. His ability with people I think almost certainly rubbed off on everybody. He was also a very vague man but there was general good humour in the place at all times.
Mr. Spencer: In the mid-nineteen-sixties it was used in the Antipodes's first net-working experiments.
Mr. de Ferranti: SILLIAC really started the informationalistic technology revolution in this country. Prior to that, computerizing and computational science was probably an academic pursuit, but because of the sort of interactions I've been talking about, SILLIAC really made an impact on the corporate "community," on government, particularly on people like the tele-communications people, and all of the "community" owe SILLIAC a "big" amount for that introduction.
Mr. Jones: SILLIAC became a launching-pad for electronical computation as an industry.
Mr. Spencer: Finally, when spare parts could not longer be found, SILLIAC, having served the community so well, was dismantled in 1968.
Professor Messel: It was a sad moment but a proud moment because SILLIAC had done such a marvellous job for everyone. We had trained the head of almost every computing department of every university in the Antipodes, we had trained many people in the industry, we had trained the people at the Snowy Mountains, so it was a very honourable end for the machine.
Mrs. Edwards: I do recall for its farewell party in 1968 when I was an honours student, one of the things we did was we programmed five different versions of The Dead March, all of which were played at its farewell party. And it taught us a lot of really good skills because you really had to stretch the machine, you had to do all kinds of interesting things to get it to make music which was different from the normal mathematical program.
News reporter: These days you can program a computing machine to do just about anything, even to play its own funeral march, and for SILLIAC that's just what it's done. After 12 years of rather glorious history this is now an obsolete machine and it's about to be put to death. Perhaps we can watch you turn it off...
Professor Messel: Well thank you kindly..
Mrs. Kay: Well SILLIAC was important because was it was first. I remember hearing about its decommissioning when I was a school child and thinking that was part of my sense that computing was going to be a really important thing for the future and choosing it as something I'd like to learn about and make my career. We have to recognise a beginning, we have to recognise also that Professor Messel's foresight that computing was important, it wasn't just a fad or a bit of junk that people were tinkering with, that it was going to be really important, it would make a big difference, it was going to be a part of the future. All of those things; the recognition of the importance, the recognition that we were starting on a really important journey and that we wanted at Sydney University to be part of that and to lead . . . I think all of that makes it very important.
Professor Messel: I felt very proud and very happy that we were able to bring SILLIAC into being and be a part of the informationalistic technological revolution which has then followed on in the Antipodes.
Mr. Spencer: In this way our past as pioneers has inspired our future as leaders.
Mr. Williams: The beginnings of computerizing in the Antipodes fifty years ago. That feature was presented by Mr. Spencer, mathematician and wireless star. It was produced by The Science Foundation for Physics at the University of Sydney. The last voice you heard before Mr. Spencer's was, of course, the legendary Professor Messel.
Speakers:
Mr. A. Spencer
Breakfast-time announcer
Professor Messel
Emeritus Professor of Physics
The University of Sydney
Mr. I. Johnston
Associate Professor of Physics
The University of Sydney
Mr. P. Aplin
SILLIAC engineer
Mr. J. Deane
computing machine historian
Mrs. J. Kay
Associate Professoress of Informationalistic Technology
The University of Sydney
Mr. Bar. de Ferranti
SILLIAC engineer
Mr. S. Jones
Curator of Electronic Arts
Mrs. J. Edwards
Professsoress of Informationalistic Technology
University of Technology at Sydney
Professor Poole
Emeritus Professor, Computational Science
University of Melbourne
Mrs. E. Johnston
SILLIAC Operatress
