National Pearcey Awards & the Pearcey Hall of Fame The Pearcey Foundation promotes and encourages Australian ICT Achievement. It was founded in 1998 in memory of a great Australian ICT pioneer Dr Trevor Pearcey
Dr. Pearcey was a consultant with CDA for a period.
Each year the Foundation makes awards to outstanding individuals.
Early British Computers THE STORY OF VINTAGE COMPUTERS AND THE PEOPLE WHO BUILT THEM Simon H. Lavington
On 28th January, 1919, Kalamazoo (Aust) Ltd was incorporated and registered in Victoria. Kalamazoo was a leader in the marketing of adding machines, accounting machines, addressing machines and punch card machines. In the 1920s and 1930s
BRITISH TABULATING MACHINE CO. c1950 + BTM 542,550 and 555 SYSTEMS These were Plugged Program Computers as used by ABS prior CDC systems. They were branded Hollerith in Australia up to 1960 then ICT. There were 3 models in the range 542, 550 and 555. more
Ron Bird worked on these Hollerith/ICT 500 series systems in Melbourne, Adelaide and Mt Isa:
Felt and Textiles Victoria Pde.
Kodak Abbotsford
TAA Little Lonsdale Street
Met Bureau Spring Street
War Service Homes Spring St.
ICI Nicholson Street
RAAF St Kilda Rd Barracks
Moulded Products (Nylex) Mentone
Mt Isa Mines Mt Isa
Harris Scarfe Adelaide
ABS Canberra
POWERS SAMAS c1957 CUB in Carlton had a Powers Samas machine similar to this in 1960 This model was also referred to as a 'PCC'.
Quite a few Victorian State Government Departments were big users of Powers Samas gear.
Click on images to enlarge
The Evolution of the Australian Bureau of Statistics Timeline of the ABS Video Presentation
1956 SILLIAC, the first computer built in an Australian University, celebrated its 50th Anniversary in September 2006 SILLIAC was an almost exact copy of the automatic computer at the University of Illinois, the ILLIAC, and as it is the Sydney version of the ILLIAC, it has been called the SILLIAC.
Trevor Pearcey with CSIRAC Photo courtesy of the Museum of Victoria CSIRO - CSIRAC In 1947, Maston Beard and Trevor Pearcey led a research group at the Sydney-based Radiophysics Laboratory of the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (now known as CSIRO), to design and build an electronic computer.
The resources they had available included the vacuum tube or "valve" technology and the pulse techniques developed for radar systems during World War II. Their developments parallelled, but were to a considerable extent independent of computer developments in Europe and the USA.
The CSIR Mk1 ran its first test programs in late 1949, and it was the fifth electronic stored program computer ever developed.
These were all installed late 1950s with the exception of ICI and War Service Homes that were installed in 1960/1
EARLY AUSTRALIAN DEVELOPMENT
This document is a compilation of notes given to Ron Bird by Trevor Robinson in late 2006. They are Trevor's 'spoken' reflections on the development of the digital computer industry in Australia from about 1946. Ron has added supplementary notes taken from several phone conversations on this subject with Trevor in 2006.
