Hill came from a very musical family his mother was a music teacher, his sister a performer and he had perfect pitch. The first software engineer or programmer was the mathematician Geoff Hill, who is something of an unsung hero of Australian computing. This would prove problematic for any time-critical application, such as playing music in real time. There were about 20 memory tubes functional at any time.Ī consequence of using mercury acoustic delay time memory was that each memory access took a different time. In this way, many bits and digital words could be stored in one tube of mercury. That means a pulse would be put into the memory tube, it would travel to the other end of the tube and be recycled back to the front.
The memory on the CSIRAC was mercury acoustic delay lines. Programmers would place a sound at the end of their program so they knew it had ended (this was known as a blurt), or they would program progress-indicator blurts into a program.ĭespite being primitive, CSIRAC performed groundbreaking work, including running the calculations to find the centre of our galaxy in 1953, and for the engineering of our first skyscraper building.ĬSIRAC was a serial computer, it passed digital bits around one at a time unlike the 32 or 64 bits passed around in parallel in modern computers.
