Technology History | Sydney University School of Physics — The Melbourne Cup Story Is Off by Two Years

The story attached to Australia's first university-built computer is that a racehorse paid for it. The University of Sydney now publishes the correction itself. Adolph Basser's horse Delta did win the 1951 Melbourne Cup. His gift of £50,000 to Harry Messel's Nuclear Research Foundation came more than two years afterwards, and the Australian Computer Society's heritage history dates it to 12 February 1954. Basser had made his money in the jewellery trade after emigrating from Poland in 1908, and he gave to many causes before and after this one. He himself sometimes told the racing version. What the money bought sat in this building. Messel, then head of the School of Physics, had already approached the Carnegie and Nuffield foundations, government bodies and the Sydney business community, and been refused by people who had no clear idea what a computer was. The University of Illinois handed over the drawings for its ILLIAC. The Sydney copy was therefore the SILLIAC, and its programming manual said as much — an almost exact copy of the Illinois machine. Brian Swire, hired from the aeronautical research laboratories in Melbourne, spent six months in Urbana learning it and returned in March 1955, while the Australian arm of Standard Telephones and Cables wired the chassis. By the University's own account the finished machine stood 2.5 metres high and three metres wide, taking most of a room here, with a second room for its power plant and a third for cooling. It went into regular use in July 1956, and the University's archives date the official opening of the Adolph Basser Computing Laboratory to 12 September that year. SILLIAC calculated for the Snowy Mountains scheme and ran the payroll of the Postmaster-General's Department, which the University describes as the first computerised payroll in the country. An English Electric KDF9 replaced it in May 1964. SILLIAC stayed on as an input-output processor for the newer machine, was switched off for good in 1968, and was scrapped. Almost none of it survives. The department it created left this building in 1979 for the Madsen Building up the hill, where the CSIR Mk1 had run thirty years earlier. Photo: Jason Tong, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons. The second image shows Peter Aplin working on SILLIAC's racks; the file records no date for it.