Jurij Semkiw remembers Australia's first computer, 2006

Transcript of interview

A machine like CSIRAC, and all machines in those days, didn't have any operating systems like you've got Windows and Mac operating systems these days, Unix and so on. But in those days you had just the pure hardware and you had to load your program into the machine from scratch. There was no software in the machine at all. And the memory was trivial, a few kilobytes of memory for the whole machine, where you're talking about megabytes now - you know, fast memory - and gigabytes in disk memory. There's just no comparison.

But it was very exciting because everything was so completely new. You see, there was no formal qualification for anybody in computer science or computer engineering in those days. My background is just in pure electronics and therefore everything that we did was completely new, just applying your basic knowledge to new technology, new applications. And also at that time solid state physics came in and the first transistors were developed, so this was also a very exciting time where we actually did some new developments with transistors for CSIRAC.

I mean, I always assumed that it would just go on and on, but in those days I know there were people who sort of said: 'Oh, after CSIRAC Australia would probably need one or two of these big computers and that would do for the whole country'. But on the other hand, some people had vision that said that computers would just grow and would permeate every aspect of society, especially in information retrieval and storage. And it just grew and grew and grew and it's still growing, and it's a bit hard to see where it will finish.