Does Compute

During a recent trip to Melbourne, I was exposed to three separate experiences which emphasized the evolving and dynamic nature of progress in the computing world. The start of my experience was at the Melbourne Museum. The museum is a very interesting place - which in itself is not that surprising - filled with the proud history of Melbourne, Victoria and their parts in the development of Australia.

There is an excellent display on the Bunjilaka people who occupied the land that Melbourne sits on prior to the arrival of European settlers in the 1800's. There are also interesting specimens from Charles Darwin's explorations of the South Pacific and Australia, and a great exhibit on the ongoing evolution of our understanding of DNA as well as the human body.

One rather modest exhibit in the museum caught my eye however - a small room on the main floor of the museum which houses the original CSIRAC computer. (No longer functional, but they did add some flashing lights for good effect...) Having grown up during the emergence of the "Home Computer", when computers were something that were plugged into your TV (seems like we're coming back to that these days...), seeing this remnant of the early days of computing was a very eye opening experience.

My Walk Through of the CSIRAC Computer

The sight of one of the dinosaurs of the computing age - the kind that your father told you about that "was good enough to get man to the moon and back", and the kind that your grand father could scarcely imagine - took me by surprise. I knew of these pre-digital vacuum tube running beasts, but to see the start of the evolution was a quirky, inspiring and humbling experience. If anything, it emphasized that progress and success was determined by the same things then as it is now: hard work, perseverance and a faith in your vision. The architects of this binary beast could scarcely have envisioned where their work would lead, but for them 1000 calculations per second - contrasted with the millions, billions and trillions to follow - was a lot of computing power.

CSIRAC Computer's Disk Drive

The sight of the hard drive, I'm sure state of the art at the time, evoked images of my 6th grade wood working class and grinding out a rolling pin on a lathe.

A short time before my visit to the Melbourne Museum, I had visited the (excellent) Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI). The ACMI has a games lab, which focuses naturally on the domain of video games and video game development. At the time of my visit the ACMI games lab had an exhibition on "hits of the 80's", which naturally meant that Texas Instruments, Commodore and other early 80's "Home Computers" were on display. What was of note is that they were on display behind a glass cabinet.

The Commodore 64 - Behind Glass

Seeing the Commodore 64 of my childhood behind a glass display case brought into focus how much has passed in the computing game. Memories of wrestling with tape drives, copying computer programs out of the back of magazines, BBS's, and finally the advent of the disk drive and the modem...

The third experience, which put all this computing history into perspective, was a quick walk past the window of a mobile "phone" shop. Where for a cool $29 per month, you can get a mobile computing platform which can connect to the broad corners of the Internet, reducing the cost of international calls to zero and allowing the storage and access of countless amounts of data and information.

Get Google, Skype and eBay on your mobile for $29/mo

I guess this is the natural conclusion of Moore's Law, and a few other major innovations over the past, but its amazing how much of it you walk past on a day-to-day basis without even taking a second glance. John Culkin said, "we shape our tools and thereafter they shape us". Its very difficult to see how the amazing leaps in power, scope and reach of computing haven't had a massive effect on our society to date, and won't continue to do so far into the future.

Thankfully all this technology can also help us remember where we came from...