Today we’re headed to Carlton and Parkville on the north end of downtown. The main attractions are two museums, the University of Melbourne and Little Italy.
The Royal Exhibition Building is a UNESCO World Heritage Site originally constructed for the Centennial International Exhibition of 1888 and the opening of the Federal Parliament in 1901.
Next to the exhibition building is Melbourne Museum, a museum of science and natural history. We went of a guided tour of this facility but they did not show the most interesting (to me) exhibit – it was hidden behind escalators in the basement – Australia’s first computer, CSIRAC. In fact this is only first generation computer left on the planet and the fourth stored program electronic computer in the world. I think I got into computers at the beginning (1963) but the CSIRAC’s life was 1949 (when I was 8 years old) to 1964.
The memory technology was delay lines. A 2010 laptop has 3 to 4 millions the speed of this antique computer and 100 million times the memory.
We took restaurant recommendations from our guide book:
- Coffee at Brunetti Café (“Melburians come from every corner of the city to sample it peerless pastries.”)
- Lunch at Donnini’s – one of the best Italian meals in a long time.
2 comments:
Where were you in 1963? My husband was just newly assigned to Vandenberg AFB on an Atlas missile crew. We've taken tours of the silo sites recently. They had big rooms full of computers for the launches. And we were told that a laptop today has more computing power.
Virginia, in 1963 I graduated from college and started programming computers for Phillips research center in Bartlesville. I turned down a job from NASA - always wondered if I should have taken it.
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