CSIRAC, built by Australia's Council for Scientific and Industrial Research, ran its first program, making it one of the earliest electronic digital computers in the world and the first in Australia. It later became the only surviving first-generation computer, now preserved in a museum in Melbourne.
While much of the early computing story centers on Britain and the United States, Australia quietly built its own pioneering machine. CSIRAC, originally called CSIR Mark 1, was designed by a small team led by British-born engineer Trevor Pearcey and physicist Maston Beard, working with vacuum tubes and mercury delay-line memory in a lab in Sydney.
Getting the machine to run its first program was a painstaking process of debugging thousands of hand-soldered connections and fragile components, any one of which could fail and halt a calculation. When it finally worked, CSIRAC became just the fourth or fifth stored-program computer operating anywhere in the world.
The machine later moved to Melbourne, where it ran university and scientific calculations for over a decade, and in 1951 it even played what may be the earliest computer-generated music at a public exhibition. Remarkably, CSIRAC survived being scrapped, and today sits fully intact in the Melbourne Museum, the only complete first-generation computer left anywhere on Earth.