Dr Peter Thorne
speaker
70 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 21 Jul
Dr Peter Thorne’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 2.
Appearances
This was the place to be.
It was the biggest, probably most exciting piece of electronics in Australia.
And it was the beginning of the new age.
Later on, my girlfriend, who later my fiance, later my wife, worked there and I hung around, as it were.
And in the end, I got the weekend gig of being the weekend service engineer.
It wouldn't fit in the average lounge room.
It would hardly fit in the average garage.
And full, absolutely full of vacuum tubes.
It was a smell of hot insulation material and the smell, I suppose, of the sort of heated dust that you could get.
It used to get quite warm and it had a fan system to cool it.
Many quantum computers need to be kept cool, in some cases colder than outer space.
There was noise from the fans which were running along.
and also noise from the input-output devices, sometimes clattering away, printing, busy.
Occasionally it was so overloaded that somebody tried to make a cup of tea in the tea room and when they turned on the jug, the computer stopped.
We had all those problems.
Like they wanted us to solve crossword puzzles and things with it.
Could it solve crossword puzzles?
No.
LAUGHTER
And my wife, they said that we never turned anybody down.
Showing 41–60 of 70 · page 3 of 4
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