03 | Dead and Alive: Plucky country
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Annual reports might be an odd thing to get excited about. And yet, here I am. I have three leather-bound reports in front of me. The covers are a rich red with gold embossing. They smell the way that old books do, a bit musty and dusty, but full of history. They're a time capsule of Australia's fledgling years in quantum computing from the late 90s onwards. They map every step Australia took to eventually become a leader in the industry.
Yeah, and a lot of that history doesn't exist anywhere else. It's something, again, that I'm extremely proud of.
According to the best of the best, there's a reason our plucky country has made it so far in this weird world of computing.
That highly collaborative nature of Australians is one of the biggest reasons why I think Australia can win the race in building a quantum computer here, because that is what you need to build something complex and difficult. And I think it's something where Australians excel.
It does take a Herculean effort to build a quantum computer.
When you are trying to build a quantum computer, essentially what you're trying to do is control nature at its smallest scales. It's an evolution of technology that allows humans to control the world at that level.
What is the origin story of Australia’s early computer CSIRAC?
And it doesn't stop there. Controlling nature at its smallest is one thing. Doing it a million times over is another task entirely.
And when you get to those kinds of scale, the challenges become different.
If we can overcome those challenges, Australia will become the first home to a quantum behemoth, a computer that can model nature itself. Nobody has come anywhere close yet. So, what will it take to get there? And will Australia get there first? This is Dead and Alive, a series of science fiction for ABC Radio National. I'm Jacinta Bowler, and to understand if quantum computers will change the world, I need to know how it controls nature at its most unstable. And I might be in the best place possible to find that out. Episode 3, The Plucky Country. Our relationship with computers started a long time ago. So to understand where we are now with quantum, it helps to take a few steps back to 1949, when Australia's first digital computer, CYRAC, was switched on.
We're going to feed the tape now into SIRAC, and I press the appropriate control buttons on the console.
SIRAC, or the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Automatic Computer, was one of the first of its kind in the world. You can actually see it go into the memory, filling up the cells of the memory. What strikes me most about SIRAC is how similar it is in a lot of ways to present-day quantum computers.
Results from that calculation into the flexor writer, which is going to print out the results for us.
CYRAC is still in one piece. It's on display in an unassuming corner of the Science Works Museum in Melbourne.
So this is the console. Around the back here.
Can we get in? I've come here to get some guidance from Peter Thorne.
And here is the hard drive.
A retired computer scientist who first met CYRAC when he was in high school.
I was pretty impressed. And I guess that meeting, which would have been in the late 1950s, changed my life basically from then on. 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.
Peter went on to graduate and then study at the University of Melbourne. Cyrec was there at the brand new Computation Laboratory.
Later on, my girlfriend, who later my fiance, later my wife, worked there and I hung around, as it were.
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