Capturing an Oral History of Computing in Australia

Abstract

As we prepared the special issue on Oceania for the IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, the question arose: What collections of primary data are available that may be used by current and future historians? We noticed the absence of oral histories that capture accounts from early pioneers of computing describing their work as entrepreneurs, researchers, educators, IT journalists, and legislators. First, taking Australia as an example, searching relevant sources yields very little available material (Table 1). This is surprising, for instance, Australia was an early innovator with Trevor Pearcey and Maston Beard building one of the first half dozen of computers in the world in Sydney [1], the first computer to play music [2]. Likewise, the first UNIX port happened Down Under [3] and WiFi came out of CSIRO and Radiata. The situation is similar in New Zealand, where there are only limited resources available, namely two small collections in the National Library of New Zealand, recorded for the 25th and 50th anniversaries of the New Zealand Computer Society, respectively (Table 1).