‘we Made The First Computer..’

[Guest Tim]

‘WE MADE THE FIRST COMPUTER..’

The co-inventor of the computer, Dr.Tommy Thomas, sits in his sunny upstairs study at Mermaid Beach, on Queensland’s Gold Coast, tapping at the keyboard of his latest model Apple with the index finger of his left hand and the third finger of the right.

 

For the 66-year-old scientist, whose ideas made millions for others, has never learned to touch-type.

 

On the way up the stairs to his office, he'd shown me a framed cutting from the Illustrated London News, dated June 25, 1949. It described "A Calculating Machine With A Memory", and pictured a mass of dials, switches, tangled wires, valves and a huge cathode tube, filling a laboratory as large as his apartment.

 

It was the first working computer.

 

Dr. Thomas glanced at the wrist-watch he was wearing. "Today this watch has more computer power in it than the device occupying our whole laboratory."

 

Dr. Thomas shrugs off the tiny salaries he and his team of boffins lived on 46 years ago. And the billions of dollars made from the intellectual property of his invention since. "We had no idea how to handle intellectual property. We were scientists."

 

His Manchester University team worked night and day to put together the wonder contraption, basing their ideas on wartime research that had enabled a radar sensor to "remember" whether a target was moving or stationary: the first creation of non-human "memory".

 

Now settled on the coast where he is a key figure in world computer communication, Tommy Thomas recalls his fellow scientists' dismay "to see the thing actually perform, then disintegrate because the componentry was so fragile."

 

And shakes his head at British reaction when the inventors were at last able to demonstrate that they indeed had a computer that could memorise and work out huge mathematical sums. "Britain believed the world would need three computers, or four at the most.

 

"We had fun. It was absolute excitement.. and the satisfaction of being able to prove something could work. It was like the birth of a child."

 

Tommy Thomas's meagre salary was paid by the electronics firm, Ferranti, the Royal Society, and the British Government who were funding the university research into "the giant brain that does not have to be told what to do by a human operator when working out a problem."

 

After months' work, a machine was finally perfected that remained intact and could - demonstrably - compute sums in hours what would have taken men years to work out.

 

"But after we built it, we didn’t know what to do with it. The Mathematics Department could only think of using it to calculate the highest prime numbers, an intellectual pursuit that didn't mean much."

 

The Illustrated London News wrote: "The Manchester Automatic Sequence-Controlled Calculating Machine has been devised.. to undertake a wide variety of complex calculations that would take human beings, using ordinary methods, possibly months to carry out, where the machine takes only an hour or so...The human controller has to decide how the Calculating Machine can perform the desired calculation, and draws up a list of instructions for it to obey...when the machine has worked out the whole problem, a red light switches on."

 

Then a Canadian, who had a contract to design the St. Laurence seaway system, thought the machine might be asked to calculate the flow of water through the seaway and the British boffins gladly allowed him to feed it figures. It was its first "serious" application.

 

Dr. Thomas admits that even if they had realised its potential worth, he and his research colleagues had no idea how to guard their discovery from exploitation.

 

"We were legally illiterate. We couldn't even compose a statement setting out what the intellectual property was! Then a marvellous patent agent came in, sat us all down, and in 10 minutes was able to capture the idea and what we had achieved in patentable terms."

 

Sometime later the American company IBM, which made cash registers, got wind of what was going on in Manchester...

 

"They hadn't yet got on to the idea of a stored programme computer, so the chief executive's son-in-law came out to see us. And he came regularly, every two months and peered over our shoulders and we told him what we were doing. He was a personable character; we were naive. We told him this, that and the other; whatever he wanted to know."

 

Within two years IBM decided their Atlantic traveller's visits had been prudent: IBM had to go into the computer market.

 

Australian scientists had worked with the British on the "hush-hush" radar machine during the war and the collaboration had continued. But a firm political decision was made simultaneously in both countries: there was no future in computers. "They and the British Government abandoned the programme. Australia went into the technological doldrums."

 

And the chance to lead the world in computers was lost.

 

Dr. Tommy Thomas, however, never let go of it. His enthusiasm never waned and he went on researching, taking his knowledge with him into the chemical field and eventually back into teaching when he established himself at Bond University.

 

Sitting in his study, tapping out messages across the globe, he has seen his brainchild grip the world in an astonishing short time. This year 180 countries which are part of a World Wide Web, enabling 30 million computer operators to chat to each other, will focus on the small New South Wales town of Wagga Wagga, ("once a music hall joke because it was so small and had a funny name") for their annual conference.

 

"Global pen pals are now instant pen pals - they can send each other pictures, text, information. Children in school operating their computers, are setting the pace and we adults are following.

 

"I am now concentrating my work on the relevance of computers to the community. Small communities that were once conscious of their isolation and seeming unimportance, now have an opportunity to be as significant as any of their peers.

 

"It seems a long way from Manchester University in 1949."