Basser Computing Department

The Department started out as the Adolph Basser Computing Laboratory.

Donations from Adolph Basser were instrumental in the building of SILLIAC, the University’s first computer. The computer was built for high-speed computing and had been asked for by the nuclear physics team at the University of Sydney. Adolph Basser, then a Governor of the Nuclear Research Foundation, donated £50,000 to the University thus establishing a fund for the erection of SILLIAC in the Physics laboratory which came to bear his name. Help also came from the University of Illinois which generously offered the drawings and technical know-how of their own fast computer to USYD. Manufacture of SILLIAC began in 1955 and the machine was completed in June 1956, officially opened on 12/9/1956 in the Adolph Basser Computing Laboratory.

The Adolph Basser Computing Laboratory did three things:
1.    It provided and maintained a high speed electronic digital computer with associated equipment and an operator for those who wish to use it.
2.    It provided courses for people to use the language of the machine and the mathematical approach best suited to its use.
3.    It carried out research to improve both engineering and mathematical techniques of computing.

SILLIAC was to be a computing tool available to the community as a whole. When it opened it was expected that the larger portion of the work would come from the University where priority was given to calculations originating in the School of Physics itself and that users from outside the University – engineers, manufacturers, consultants, government bodies and departments – would occupy SILLIAC for about a third of the time. [The Electronic Computer SILLIAC and the Adolph Basser Computing Laboratory, G47] SILLIAC was built in the Physics building, right next to the main entrance and located in Room 226. The basement room underneath the laboratory served as air-conditioning plant.

By 1961 research and teaching had expanded and the unit was given departmental status within the School of Physics; it became the Basser Computing Department. At that time, since SILLIAC had begun operations, approximately half of the expenses of the Basser Computing Department had been met by the sale of computer time. The time had been bought primarily by Commonwealth Government departments and agencies. [Proposal for a Fast Computer at the University of Sydney, June 1961, p.3, G47]

In 1972, the Basser Department of Computer Science was separated from the service division, the Basser Computing Centre. Two years later the service division was moved out of the School to the Darlington area. ‘In 1979 the formal ties of the Department with the School of Physics were broken and the Department of Computer Science gained independent status. It moved out of the Physics Building into new facilities in the Madsen Building, which had been vacated by the CSIRO, its original occupants.’ [Australia’s First Volume 2, p.265].