Cool, it appears I’ve been nominated for the 2007 Queensland Pearcey State Award – that’s quite an honour!

The Pearcey Foundation takes its name from Dr Trevor Pearcey who in 1949 led the team that designed and built Australia’s first digital computer, CSIRAC, and which was in fact the world’s fourth digital computer ever to be built.

Now, coming from The Netherlands I lack a certain amount of education in terms of Australian ICT history, but I was at the Melbourne Museum the week before (for the AUUG 2007 conference), and actually visited CSIRAC which is (at least some parts) on display there. It features nifty technology like mercury acoustic delay tubes and a magnetic drum (disk).

I first learnt programming on a DEC VT78 (PDP-8) around 1980, so I do have some half-ancient computer history under my belt – heck, I’ve even used timeshare terminals and punchtape ;-)
There’s an original PDP-8 at the Melbourne museum also. Hehe, the PDP-8 assembly code on the Wikipedia page looks *very* familiar. Quickly getting bored with the limitations of its BASIC, my friend Bas de Bakker and I quickly descended into PDP-8 assembly lingo to write a version of Pacman and other magical stuff going around the text-only screen. Later I got a Sinclair ZX80 but quickly went on to the Acorn BBC/B Micro. Anyway, that’s enough digression (feel free to comment with your own first computer platforms ;-)

I’m looking at whether I can go to the awards dinner next week. I don’t expect to win (I’ve seen the list of nominees and there’s plenty of very worthy people on it) but it’d be interesting to be there anyway. Plus a bit of a networking opportunity for Open Query, perhaps. We’ll see.