Emulating a CSIRAC instruction set
The programs are designed to emulate CSIRAC instruction sets. The emulator should start up with four windows, tape reader, displays, control panel, and printer/punch.
Download the emulation files (.ZIP)
Test programs include:
- 1. A2Test.cvt: Originally a test for the ASIN subroutine. Calculates Sin and Cos for a series of angles, then call ASin to get the angle back.
- 2. T712a.cvt: Crude printer test, cycles through the character set outputting the characters to the printer.
- 3. sqrt.cvt: Calculate the square root of a series of values, read from the data tape: sqrt.dat.
- 4. TestSound.cvt: Crude test of sound generation. J
The emulator can be used on Windows, Mac and Linux.
The two CSIRAC emulations
John W. Spencer was a frequent (nocturnal) user of CSIRAC for the production of Solar Position and Radiation tables for the CSIRO Division of Building Research.
He developed an emulation using the Windows 98SE operating system with an 800 x 600 screen resolution and small fonts. The EM2 and EM3 programs used the Courier New font with Western and Greek scripts; the EM3 program used also the Lucida Console font with Greek script.
in 2021, Bill Purvis kindly created an updated version in Java.
CSIRAC Documentation
The Interprogram in English Langauge for Automatic Programming : CSIRAC Computation Laboratory, University of Melbourne was produced by G. W. Hill Division of Mathematical Statistics Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO). It was an "English language complier" produced in 1960.
The production of this Programming Manual for the Automatic Electronic Computer CSIRAC by the staff of the Computation Laboratory is based upon papers by T. Pearcey and G.W. Hill (August 1959). It was then reformatted into a more modern style by Bill Purvis. (February 2021).
Instructions from Bill Purvis on how to load and run the CSIRAC emulator.