snocom

During unrelated research I came across SNOCOM. Apparently Australia’s first transistor based computer which was used for the Snowy Hydro project in the 1960’s. I became a little obsessed with it. It’s a fascinating piece of Australian computing history. Given its age it would be amazing to read the computer programs and even run them. My brain suddenly latched onto the idea of building a SNOCOM emulator.

Unfortunately the project just isn’t going to happen. I’d really like to work on something like this but time and money constraints means I have to let this one go. I’m hoping in writing this post someone else has the opportunity to give it a go though.

SNOCOM was made by PhD student David Wong at Sydney University. The design was to be a general purpose computer faster and more flexible than ADA. David adapted the design of LGP and ADA to make a transistor based machine. It uses a magnetic drum for memory for about 8KB of RAM.

The NMA contains a lot of SNOCOM artefacts including journals, books, and punch tape! The problem is the artefacts aren’t indexed very well, and the NMA doesn’t seem to really have the skills to handle computing related history. This means that while they can photograph the artefacts obtaining the contents of the punch tape will likely be very hard.

I’m sure it will be possible but it’ll require finding the right people and process. It’s also likely that the programs are also written down in one of the books, however I can’t determine which books it would be in. NMA have sent me some low res photos of some of the artefacts and I haven’t been able to determine which ones would be best to request photographing.

I could ask them to photograph or digitise them however the cost becomes very expensive very quickly. I could view the artefacts however I would need to get to Canberra. Even then its unlikely I could flip through pages. Just look at the covers.

Even if I was to magically gain access to the paper punch tape, I don’t have any equipment to read it. Photographing it might be an option, but processing it would be painful. One of the pictured punch tapes is ripped as well.

Then if the punch tape is processed, what program is it, whats its inputs and outputs. Is there enough information to make that tape useful?

As such I just can’t dedicate myself to a project like this. But maybe you or someone you know can?

If your interested here are some useful resources:

• NAA has several pictures of the configuration sheets
• NMA has several aretfacts listed
• Snocom programming manual at University of Sydney Library (I’m trying to do a inter library transfer for this….)
• The design and construction of the digital computers snocom, nimbus and arcturus Thesis - The appendix is extremely useful as it has all the details on how the SNOCOM computer works and is built