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Spooks and spats a speciality

Peter Davidson, Information Age

21/08/2004 14:16:54

While dark mutterings over the convergence of technology and business rumble on in some quarters, it’s an issue which Trevor Robinson resolved and put behind him 40 years ago.

For all practical intents and purposes the founder of Control Data (CDC) in Australia – the US big-iron pioneer’s first offshore venture – in 1962, his lunge into commercial computing not only shaped the foundations of our IT history, but significantly influenced the often abrasive relationship between government and the private IT sector in the 90s.

Based on his 20 years’ experience advancing defence technology around the world, Control Data Australia flourished under his stewardship and expanded into Asia, as did its later de facto progeny Data 100, and Control Data Business Advisors.

But as technology’s exponential rate of development changed the business dynamics of IT over the next three decades, so these companies were inexorably churned into different entities, their names disappearing off the radar.

With a pretty well unique store of technology and business experience behind him Robinson was recruited by then Senator John Button, Minister for Industry, Technology and Commerce, as Special Advisor, Information Industries in 1989.

Button, now actively retired in Melbourne, recalls Robinson as “having a great business sense and knew not only what was an effective deal for both sides in any negotiation, but how to set it up and get it through”.

“At the time of his appointment, IT was growing rapidly but few in government, whether politicians or bureaucrats, understood it,” Button says.

“It was a time of amazing waste by departments, some significantly demonstrable failures and our trade deficit was growing rapidly. A lot of the people involved had arts degrees – few knew maths or physics – and we needed outside advice.

“Trevor was terrific. He had decades of experience in dealing with government and knew he had to be direct, although that antagonised more than a few in Canberra.

“At one stage he had 32 departments offside simultaneously. Everything was systems integration, and each department had its own expert on how SI should be done and what should be bought, how and from whom.

“Outside interference was not welcomed.”

(In describing his life – or anything else for that matter – Robinson draws freely on a well-honed lexicon of basic Anglo Saxon to offer direct views; e-mail for example, is simply “bullshit”.)

“Fancy John Button putting up with a guy like me getting in there and making a nuisance of myself – but that’s what he wanted me to do.”

“I told him the problem in Australia was very simple: you have all these big companies here and what they do is integrate systems They just get bits and pieces, some of which they make, some of which they buy, and then try to join the whole thing together.

“If someone in Canberra is using a particular sort of locally-made data display, do you think an IBM or Honeywell is going to overcome the interface problems to accommodate it? It just won’t work.

“The way to fix it is to give a local company the prime contract and specify that they put as much Australian content in as they can – buy the mainframes and whatever else. Let an Australian company do the shopping and write the software that will glue it all together. That’s the only way it will work.

“Now John Button’s not stupid and he knew I was on to something but the IT Procurement Advisory Council wouldn’t have it and I got into a lot of trouble over it – cartoons in the Canberra Times and all the rest of it – but I would never say anything negative about John. He really did do his level best to make things work.

”His policies were first rate.”

(The council, comprising ministers and bureaucrats, was set up by Button to streamline procurement procedures and find savings.)

His tenure lasted four years until halted by mandatory retirement (he’d passed 70) so he went on to established and nurture start-up technology companies, drawing on an acumen and experience which had begun to accumulate much earlier…

And in the beginning

For a third-year science student at the Uni of WA in 1942, things did not look too rosy: the Japanese were marching on Kokoda and the Afrika Korps had overwhelmed Tobruk. Things in Europe were middling at best.

So when Robinson, barely out of his teens, was offered the chance to join he RAAF as a “radio location trainee” he was soon at Sydney University immersed In the pulse technology that underpinned the still-secret radar so critical to Britain’s survival only a year or so earlier.

After four years in uniform (working alongside another young scientist called John Bennett) and the completion of his honours physics degree in WA, he worked as a graduate student with the Radio Research Board of the CSIR using radar technology to measure ionospheric disturbances.

A research officer at Mt Stromlo by 1952, a call from the Department of Defence saw him move into a spooky world constrained by the Official Secrets Act. The decision to join was something of a punt:

“I wanted to get married but couldn’t afford to on the 750 pounds a year I was getting. Defence offered something around 1200 but couldn’t or wouldn’t say what the job entailed until he agreed to go there.

The job turned out to be with Defence Signals Branch (DSB) which kept itself well in the background while it pursued its nefarious task of eavesdropping on radio transmissions “from countries of interest”.

Robinson’s job was to design aerials which didn’t thrill him much so he sought other work. Would he be interested in electronic computers?

At a time when Australia was seeking to establish its independence in defence electronics, a cloud of secrecy still hung over much of the wartime technology which had been developed in the UK.

The programmable COLOSSUS and ROBINSON (named after Heath Robinson) machines which had been used to such effect at Bletchley Park to crack the Enigma code, and later developments, convinced Australian defence that something similar had to be built here.

So Robinson, with his background in the pulse physics essential to the emerging computer technology, was sent to Sydney to get familiar with the CSIR Mark 1 machine – and had one of its creators Trevor Pearcey as his mentor.

(Robinson was the 1999 recipient of the Pearcey Award.)

Then to England with fellow Australian Ken Watson (a circuit engineer), supposedly to join a team of 40 engineers who were to build Australia’s equivalent machine, bring it home in bits like Meccano and set it up here.

The trip was not quite as described in the brochure.

The engineering team had long before dispersed, so the two colonials set out to meet the DSB’s specification for a machine to perform a single program to support its signals intelligence work, but which could be rebuilt and dedicated to another task as required.

The original UK team had tried to meet the Meccano requirement by building COLOROB, named after its predecessors, but could not generate the speed required.

“The essence of cryptanalysis work is speed, and we had to sharpen the pulse shapes we wanted to use.”

Faced with impedance matching difficulties, they opted for pulse transformers rather than the cathode-followers traditionally used, and went to Ferranti for the hardware.

“We told them we needed a pulse with a riser no more than 0.1 microseconds, but they looked down their long noses at us blokes from the bush (I was 30 and Ken a few years younger) and said it was impossible. But we bought their transformers and rewound them – all 78 of them - and they worked.

“It was blasphemy, but to their credit Ferranti later adopted some of our mods.

“We didn’t really know what we were doing but we kept at it in our own way and for most of it there was just the two of us.”

Thirty months and additional engineering staff later, their machine, called INFUSE, had been built in 24 racks connected by co-ax cable and was ready for the trip home.

“It looked like a whale beached in a shallow sea of brown spaghetti” but he duly installed in Melbourne n 1957, ready to perform its single task.

It took a week to get each new program up and running, but it remained in service for nearly a decade until replaced by a Control Data 3400.

Meantime, space was becoming a busier place and he returned to the Weapons Research Establishment (WRE) at Salisbury in SA where plans were afoot for testing Britain’s Blue Streak ICBM at Woomera.

Discussing the INFUSE and WRE periods of his career brings several pauses while he ponders how much he is able to say about them, still bound by official secrecy all these years later.

However, the Blue Streak project prompted the Australian government of the day to insist that there would have to be range safety systems in place before rockets blasted off from Woomera to hurtle downrange to fall wherever a possibly wayward guidance system dictated.

Or, if necessary, blow the missile up in flight.

A computer system based on the English TREAC developed by the Telecommunications Research Establishment was running late, and Robinson was charged with going there, getting it finished and beefed up to meet Woomera requirements.

“It was a typical Pommy effort – no coordination, and they were trying to build it in a laboratory. Just ridiculous.”

Improvements included adding a square root facility to its code which basically performed the high-speed processing of linear equations to predict its impact point if its motor should fail or guidance waver during Blue Streak’s three minutes of powered flight.

And more importantly getting the project, which was to be renamed DIP (digital impact predictor), out of the lab and into the workshop where engineers could get to work on it as a project.

The DIP project proved itself (unlike Blue Streak which was cancelled never having gone beyond the first of its three stages) and found its way to Woomera, while Robinson found his way out of Adelaide and his spooky pursuits, back to Melbourne.

It was a career characterised largely by a practical knowledge of physics and native ingenuity overcoming need.

Phil Grouse recounts finding himself in the arid wilds of northern South Australia with Robinson who was keen to show him the latest, highly secret device designed to detect even the smallest above-ground nuclear explosions.

Warned of its classification, he expected a bunker crammed with sophisticated electronics. Instead he was shown what was in fact a country dunny housing a 44gal drum with the guts of a tape recorder sitting on it.

The trick, Robinson explained, was in getting the size of the hole drilled in the top just right. Then the lid would flex only in response to the low-frequency sonic boom of a distant nuclear explosion.

Acting as a sonic filter, the drum recorded its flexing on a low-speed tape drawn across a steel pin welded to the drum. Another track gave a timing reference. It cost the then equivalent of a couple of hundred dollars and did the job.

Into the commercial world A decision to apply for a job with Melbourne import agent H L Heymanson in 1962 brought a generally derisive reaction from former colleagues convinced that commercial computing wouldn’t amount to anything – and called for infra dig things like “selling”.

“Heymanson was a wise old Jewish gentleman who was a lot smarter than anyone who worked for him. He represented Lockheed at a time when we had the Royal Australian Lockheed Air Force, but knew that Boeing would become a real threat.

“So he’d decided to get into ‘computerisation’ and became local agent for TRW which had a computer which managed process control, and Philco which had the first fully transistorised machine, the Transac S-2000.

“Heymanson thought the TRW machines were office computers and could take on IBM. The Philco had been built for the US Defence Dept and had no software and I had to tell him that none of it was going to work.

“He gave me a stern lecture on loyalty to one’s principals, and then asked what I suggested. I told him about this American maker I’d heard about called Control Data Corporation.

“He agreed and we were able to get the agency for CDC, its first outside the US.”

The decision was timely: the CSIRO, Bureau of Census (later ABS) and Postmaster-General’s Dept in Canberra were looking for new computing power and Robinson felt that CDC was in with a chance – if it could meet specs.

“I knew we had a pretty good chance with CSIRO which was looking to install a core machine networked to satellite nodes in all state capitals except Hobart, while Census was looking to do the same but in all capitals.

“The idea was that Census would become a computing bureau for the Tax Office, Health and other agencies until they could set up their own systems.

“It meant two big computers, the fastest available, which CDC could supply in the CDC3600 – but the 11 remote boxes were a different matter. We were up against Ferranti’s Atlas for the Census contract but CDC was determined to establish its Australian foothold with the others.”

“At a time when Control Data was me, a secretary and great programmer called John Barth sent out from head office, we were up against all the political pressure that the Brits could apply to get Atlas into Australia.

“However the 3600 was faster than the Atlas, better engineered and superior by a long shot.

“It was a fascinating time as Australia was really into wide area networking before many others.”

Robinson knew what was needed for the remote sites, but there was no CDC product to do the job.

“Our first offering for the CSIRO was the 160A, and for Census the Polaris 924 which had been developed for nuclear submarines, but it had no software. Ferranti was offering their Ferranti Packard FP2000 which was really good.”

So with Barth he wrote the specs for a machine which would fulfil contract terms, guaranteed its delivery – and sent the specs off to CDC and asked for it to be built and delivered to spec on time within the agreed price.

The contracts were won on that basis, leaving CDC engineers in Minneapolis with the job of producing a box to Robinson’s design – and time line.

His result was the 160Z, later given the more commercially seductive name of CDC3200.

“The contract for both CSIRO and Census was signed on June 19, 1962. You have one great win in your life, and that was mine.”

Another triumph in the process was the recruitment of a young Australian engineer called Peter Jones whom Robinson had met during Jones’ peripatetic efforts to promote Atlas in the US.

Jones was recruited out of Manchester University where he’d worked on Atlas to join CDC, working with Robinson for a period in Australia on the government installations, and later going to the US to work on the CDC6600 with the legendary Seymour Cray.

It was a collaboration to last many years.

Control Data Australia’s heyday was to be somewhat short-lived as IBM’s new System 360 gained rapid favour with the university market which CDA had expected to dominate, leaving slimmer pickings in add-ons for existing customers.

But CDA continued to expand in Thailand, Taiwan and Japan, and undertook customer engineering for India and Vietnam.

It won the TAB business in Australia and developed a range of business and data centres around the CDC6600 but a global reorganisation of the corporation and policy shifts saw its fortunes dwindle.

Bruce Bambrough who had transferred out of CDA back to the corporation saw an opportunity in programmable remote-batch terminals which would operate on any comms protocol to connect with any mainframe.

CDC wasn’t interested so Bambrough started the soon to prosper Data 100 Corporation, asking Robinson to join him in Minneapolis to create and manage its international division which by 1976 had operations in every major Western country.

Distributed processing eventually squeezed remote batch out of the market, however, and Data 100 was sold to Northern Telecom, with Robinson returning to Australia.

CDC founder Bill Norris had long held the belief that small business was the well-spring of IT innovation.

Asked by CDC president Robert Price to set up Control Data Business Advisors in Australia to nurture emerging techno companies that needed effective computing capability to progress, a pool of part-time experts was formed to offer advice and mentoring.

However visionary the philosophy, it was brought down by more venal attitudes: “The companies that failed couldn’t pay, and the others for the most part, wouldn’t.”

Meanwhile the corporation itself was in financial straits. Newly developed technologies arrived too late to save it, and Robinson left the company for the second time, to take up John Button’s offer in 1989.

The quieter years Now 82 he can look back on a life pioneering technology, its applications and fostering the careers of those who created and used it. He holds to a simple management philosophy typically couched in no-nonsense terms:

“You have to let people get on with what they have to do; tell them what’s needed and when it it’s due and leave them to do it. You have to fire the ****holes, and that’s the hard bit, but it has worked in all the countries and projects I’ve managed.”

Still involved in our business through his work with the technology section of the Museum of Victoria (where he recently installed a Ferranti Sirius and tends its CDC3200), and working with students at RMIT and other institutions.

Fiercely loyal ex-CDCers gather at the regular reunion lunches he hosts, which also offers an opportunity “to ease Australia’s wine glut”. His work goes on.