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ACS Heritage: Max Burnet

Peter Davidson, Information Age

04/12/2003 14:16:52

When the producers of the movie The Dish asked Max Burnet whether he might be able to help recreate something like the computer control room at the Parkes radio telescope which tracked the Apollo XI mission in 1969, he simply produced the actual Digital Equipment PDP-9 gear that had been used there 30 years before.

It had been retired from Parkes and like so much of Australia’s computing history, it found its way into the massive collection that forms the Australian Computing Museum he helped found and has nurtured for years.

Re-installed on The Dish set, recreated from old photographs down to the last ashtray, it starred and went back into careful storage as a working example of our technological heritage.

Other film producers call on him for vintage hardware, some of it to fulfil their idea of what 60s computing looked like: “They want rows of big boxes with cascading fairy lights and giant tape spools, more a perception than reality. I think I’ll have to build something – a computing cartoon character.”

But the accumulation serves a more serious purpose than just playing stage prop; programs and data trapped on arcane media long since obsolete are being released to be useful again as the systems which created them are linked to more modern equipment, creating a digital evolutionary chain in a single system to bring pioneering work back to life.

Paper and magnetic tape, plate-sized floppies and other devices carrying near-forgotten programming languages from deep in computer history find their way eventually to Max whose unique equipment, knowledge and archaeological skills bring it all back to life, eventually on a laptop, refreshed and preserved.

A local Intel executive recently found his family tree on a 5in floppy, but even in the citadel of chip development, anything that could read the disk had long since gone for scrap. “A couple of clicks” and Max had it back on a modern floppy

Often it’s far more than the computing equivalent of restoring an old photograph. Geological surveys and other scientific data, archived for decades and presumed irretrievable, can be unlocked to be seamlessly integrated with contemporary material.

Lawyers and librarians seek his skills. So too developers that created code on early Digital PDP boxes, able to return nostalgically to their craft in retirement years later to pick up where they left off on working models of the equipment that under-pinned their careers.

It all started, as they say, when he joined the fledgling Digital Equipment Corporation soon after it set up in Australia in June 1964, and with the UK at the same time, DEC’s first offshore offices.

With a 1962 honours degree from Melbourne University which had started out in physics and then switched to electronic engineering, he joined the Weapons Research Establishment in Adelaide where work on weapon systems for the RAN took him to sea for four days.

Four days of constant seasickness saw ambitions in military electronics start to unravel, but the stint brought him into contact with the new range of DEC mini-computers that were to change the face of computing.

DEC on the road to Damascus “WRE was a terrific place, probably the centre of high-tech in Australia. They had millions of quids worth of gear but I realised it could be replaced by a little box that DEC had invented. Finding out about this new stuff was like a religious experience.”

No amount of cajoling would convince WRE to buy one however, so he thought: “Bugger it, I’ll go where they are” and joined DEC in Melbourne in 1967 as a one-man band, doing it all at age 26. He worked from a room in St Kilda Road, not far from where Digital would have its chrome-and-glass Victorian HQ nearly 30 years later.

“I’d sell them and fix them for free. Melbourne office didn’t make much out of servicing – but I knew my customers would buy Digital next time.”

A few successful years later he was called to Massachusetts for a year, located in Cambridge not far from DEC’s home in Maynard. With Tufts University on his sales portfolio and penchant for teaching the faculty to drink beer, he displaced Tufts’ IBM 1620 with a DEC10 in a million dollar deal and came home in 1971 to open DEC’s office in Adelaide.

“I looked after Perth as well and was making 48 sales calls in a week.”

(Perth had always been a favoured selling ground for Digital: in 1964 a PDP-6 there had been connected with a terminal in Boston by a telex line to create the world’s longest data link. The PDP-6 still exists, torn from the junkman’s grasp and preserved.)

“Then our American country manager Dave Denniston asked me to go to Sydney in 1975 as sales manager. Two weeks later he went back to the US – and I got dropped into the national boss’s job.

“We had 200 staff and were doing about $20m a year. By 1982 we had 500 people and were doing $70m a year, and I think I could greet every one of those staff by name. But I’d had no management training and really wasn’t vicious and mean enough to be a country manager.”

DEC’s huge success with PDP-11 and the arrival of the VAX in the 80s was stalled when drought-stricken Australia slid into recession in 1982 and sales fell short of target. Called to Maynard for what he describes as “re-education”, he refused to go and was eventually replaced by Frank Wroe.

Attached to marketing he continued to deal with DEC’s major corporate customers, particularly those industry segments that had adopted, almost as a bloc, Digital gear. Like their computers that got newspapers out across Australia and NZ every day.

And the universities that eagerly sought every upgrade. “I have a tie from every student union in the country.”

“We were in them all – well, nearly all. Wollongong University was first in the world to port Unix to a non-DEC machine, going instead for Interdata. I should have sold them a VAX.”

While Digital Australia continued to flourish through the first half of the 90s, running second to IBM in this market, the clouds were gathering over Maynard where founder Ken Olsen had insisted that Unix “was snake-oil” and that there was “no future for a personal computer”.

A proud company with 135,000 employees in 90 countries in its heyday and holding primary patents on 8-, 16-, 32- and 64-bit processors and a host of other breakthrough technologies was in serious decline as commoditised computing gnawed at its engineering foundations.

Each quarterly financial report was more dismal than the one before and analysts and competitors bickered over the nature and speed of its death.

For Max Burnet, the work went on, gathering a 5000-strong cadre of users into DECUS and shepherding DEC through John Button’s Partnerships for Development scheme (the only company to complete it all).

And all the while, his acquisitive streak saw a pile of superseded equipment start to grow. Famed for his “creative trade-ins” he’d buy legacy systems back rather than see them ignominiously lugged to the tip, and his museum started to grow.

While DEC stuff was trawled, so too disparate, but historically significant, leftovers from Univac, CDC, IBM, HP, Apple and others accumulated in a warehouse in Sydney.

A few like-minded enthusiasts later added their skill and knowledge to the cause to form the Australian Computer Museum Society. David Hawley is the current president.

“But with Digital in its death throes, I took early retirement a couple of days before Compaq took over, and did a deal with then MD Ron Bunker to buy the collection for a dollar. All very nice but suddenly I had this huge collection to store somewhere.

“I’d been at Digital for 31 years and had seen the company through three great waves of computing evolution, but it was over.”

Bringing it all home While various benefactors helped give it shelter, the smaller, more valuable pieces he brought home, including a complete time-line collection of silicon chips.

Walk these days into his 60s-style brick tree-shrouded house in Sydney’s northwest and you get the feeling that you should be buying a ticket to go further than the front door where a PDP-8E stands guard: showcases line the walls, reference books, manuals and file binders are stacked in serried ranks in meticulously catalogued order and tonnes of veteran computer gear hums happily in gentle retirement wherever there’s space for it.

It’s a bit of a surprise to bump into beds, a washing machine and the usual survival tools of life. It’s a museum, arrayed in precise order; functional, spotless and the epicentre of a career in computing covering more than 40 years.

His rarest piece? A 1964 PDP-5, one of only three known to exist and claimed to be the first mini-computer in Australia and with it a PDP-7 (1965), the first machine in the world to run Unix, used at Lucas Heights.

On one wall, a metre strip of holed cardboard hangs. It’s a Jacquard Tape which the 18th century French weaver developed in an endless loop to control the looms which produced intricately patterned silk.

Charles Babbage used the idea in the punched cards which controlled his analytical engine.

“This tape is from the late 30s and was used to make the Persian rugs that people think are hand-woven.”

Nearby sits Sir George Julius’ automatic totalisator machine, a crowded nest of cogs used by the Newcastle Jockey Club in the 20s, the console from UNSW’s Deuce machine, ICT and Power-Samas mini-punched card tabulator, backplanes hanging as wiry murals – and so it goes on.

In his basement workshop, ailing components get restored as the museum members’ constant search for bits and pieces yield vital parts to bring salvaged equipment back to life.

In between time, Max has a busy round of lecturing engagements and writes historical treatises, including the detailed time-line of Australian computing history, filling a broadsheet newspaper spread, that the ACMS produced for the ACS’ 35th anniversary.

His public persona these days is called BACK – Burnet Antique Computer Knowhow.

Modern computing? He mutters darkly about the “appalling lack of quality in software – the concept of having to reboot is a disgusting indictment on engineering standards. Shouldn’t be allowed.”

Finding a new home for the bulk of the collection has meant scouring our industry for benefactors and sponsors to keep the museum alive and available to those who think Bill Gates invented it all.

At press time, it appears that the NSW Government will make what was a juvenile detention centre at Mt Penang on the state’s central coast available as a permanent display site.

“It should be good – provided the mainframes don’t fall through the wooden floor.”

To fill the few hours of remaining leisure time he works as secretary of the Hornby Railway Collectors’ Club which he founded. Like any decent-minded father, the arrival of son Lachlan in 1972 meant buying a model railway layout – which over the years grew like a pool of bacteria to fill a garage-sized space under his house.

Now more than 1000 pieces of rolling stock in various gauges hurtle around a complex layout while dozens of locos stand shelved around the walls. Thomas the Tank Engine models are an indictment to a continuing obsession.

Late in November he hosted his 10th annual Old Timers’ Lunch at Eveleigh where John Bennett, Peter Jones and the other pioneers of Australian computing gather each year to swap war stories and just stay in touch.

Max carted 54 significant documents from each year from 1951 to 2004 out of his library as the basis of his after-lunch talk. The first item, a 1951 paper announcing the Conference of Automatic Computing Machines with one Dr Douglas Hartree as guest speaker.

The latest item in a “whimsical collection” a 2004 fractal calendar. Typical.