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Trevor Robinson, computer pioneer 1922-2007

Peter Davidson, Information Age

17/08/2007 15:53:47

Among notable contemporaries like Trevor Pearcey, John Bennett and Peter Jones, he strode through a 50-year IT career in defence, commerce and government with a reputation for getting things done, taking few prisoners along the way.

Born in Port Hedland in 1922, his future as a third-year physics student at the Uni of WA seemed limited: the Japanese were marching on Kokoda, Tobruk had fallen and things in Europe were middling at best.

Joining the RAAF as a "radio location trainee" he was off to Sydney Uni and immersion in the pulse technology that underpinned still-secret radar, later using it to measure ionospheric disturbances for the (then) CSIR.

A research officer at Mt Stromlo in 1952, he was offered a job by the Department of Defence. All he knew was that he had to sign the Official Secrets Act before getting a job description, which he did as it paid enough for him to get married.

In a lengthy interview with Information Age magazine four years ago, his recollections of his years in the spooky halls of defence technology were interspersed with lengthy pauses and mutterings about "I don't know how much of this I can talk about" before launching into another anecdote couched in very Australian idiom.

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

Australia wanted its own defence electronics, and sought versions of the COLOSSUS and ROBINSON machines that had helped crack the Enigma code at Bletchley Park.

After experience on the CSIR Mark 1 computer under the mentoring of its creator, Trevor Pearcey, he went to England with circuit engineer Ken Watson to join a 40-member team of engineers who were to build a hybrid called COLOROB which would be brought back to Australia and reassembled like Meccano.

Unable to crank enough speed to meet Australian cryptanalysis specs, the UK team dispersed, leaving the two Australians to get on with it.

They went to Ferranti for pulse transformers, rewound 78 of them and after 30 months produced INFUSE, built on 24 demountable racks connected with co-ax.

"It looked like a whale beached in a shallow sea of brown spaghetti," he recalled, but it was duly installed in Melbourne in 1957. It took a week to get each new program up and running but it worked for nearly a decade until replaced by a Control Data 3400.

He returned to the Weapons Research Establishment in Salisbury, SA, where plans for testing the British Blue Streak missile at Woomera called for a range of safety systems including an impact predictor should a guidance system fail, and the missile be blown up in flight.

A computer system based on the English TREAC was running late and Robinson was sent off to beef it up and get it finished.

"It was a typical Pommy effort - no coordination and they were trying to build it in a laboratory. Just ridiculous."

His improvements included adding a square root facility to its code which solved the high-speed linear equations to predict its impact point. The predictor worked but Blue Streak was cancelled.

His career was characterised largely by a practical knowledge of physics and native ingenuity. He developed a device to detect even the smallest above-ground nuclear explosions.

It was a country dunny, parked in the SA desert, housing a 44gal drum with the guts of a tape recorder sitting on it. The trick, he explained, was in getting the size of a hole drilled in its 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 equivalent of $200.

In 1962 he took a civilian job with importers H.L. Heymanson, much to the disdain of his academic colleagues. After a faltering start in importing computers, Robinson secured the agency for Control Data Corporation, the first outside the US.

Amid a flurry of opportunities to computerise government departments like Census, the ATO and PMG, Robinson was up against stiff competition. So he wrote the specs, delivery time and cost for a machine designed to win contracts, and asked CDC to build it.

The result was the CDC3200 which won contracts from the CSIRO and Census. "You have one great win in your life, and that was mine."

In 1989, the then Minister for IT, Sen John Button, asked Robinson to help manage the rapid growth of government IT where "people with degrees in sociology were trying to integrate systems from half a dozen vendors based largely on cost".

According to Button, "he was terrific; he had to be direct and at one stage had 32 departments offside simultaneously".

He held to a simple philosophy: "You have to let people get on with what they have to do; tell them what's needed and when 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."

He retired, because he had to, at 70 but remained involved in IT through his work with the technology section of the Museum of Victoria (where he installed a Ferranti Sirius and tended its CDC3200), and working with students at RMIT and other institutions.

Generous with his time, knowledge and humour, his was a life of creating significant change in Australia's information technology evolution.

He died on June 13, 2007, after being ill for some months, surrounded by wife Kaye, and children Kate, Chris and David.

(A more comprehensive history is available at www.infoage.idg.com.au, search Trevor Robinson.)