Science competitions

In 1966, when I came from Adelaide to Telopea Park High, I had an avid interest in science, so I sought out others with similar leanings. It turned out there was a group who had all been science and electronics hobbyists – Geoff Kingston, Richard Elliott and David Brown from our year, and Richard Swan and Stephen Bisset, amongst others, from the year below.

Now Geoff Kingston was a special case, because that year, 1966, he forsook the soldering iron to wear black turtleneck skivvies (remember skivvies) smoke Gaulois cigarettes and drink black coffee. His interest in science, if you could call it that, was now confined to reading Jung and Freud, and describing the motives and behaviour of those around him in such terms. He never showed interest in science again and would, ironically, come to embrace instead the 'dismal science' of economics.

The others of the group, however, remained committed young experimenters, and it was they who told me about the ACT Science Competition. We had no such thing in South Australia. I decided to give it a try. I can't remember whether David Brown or Richard Elliott entered, but I remember that Richard Swan and Stephen Bisset entered the practical part of the competition with a 'voice over light beam' demonstration, aided by an astronomical telescope borrowed from the Science Department. Gaspard de Jong, he of the thick black-rimmed glasses, entered the theoretical part of the competition with a paper on the newly discovered Noble Gas Compounds - I remember thinking that 'Noble Gas' showed much more flair than the 'Inert Gas' designation used in chemistry classes. I decided to enter the theoretical part with a proposed pharmacology paper on 'LSD and other Hallucinogenic Drugs'!

Remember the times. Hippies had not yet emerged into popular culture in the early part of 1966. At first 'LSD? What's that - pounds, shillings and pence?' was a common response to my paper's title - we had only just converted to decimal currency on the 14th of February. By the time of the actual judging, Haight-Ashbury and the Summer of Love had started, and Timothy Leary was urging everyone to 'tune in, turn on and drop out'... and my paper was, thanks to my father in the Patent Office, replete with the actual formula for the synthesis of LSD. Folks were scandalised. Had the nerdy new boy from Adelaide set up an 'acid' factory in his bedroom in Yarralumla?

He hadn't, but when Gaspard got first prize for his paper and I got third, I liked to think it was because the judges felt they couldn't give first to such a controversial topic. The truth is, Gaspard's paper was better researched and better written than mine.

The following year I teamed up with Richard Swan. We decided to go for broke in the practical part of the Science competition and build a computer! This was somewhat ambitious given that it was only just on twenty years since the first general purpose computer ever, ENIAC, had been commissioned. People still referred to computers as 'giant electronic brains'.

Transistorised integrated circuits, just emerging, would have been too expensive, so we would have to use bulky power-hungry valves scavenged from the office accounting machinery of the day. We found a suitable discarded machine in Sydney, and Stephen Bisset helped us truck it back to Richard's house in National Circuit. We stripped the machine down to the metal chassis, about the size of an office desk, which we installed in Richard's bedroom through the window. Mrs Swan must have been a very understanding mother.

Working, often past midnight, we unsoldered components and rebuilt them into the logic elements Richard had designed. I concentrated on the overall logic design, and we built proof-of-concept subsystems. We couldn't finish the computer in time for the competition, but won hands down anyway, on the basis of our logic schematics and proof-of-concept demonstrations.

We were overnight celebrities, on the front page of the Canberra Times. The ABC interviewed us on national radio, and I remember saying some particularly vacuous and irrelevant things.

Well, somehow the actual computer never got finished. I got bogged down in preparing for my HSC and Richard teamed up with Stephen Bisset to outclass themselves in borrowings from the school. They borrowed the entire stock of the school's stage lighting for well over a year to establish Canberra's first disco lighting venture! As far as I know, the computer chassis and its would-be components may still be rusting at the back of the garage in National Circuit.

In time, Richard, Stephen and I, as well as others from the school such as Jim Gillespie, would contribute to the development of computers. Amongst other things, Richard would come to head the laboratory which built the first internet search engine, Altavista. He went on to establish the Silicon Valley Research Center of software giant SAP.

I, amongst other things, would become the architect of Australia's pioneering system for computerised detection of money-laundering. This system, and its successors around the world, would eventually be used to help track the sources and flows of Al Qaeda funds in the War Against Terror. However that, as they say, is another story – a story that began in the schoolyard of Telopea Park High over 40 years ago.

Tony Rossiter