pprint-dispatch

May 21, 2012 8:18 PM

Can anyone tell me which institution offered the first computer science degree in Australia and when that was? My Google hand is not working.
posted by mattoxic to Computers & Internet (3 answers total)

Melbourne Uni (though it could have been RMIT) was offering something in 1974. My secondary school had a class in computing - we would get punch cards, punch them out and they'd go back to the Uni for 'computing'.

The punch card thing ... I'm glad we're not still doing that.
posted by Kerasia at 8:27 PM on May 21, 2012

I think it might have been RMIT, but it's going to be a difficult one to figure out exactly. Define "CS", and when it became a separate discipline to mathematics &/or physics?

AFAIK, John Makepeace Bennett is considered to have been Australia's first professor of computer science (at USyd), and in 1958 established a Postgraduate Diploma in Numerical Analysis and Computing which (much later) became a Postgrad Diploma in CS. But, again, that was in the Physics department there…
posted by Pinback at 10:12 PM on May 21, 2012

Best answer: University of Melbourne says: "The first computer at the University — and the first computer in the country — was commissioned at the University in 1956… Academic courses in computing followed not long after CSIRAC’s arrival."
posted by unliteral at 11:32 PM on May 21, 2012