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Never one to let a golden opportunity pass him by, Adjunct Professor Terry Woodings of the School of Computer Science and Software Engineering organised a get-together of some of the University's - and the nation's - most respected computer experts recently.

Professor Woodings made the most of a visit to UWA by Professor Ian Reid to gather three former colleagues whose expertise spans more than half a century of computing in this State.

ARC Australian Laureate Fellow Professor Reid, a UWA graduate, is now Professor of Computer Science at Adelaide University. He received a BSc in Computer Science and Mathematics with first class honours from UWA in 1987 and, in the same year, was awarded the WA Rhodes Scholarship.

Professor Reid was at his alma mater to deliver the Australian Computer Society's Annual Dennis Moore Oration on the topic "Making Computers See".

The other invitees were Professor Andrew Rohl, also a UWA graduate and a contemporary of Professor Reid, who is now at Curtin University's Computational Chemistry Laboratory and the man who pioneered computing at UWA and in the State, Dennis Moore.

Professor Reid's father Alex and Professor Rohl's father Jeff - who, like Dennis, were extremely influential in early computing at UWA - were not in the room, but were present ‘in spirit' as the four discussed the incredible advances in computing and their contributions to the field.

Professor Reid said the computer vision applications in future that would most impact people's everyday lives were in visual safety systems in cars, in bionic vision for the vision-impaired, and in home-assistance robots.

The oldest member of the group, Dennis Moore, remembers a time when UWA's first computer took hours to do what today's computers achieve in seconds.

The first digital computer, the IBM 1620, cost £45,000 in 1962, at a time when a house in Cottesloe cost around £5,000. It was almost as big as a room in a house, but  was, however, a very powerful and valuable tool, he said.

Even back then the IBM 1620 was able to carry out pattern recognition. For example in muscular dystrophy research, it was vital in recognising distorted cells.

That first computer also carried out crystallography analysis, stored the statistics for the CSIRO and the Busselton Health Survey - and looked after the University accounts.

It was so much in demand by post-graduates that they took to sleeping on camp-beds beside it while waiting for it to complete overnight computations.

And Professor Rohl remembered being an undergraduate and using another generation of computers but still having to input programs on punched cards.

Professor Woodings, who was instrumental in the design of UWA's first Software Engineering Course, said today's students were fortunate to have the use of WiFi and the responsibility for their own computing.

Today, we enjoy the benefits of computing that few could have envisaged in the 1960s.

Professor Moore, who runs the Mainly Books second-hand bookshop, uses the Internet to compare his prices with those of his competitors around the world.

Professor Woodings told how his wife uses her bird-watcher app to tell her what bird she can see and hear - even down to whether it's a Baudin or a Carnaby's black cockatoo and whether it's roosting or in flight.

Professor Reid produced his mobile phone to show that he uses the same app.  At age 13, he spent Easter programming his own Space Invaders game on an early hobby computer and is now amused at how much his own young daughters know about computers and their interest in the animation on his presentation slides.

And Professor Rohl relishes the fact that his computational chemistry students can achieve in an afternoon what would have taken months 30 years ago.

Professor Reid's delivery of the Dennis Moore Oration came 51 years since UWA installed its - and the State's - first digital computer.

And it was one year since the University launched its powerful new supercomputer, known as Fornax, the cornerstone of iVEC, the Interactive Virtual Environments Centre, which was formerly known as the WA Supercomputer Program (WASP).

By Sally-Ann Jones