Along Adelaide’s “North Terrace” are a large grouping of 19th century buildings. These buildings are museums, universities, concert halls and of course, churches.

I knew almost nothing of Adelaide before our whirlwind visit. For instance, I didn’t know the CBD (and northern CBD) were completely surrounded by a ring of parkland. Very unique and great town planning — if only they’d stuck with it.

Along the North Terrace, we saw at least four or five weddings in progress, so it was difficult to avoid capturing a happy couple!

OK, so it’s been a while since I’ve posted. I’ve been lazy. In the time between this and the last post Christmas has come and gone (thanks to everyone for the hospitality and gifts; sorry I didn’t do the ‘haul’ roundup as usual), as well as the New Year. The drive-in the other week was cool, too.

At the behest of Justine, we made a trip into the city today to visit the Melbourne Museum. I hadn’t been to the museum since it was on Swanston Street and the underground train station nearby was called ‘Museum’ station. The exhibits at the new museum were — for the most part — quite underwhelming. The only exhibits that gave me any sort of pleasure actually centred around Melbournian history over the last hundred or so years.

The first, a short history of Melbourne, showed objects and explained what Melbourne life was like. I learned that Little Lonsdale Street was a slums to compete with some of the best slums in the World, as well as a red light district. Much of that exhibit wasn’t interesting but some of it was interesting enough to make me want to write about it here.

The second exhibit I found interesting was CSIRAC, which was Australia’s first computer and the World’s fourth (Wikipedia says fifth, but the exhibit says fourth, strange). The machine has six large cabinets to house it’s memory, which totals something like 2000 bytes of memory. Other large cabinets run the valve-powered 1000 Hz CPU and the 30,000w of power supplies. Obviously punch cards were a thing of the future in the 1950s, since CSIRAC actually used rolls of punched instructions. An amazing thing to see and it’s really the only unique thing I found at the museum of any interest to me that wasn’t a reproduction of the real thing.

There were also a couple of other 1960s computers which were interesting, but didn’t compare with CSIRAC.

So, Melbourne Museum: It’s OK … I guess.