SILLIAC was "an almost exact copy of the automatic
computer at the University of Illinois, the ILLIAC, and as it is the Sydney version
of the ILLIAC, it has been called the SILLIAC", according to the SILLIAC Programming
Manual. ILLIAC (completed in 1952) was an early member of the IAS
Princeton family of computers.
Photo courtesy of the Science Foundation for Physics, University of Sydney
The SILLIAC, shown opposite being operated by Pat Dunlop,
entered regular use in July 1956.
Later, in 1958, the SILLIAC instuction set was extended to include various new instructions and at about the end of 1959 four magnetic tapes were introduced.
SILLIAC was switched off for the last time on 17 May 1968.
My copy of the SILLIAC Programming Manual contains a full description of the program codes as they were in 1958. I have scanned the manual and it is available here. As the total size of 44 Mb would represent a mega download, I have split it into three smaller, more easily managed .pdf files, comprising Chapters 1 - 5 (13.5 Mb), Chapters 6 - 12 (13.2 Mb), and the remaining chapters and appendices (17.0 Mb).
The manual (and the picture of SILLIAC) are reproduced here with the kind permission of the copyright owners, the Science Foundation for Physics at the University of Sydney.
I have written an emulator for the SILLIAC. It is written in C and operates under DOS. You can download it here. It has not been tested as exhaustively as I would like because little of the original SILLIAC code has survived. We have some code (Leapfrog, A12) with inadequate documentation (which we don't have working yet) and some documentation with no code.
Help in this regard (access to fully documented code for not just SILLIAC but also for ILLIAC or MISTIC) would be most welcome. If you can help, please get in touch.
The emulator emulates the 1958 instruction set. It can also emulate the 1956 instruction set, and as SILLIAC was, in 1956, an "almost exact copy" of ILLIAC it will probably serve as an ILLIAC emulator also. The main difference between the two machines was that ILLIAC had a magnetic drum while SILLIAC later had magnetic tapes. These would have led to certain differences in the type 8x and 9x codes for input and output but would not affect programs that use only paper tape.
Hardly any descendants of the IAS computer were exactly alike but some other copies of ILLIAC were very similiar to SILLIAC. For example, a program for the MISTIC (near the bottom of) the Michigan State University web site runs without alteration on the emulator.
We are fortunate that Wayne Lichtenberger had the foresight to preserve several volumes of documentation of the ILLIAC program library. They have recently (October 2004) been scanned by Al Kossow and placed on his web site. They are: the Active Library, the Auxiliary Library, and the Statistical Library.
Wayne also preserved a paper tape copy of the protected section of the ILLIAC drum, and details of this have also been posted by Al Kossow.
We are equally fortunate that the late George Brooks (who was SILLIAC's last engineer) kept a variety of notes about, and listings of, the SILLIAC maintenance programs, and that these later found their way into the archives of the Sydney Powerhouse Museum. The following copies are reproduced here by kind permission of the University of Sydney Science Foundation for Physics, and with thanks to the Powerhouse Museum for preserving the material and to John Deane for making the copies.
Leapfrog (2.2 Mb),
Orange Leapfrog (1.7 Mb).
As a result, a substantial amount of code is now available to test the emulator, and also to keep as a program library for the emulator. Not all the routines and programs are of equal interest (to me, anyway) but the ones I have reconstituted and tested are provided below.
Last update Tuesday, 2 November 2004.