This article examines whether New Zealand’s geographic isolation, small domestic market, and post-colonial economic structure shaped the adoption of electronic computing between 1960 and 1975, and if this produced outcomes different from those in other countries. Drawing on archival sources, contemporary reports, and a compiled dataset of computer installations, we analyze patterns of growth, institutional development, and examples of local ingenuity. Import controls and limits on foreign exchange strongly influenced early adoption, encouraging shared use through service bureaus and slowing overall growth. We compared New Zealand with several other developed countries to establish whether there were any grounds for claims of exceptionalism during the early spread of modern computing. Our findings show that New Zealand’s experience largely followed that of other countries and, rather than being exceptional, tended to lag behind comparable economies. By placing New Zealand alongside these countries, this study contributes to a clearer comparative understanding of early computing history.

Garry Tee entered university in Auckland, New Zealand, in 1949 at the age of 16 and became a programmer in 1958 and an academic in 1964. By the 1980s he was a historian with a particular interest in Charles Babbage. This article traces his work over more than a decade, based on his personal archive. It focuses on eight distinct themes in his work, from his hunt for Babbage relics to his reinterpretation of a work by Lewis Carroll.

This article traces the history of New Zealand's information technology innovators from the late 19th century until the arrival of the first stored-program computers in 1960, a history that parallels the country's evolution toward a modern economy. Starting in 1879, various individuals deployed simple racetrack totalisators. At the turn of the century, Donald Murray became a leading figure in automatic telegraphy. As punched card usage blossomed in the 1920s and 1930s, Leslie Comrie moved to the United Kingdom, where he actively promoted scientific computation. By the 1950s, the economy had matured to the point where government, businesses, and universities were eager to join the computer age. We conclude with the stories of some of the first New Zealanders to write software during this booming computer age, and we were privileged to interview three of them.

The Bob Doran Museum of Computing at the University of Auckland, New Zealand, was formally opened on 14 July, 2022. The late Professor Robert W. Doran (“Bob”) established his “Computing History Collection,” and its associated timeline display, at the beginning of this century, and continued to develop it until his untimely death in 2018. The museum now spans six levels of the stairwell in Building 303S on the University's City campus, available during weekday working hours. It mainly covers modern computing, starting in the late 1950s, with a focus on New Zealand. Apart from papers and books retained by the University, part of Bob's large collection of old documents has been donated to the library at MOTAT, Auckland's Museum of Transport and Technology, forming the Robert W. Doran Collection. Papers from Bob's years working for the Amdahl Corporation in Sunnyvale, California, have been donated to the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California.

This document proposes guidelines for the design of Autonomic Service Agents for autonomic networks. It is based on the Autonomic Network Infrastructure outlined in the ANIMA reference model, making use of the Autonomic Control Plane and the Generic Autonomic Signaling Protocol.

An earlier study observed that until 2008, the size of the BGP4 system for IPv4 appeared to have grown approximately in proportion to the square root of the host count of the globally addressable Internet. This article revisits this study by including IPv4 data until 2020 and adding IPv6 data. The results indicate that BGP4 for IPv4 is continuing to scale steadily even as IPv4 approaches its end of life, and that it is working as it should for IPv6, except for a slight concern that the number of announced routes is trending upwards faster as time goes on.

Limited domains were defined conceptually in RFC 8799 to cater to requirements and behaviours that extend the dominant view of IP packet delivery in the Internet. This paper argues not only that limited domains have been with us from the very beginning of the Internet but also that they have been shaping innovation of Internet technologies ever since, and will continue to do so. In order to build limited domains that successfully interoperate with the existing Internet, we propose an architectural framework as a blueprint. We discuss the role of the IETF in ensuring continued innovation in Internet technologies by embracing the wider research community's work on limited domain technology, leading to our key insight that Limited Domains are not only considered useful but a must to sustain innovation.

This document describes a reference model for Autonomic Networking for managed networks. It defines the behaviour of an autonomic node, how the various elements in an autonomic context work together, and how autonomic services can use the infrastructure.

This document is a conceptual outline of the application programming interface (API) of the Generic Autonomic Signaling Protocol (GRASP). Such an API is needed for Autonomic Service Agents (ASA) calling the GRASP protocol module to exchange autonomic network messages with other ASAs.

There is a noticeable trend towards network requirements, behaviours and semantics that are specific to a limited region of the Internet and a particular set of requirements. Policies, default parameters, the options supported, the style of network management and security requirements may vary. This document reviews examples of such limited domains, also known as controlled environments, and emerging solutions, and includes a related taxonomy. It then briefly discusses the standardization of protocols for limited domains. Finally, it shows the needs for a precise definition of limited domain membership and for mechanisms to allow nodes to join a domain securely and to find other members, including boundary nodes.

How quickly did the computer revolution reach the most remote Westernized country? Conventional history holds that the first modern computer in New Zealand—where “modern” means electronic, and with stored programs—was an IBM 650 leased from IBM Australia by the New Zealand Treasury in November 1960, and officially inaugurated in March 1961. This article discusses an alternative hypothesis—that the pioneer was in fact an ICT 1201 ordered in 1959 and installed by the New Zealand Department of Education a few months before the arrival of the IBM 650.

Previous work on service oriented networking has mainly focused on the requirements of network operators and other service providers. This document proposes a new, backwards-compatible, approach to the topic that is directly aimed at end users and their requirements, but also has significant benefits for operators. It describes a proposed new mechanism for packet forwarding in edge networks, where the service required rather than an IP address acts as the vector for routing packets. Deeper in the network, the user's traffic is dispatched to specific services using conventional mechanisms.

This document aims to illustrate possible approaches to make network management and operations more autonomic in several aspects. The ultimate goal is that the network could run all by itself, so that users and administrators may feel that there is no network to take care of at all (a.k.a. Networkless). The approaches are described in a form of different levels (inspired by the Self-Driven Car levels). The higher the level is, the more autonomic management capabilities the network would have. Although some specific technologies are categorized into different levels, it is not the document's intent to rank them; rather, this document is more about discussing the possible next stage and the ultimate vision. Hopefully, this document could collect people's consensus in the industry and provide guidance for future technology developments.

This chapter reviews the history of Alan Turing’s design proposal for an Automatic Computing Engine (ACE) and how he came to write it in 1945, and takes a fresh look at the numerous formative ideas it included. All of these ideas resurfaced in the young computing industry over the following fifteen years. We cannot tell to what extent Turing’s unpublished foresights were passed on to other pioneers, or to what extent they were rediscovered independently as their time came. In any case, they all became part of the Zeitgeist of the computing industry. At some universities, such as ours in New Zealand, the main computer in 1975 was a Burroughs B6700, a ‘stack’ machine. In this kind of machine, data, including items such as the return address for a subroutine, are stored on top of one another so that the last one in becomes the first one out. In effect, each new item on the stack ‘buries’ the previous one. Apart from the old English Electric KDF9, and the recently introduced Digital Equipment Corporation PDP-11, stack machines were unusual. Where had this idea come from? It just seemed to be part of computing’s Zeitgeist, the intellectual climate of the discipline, and it remains so to this day. Computer history was largely American in the 1970s—the computer was called the von Neumann machine and everybody knew about the early American machines such as ENIAC and EDVAC. Early British computers were viewed as a footnote; the fact that the first stored program in history ran in Manchester was largely overlooked, which is probably why the word ‘program’ is usually spelt in the American way. There was a tendency to assume that all the main ideas in computing, such as the idea of a stack, had originated in the United States. At that time, Alan Turing was known as a theoretician and for his work on artificial intelligence. The world didn’t know that he was a cryptanalyst, didn’t know that he tinkered with electronics, didn’t know that he designed a computer, and didn’t know that he was gay. He was hardly mentioned in the history of practical computing.