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IT lecturer says farewell

30 November 2005

Monash's longest-serving academic, Mr Barrie Milne, will retire at the end of the year after more than 40 years at the university.

Mr Milne (pictured), from the Faculty of Information Technology, joined Monash in 1964 as a senior tutor in the Department of Mathematics and soon gravitated towards the computing aspects of the discipline.

At the time, Monash had just two computers -- the Ferranti Sirius, which was located in one corner of the university's computer room in the Engineering faculty, and the control data (CDC) 3200, which took up the remainder of the room.

Mr Milne did all his work on the CDC 3200, which had just 16,000 24-bit words of memory and, unlike today's computers, remained competitive for at least 15 years with the newer mainframes that were introduced.

He said many changes had occurred throughout the years, the biggest of which was the increase in speed and memory of computers and the decrease in their size.

"When I started at Monash, computer access was via punched cards and there was a two-hour turnaround for completion of computations and printouts," he said.

"Hundreds of staff and students were using the CDC 3200 for their work."

Mr Milne moved to Monash's computer centre in 1975 to look after the statistical and mathematical facets of computing. At the time there were six academic staff in the centre, making it unique among computing centres, which were usually seen as service organisations, not teaching or research organisations.

Throughout his career, Mr Milne has been involved in various aspects of computer timetabling. Long before Allocate Plus appeared on the scene, personal class timetables were computed for all students in Orientation Week -- a nerve-wracking task requiring data entry for all classes on campus.

"I won't say it's a fond memory, but it's a strong memory," he said.

In 1990, Mr Milne developed an examination time-tabling program for the university.

"It had to optimise many factors such as staff preferences and spacing the exams evenly for each student. It was a big success."

Although he is retiring, Mr Milne's love of mathematics and computing will still be put to use, with plans to pursue different aspects of timetabling and numerical mathematics.