Everitt of Sydney Office, for which we believe he was awarded the grand sum of £50 ($100), FABACUS, (First Australian Bank’s Accounting Computer Used in Sydney). The name was a very clever play on words, based on the ancient ‘computer’, the abacus, used predominantly in China and is still in use today by traditional Chinese people). FABACUS was commissioned by the then Bank of New South Wales – no
w Westpac – in August 1964 and started operating at the end of October 1964. FABACUS was established primarily to centralise the bank’s Trading Bank (Cheque) Accounts onto a computer system, replacing the manual / machine accounting operations in each branch within the Sydney Metropolitan Area. The first computer, developed by General Electric, was a GE-225 system that had 20 kilobytes of core memory and was the size of three wardrobe-sized compartments. However, it was no slouch and with efficient programmes could process 40 cheques per second. The cost and versatility of these early systems compare poorly with even today’s basic laptops in terms of pure computing, or calculation and decision-making power; however, the “magic” of FABACUS was its ability to manage multiple peripheral equipment, such as document handlers (cheque sorters), printers and tape drives simultaneously, without any obvious degradation in processing speed, something that users of today’s laptops etc will understand if, for instance, they have ever tried to print, say, two documents on separate printers at the same time. The computer programmes for FABACUS were purpose written by the Bank’s staff and were stored on punched cards that were read into the GE-225 from a punched card reader. The computer operators operated from a console by setting console switches and responding to output messages from a console typewriter. The main method of capturing the data was from two on-line document handlers which read the Magnetic Ink Character Recognition (MICR) encoding on the bottoms of cheques and deposits and stored this information on to ½ inch reel (2400’) magnetic tapes. The document handlers were also used off-line to sort cheques and deposits into branch order for their return to their respective branches. Some patterns of sorting required up to 13 passes through the machines. Other peripheral equipment attached were tape drives, (hammer or impact) printers, punched paper tape reader, card punch and later on a disk storage array. FABACUS Centre was installed in the upper floors of the Wales House building. Operations functions included Proof, Reconciling, Data Entry and Receipt and Despatch. Support functions included Balancing, Branch Conversion, System Development, Methods, Personalised Cheques, MICR Evaluation, and, of course, Divisional Management. Over time other applications were subsequently computerised – such as Unit Trusts, Staff Records and Salaries, the Bank’s Share Register, etc. Converting the Bank’s branches to FABACUS required specialist conversion teams that worked within each branch in advance, to implement a programme to prepare them for the changeover. Branches were converted on a weekly basis and the workload grew steadily. The growth in the workload meant that more time was required for FABACUS to process the work and this required the computer operators to start working shifts. The move to shift work took the Bank unawares as the FABACUS computer operators were the first white collar workers to work shifts. Shift work eventually evolved into 3 x shift teams that worked 8 hour shifts 5 days per week, rotating shifts on a weekly basis. FABACUS computer equipment eventually expanded to become three GE-200 series computers and peripherals and three document handlers. Within 2 years of FABACUS’ commencement the Bank was faced with the challenge of conversion to Decimal Currency. This change not only required replacement of all the accounting machinery within the Bank branches and in the FABACUS Support areas but also required significant major changes to all of the FABACUS computer programmes. On the conversion weekend of the 11th to the14 th February 1966, FABACUS was required to “rebalance the books twice” and to print every customer’s Bank statement twice - once in pounds, shillings and pence and a second time in dollars and cents. This extended process was remarkably successful. The FABACUS system began to be phased out when the Bank selected IBM in 1970 as its future computer supplier, requiring the redevelopment of existing systems and expansion to cover all Australian branches with data and computer centres in Melbourne, Brisbane and Perth and a data centre in Adelaide (which is now known as Westpac’s Mortgage Processing Centre – MPC). During the extended transition period from FABACUS to IBM, the original FABACUS hardware was very much showing its age and was subsequently replaced gradually but systematically by a Honeywell H-6060 series computer, which ran the FABACUS programmes under a process known as ‘simulation’, whereby the Honeywell computer ‘pretended’ to be the original GE-200 series computer. Whilst the upside of this strategy gave the Bank “breathing room” to convert all of the FABACUS systems to the IBM protocols, the downside was that it was a programmer’s worst nightmare, as everything modification / patch / whatever had to be made in the GE-200 “pure machine language”, taking into account the difficulties of converting a 20-bit-word instruction into a 36-bit-word Honeywell format. Needless to say, any requests for programme modifications were considered very carefully!! One item of information that is not widely known throughout the Bank today is that FABACUS was the basis of what is believed to be Australia’s first ever on-line, real time banking system. In 1969, when networks were purely “pie in the sky” hallucinations by "fantastists" who should have known better, the Bank successfully trialled just such a system, using West Ryde’s Savings Bank accounts as the trial “guinea pigs”. A very ambitious project for those times and truly, a harbinger of “things to come”.
