An Unlikely History of Australian Computing: the Reign of the Totalisator

A Dusty Legacy In 1994 the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney received a telephone call from the electronics company Amalgamated Wireless Australia (AWA), requesting that someone from the Museum be sent to inspect a collection of old totalisator equipment at one of the Company’s premises. AWA was Australia’s oldest and most high profile electronics manufacturer, and had come into possession of the Tote equipment through its acquisition of a company called Automatic Totalisators Limited (ATL), in the 1980s. This equipment, once used to mechanically calculate the betting odds at Australian racecourses, had long been redundant, and AWA was unsure what to do with it: should it just become landfill, or was it worth preserving?