COVID Stats Australia and Overseas shutdowns openings
Early COVID News
243 Aussie passengers (plus 4 pilots & 14 crew) left Wuhan via QANTAS flight on Monday 3rd February 2020 at 8am (local time).... Flight subsidised by Govt. Will spend up to 14 days in Quarantine on Christmas Island. QANTAS to cover all additional domestic fares.
Update Sunday Feb 16
Australians quarantined on Christmas Island were on Sunday preparing for freedom as the islands temporary quarantine station scaled down.
The 242 Australians who arrived from Wuhan on February 3 are scheduled to be delivered to Christmas Island airport after a short bus tour of local sights — but 36 Australian citizens and permanent residents will stay behind.
The smaller group landed on the Indian Ocean territory 48 hours after the first arrivals, via a rescue flight arranged by the New Zealand government that went first to Auckland.
They can leave on Wednesday if they remain virus-free.
The 24 doctors, nurses and clinicians sent to oversee the quarantining of Australians on Christmas Island were on Sunday packing up gear and a tent hospital in the grounds of the Howard-era immigration detention centre.
The medical group — including a pharmacist and paediatrician — are from the Australian Medical Assistance Team led by Dan Holmes, who described an optimistic mood among evacuees on Sunday. 'Everything is going smoothly,' he said. He indicated the Christmas Island detention centre could be prepared for more quarantine work at short notice pending any decision to send more people. 'AUSMAT are ready whatever we are asked to do,' he said. 'Our tents can be built up in two hours when required.'
The role of Christmas Island as a quarantine station was arranged swiftly and there was uncertainty about whether the island had capacity to receive more evacuees.
Another 266 Australians took a Qantas rescue flight out of Wuhan on February 9 to a former resource sector workers camp at Howard Springs, near Darwin.
Economy in 2022
By 2020, Australia the world's biggest exporter of Iron Ore ($79.6B). Top import was Cars ($13.7B)... Coal Briquettes ($36.4B), Aluminium Oxide ($3.59B), Sheep and Goat Meat ($2.7B), and Wool ($1.58B). Other top exports were Petroleum Gas ($26.8B) and Gold ($17.7B), exporting mostly to China ($102B), Japan ($31.8B), South Korea ($17.2B), United States ($11.6B), and India ($11.3B). Top imports were Cars ($13.7B), Refined Petroleum ($10.8B), Gold ($6.49B), Broadcasting Equipment ($6.38B), and Computers ($5.76B). Country: China ($57.2B), United States ($24.2B), Japan ($12.2B), Thailand ($10.4B), and Germany ($9.67B). China still largest partner
Tax Revenue Fed State Local
Total 2021 $593bn GDP $2 trillion
a. GST ABNs 2.4mn 12%
b. Company Tax 19%
c. Personal PAYG 11mn 39%
from 14.7mn returns
d. State (PayrollTax, StampDuty Rego) & Local (Rates) 19%
e. Fed (Customs, Excise, Fuel) 11%
More info
First an introduction
Early Computer(s)click here for the ENIAC, operational 1945-1955, initially at the University of Pennsylvania before being transferred to Maryland for US Army use in 1947.
...
It is often called the first computer with its coding capacity to conditionally "branch", as well as "loop", thus differentiating it from earlier adding machines and calculators. It was followed in England by the Manchester Baby in 1948, Cambridge University's EDSAC in 1949, and the US Army's EDVAC at Maryland first operational in 1952. They all followed mathematician John von Neumann's widely distributed paper in 1945 describing computer architecture, still used in almost all computers today eighty years later. IBM released its first computer also in 1952. In April 1957 following 3-4 years of development, IBM's "formulaic" software language compiler FORTRAN by John Backus was completed and ready for customer delivery.
COBOL, click here for those unfamiliar with its inventor, was a "business English" programming language which the US Department of Defence insisted that all computer manufacturers, if they wanted US Government contracts, had to be able to support. Launched in 1960, strongly supported by IBM after 1962, and the ICT/ICL 1900 series of business computers in England after 1964, by the year 1970 COBOL had become the most widely used programming language in the world.
Today it allegedly supports over 70% of business transaction processing worldwide, on IBM mainframes, including a vast number of Internet queries. In 2014 it was estimated that every second of the day there were 6,000 tweets sent, 30,000 Facebook "likes", 60,000 Google searches, and 1,100,000 IBM mainframe transactions processed worldwide.
Cobol is said to have 90% dominance in global financial transactions and is widespread through banks, supermarkets, governments, insurance and airlines. It's called a "third generation" (3GL) language. Standards are set by ISO / IEC, with 18 participating member countries and 27 observer member countries. The organization also provides oversight to five other (more formulaic) languages C, C++, Fortran, Ada and Prolog.
Click here for a brief summary of the meaning of 1, 2, 3 and 4GL languages. These early 3GLs contrast with later 3GLs (and 4GLs), now with run-time systems or "virtual machines" built using C and C++ compiled executables, e.g. Java now owned by the Oracle Corporation, and Javascript whose trademark is owned by Oracle, and standardized by Euro group ECMA International.
In Australia, click here for our Aussie banks IT systems (and some of the dramas at switching over to Java at NAB and Suncorp).
Click here and here for the level of demand for COBOL programmers worldwide in 2022. The estimated 800 billion lines of code in daily use, and $2 trillion said to have been invested over its 60 years via myriads of flowcharts and systems analysis, continues to play its part. While verbose, it is the most readable, understandable and self-documenting programming language available. Well written code is straightforward and robust — in a professional English-like way — explaining why financial institutions continue to depend on it. But the increasing dearth of experienced programmers will cause ongoing issues.
End of Intro
Go to Computer Timeline, World Wide Web & Language Aids