1970
1 September 1970 Van de Riet was appointed professor of math with a specialization in informatica. Van de Riet gave his first lecture in WN-S303 but the room was much too small with students sitting in the aisles and on the floor.
1971
8 October 1971 – Reind van de Riet delivered his inaugural address: “Mathematics, computers and computer mathematics”. Andrew (Andy) Tanenbaum joined the department as an assistant professor. Here is the initial computer group.
1972
Students ran programs by punching them on paper tape offline on an Olivetti terminal. During the lab, we read the paper tape through a terminal that sent them to the MC (Mathematical Center, now CWI) over a 300 bps modem. There the tape was punched out and read into an X8 computer with 8 KB of memory. The X8 punched out the results on paper tape. The operator read the paper tape into a terminal that was connected to modem at 300 bps. The terminal in our computer room punched out the paper tape at the VU. The student could then read it into an offline terminal at the VU that printed out the tape. Needless to say, this process was horrible.
1973
1 May 1973, Jaco de Bakker was appointed professor for one day per week. His research was in the field of the programming theory. He gave two lectures on theory that day. The other days he worked at the MC.
We also scrounged up the equivalent of €500,000 and bought a PDP-11/45 minicomputer. The students didn't use it initially, but when we got UNIX V6, we could support 16 students online at once even though the disk held only 2.5 MB. We were ecstatic and loved the PDP-11/45 to death. We later bought a second 2.5-MB disk. The disks were the size of toaster ovens.
1974
The study program for all math students was changed. It became 8 semesters (down from 10). The first three were the same for all students. Then students had to choose among (1) pure mathematics, (2) applied mathematics, and (3) informatica. But most of the informatica courses were in math because we had only four staff members to teach the informatica courses.
1975
Informatica moved from the 4th floor of the main building to the science building, where we stayed for 45 years
We bought 1-KB cache memory for the PDP-11 to make it 2x faster. A man came all the way from England to install it.
The first Ph.D. in informatica was granted to Willem Paul de Roever, a student of Prof. De Bakker.
1976
We got mail. The PDP-11 at the MC, which also ran UNIX, got connected to the ARPAnet in the U.S. Their PDP-11 called our PDP-11 once or twice a day over the telephone system and delivered incoming email. We gave it our outgoing mail which it delivered to the ARPAnet. We now had a primitive email system. This was probably illegal because the PTT had a legal monopoly on telecommunications, but we did it anyway.
1977
We bought a MASSIVE 40-MB Ampex disk drive the size of microwave oven. This increased our online storage for student programs by 8x. A year later we bought a second one.
We bought a PDP-11/60 for microprogramming research. The software the manufacturer promised never arrived. The staff now had its own PDP-11 while the PDP-11/45 was used for student labs.
We started to get 25x80 ASCII glass terminals to replace the paper-tape-oriented Olivettis. Tanenbaum bought one for himself and a modem. He could now use the PDP-11/60 from home. This was absolutely cutting-edge technology: using a computer at the VU from home. Probably no one else in the entire country could use a computer from home.
1979
We bought eight rack-mounted 8086 workstations and ran our Amoeba research operating system on them. This was the first of many distributed systems we constructed and used in our research. We were in fact doing cloud computing 20 years before it really took off. We also bought a 9-track magnetic tape so we could store information offline. This was so much better than using paper tape or the tiny DECtapes the PDP-11s had for long-term storage.
1980
We bought our third PDP-11, a PDP-11/44 which was like the PDP-11/45 but newer. We also bought a daisy wheel printer, which was like an electric typewriter but could produce very sharp output that could be sent off to conferences for publication in the proceedings. Laser printers were still years in the future.
Tanenbaum became a personal full professor by order of the Queen (actually the minister of education). We now had 2.2 full professors
On 16 June 1980, the education law was changed to make it possible for universities to offer a degreee in informatica. The number of informatica students began growing sharply after this.
To read more about department history, click here.
Or go to Andy Tanenbaum's page.
Photo: A. Tanenbaum, 2000, machine room
