From mathematical sidetrack to a new discipline
VU was founded in 1880, with Mathematics and Physics formally established in 1930. For decades, computing was a curiosity rather than a programme. That changed in 1969, when a university committee explored “informatica” as a service shared across faculties. But instead of giving it a back‑office function, visionaries Reind van de Riet and Andrew Tanenbaum steered it toward a true academic discipline. One that would research, educate, and build systems in its own right.
Early computing: paper tape to UNIX
The department’s first steps were hands‑on. Work began an Electrologica X8 machine at CWI using paper tape: long strips of punched holes that represented data as binary numbers. In 1973, the department acquired a PDP‑11/45 minicomputer. A few years later, it became one of the Netherlands’ earliest adopters of UNIX: a groundbreaking multi-user operating system. Timesharing terminals arrived, student labs grew, and computing was now made accessible to many.
Education built for learning by doing
In 1981, Computer Science became an official education programme. Enrolments surged, demonstrating how quickly the new field resonated with students. Courses spanned systems, theory, databases, AI, networks, programming languages, and software engineering. Crucially, the department invested in labs, where students could write programmes, build tools, and explore networks.
Platforms that shaped practice
As technology advanced, so did the department’s computing park: from three PDP‑11 minicomputers to two VAX‑11/750 superminicomputers, and later Sun workstations and PCs. The team didn’t just use computers, they created software that travelled far beyond campus. A few early examples:
- Amoeba: A research operating system that explored distributed and parallel computing, long before “cloud computing” was introduced.
- Amsterdam Compiler Kit: A toolkit that made compilers portable across different machines, speeding up real‑world software development.
- MINIX: An educational operating system released with full source code and a plain‑English commentary. It helped generations learn how operating systems work and inspired and provided the base upon which Linux was built.
These projects were supported by custom multicomputers; racks of processors (from modest 8086 boards to an 80‑microSPARC zoo) that enabled experiments in parallel and distributed computing.
Building a national research backbone
Since 1997, VU co‑led the Distributed ASCI Supercomputer (DAS) programmes DAS‑1 to DAS‑6. Think of DAS as a network of cluster computers across Dutch universities, designed to make large‑scale computing accessible to researchers from computer science and other fields. Hundreds of projects used DAS to explore high‑performance, distributed, and data‑intensive computing, standardising methods and strengthening collaboration nationwide.
From foundations to global impact
Between 2000 and 2025, the department expanded strongly in areas such as artificial intelligence, security, bioinformatics, theory, and sustainability-focused software engineering, supported by major national and international research grants. Today, the VU Computer Science department builds on more than half a century of computing innovation, and is internationally recognised for its rigorous research, influential open-source contributions, and its broad, modern curriculum.
Interested in more details? Andrew Tanenbaum gave a presentation on the occasion of the retirement of Prof. dr. Henri Bal, reflecting on the department’s history. Here is an expanded version.