Catálogo de publicaciones - libros

Information technology was introduced in the curricula at the Norwegian Regional Colleges in years 1965—1975. New Regional Colleges were established all over the country. In this period, we experienced the rapid development of minicomputers and the Norwegian company, Norse Data AS, played an important role in supplying suitable equipment for the educational market. This development was very well supported by the governmental policy in the fields of education and IT.

The paper describes the early user cooperation and states that it was an essential prerequisite of high level of IT in Nordic countries. It describes the cooperation in the domestic, Nordic and international level. It gives many examples but is not comprehensive by any means. It gives a very pessimistic view of the future.

This paper gives a survey of the pioneer era in Norwegian scientific computing. Right after the Second World War research councils and research institutions were established and young scientists got scholarships to study abroad. Many caught interest in the new mathematical machines. In 1950, the Royal Norwegian Council for Scientific and Industrial Research decided to build a Norwegian computer, later called NUSSE, and by 1952 the Norwegian Computing Center for pure and applied research, was organized. The paper describes activities at the universities in Oslo, Bergen, and Trondheim, as well as at the Norwegian Defense Research Establishment at Kjeller. In the late 1950s, both the Central Bureau of Statistics and the Norwegian Meteorological Institute installed their first general-purpose computers. This was before such computers were installed at the University of Oslo and at the NTH, the technical university in Trondheim. The paper closes noting the contract signed in 1962 for the first UNIVAC 1107 to Europe.

This paper explores the role of early IBM strategies such as installing “computing work horses” at various customer and own sites for shared use. It did this by making available a “super computer” at the Northern Europe University Computing Center, by making available programming languages and application programs to the computing community, and, not least, by conducting courses in state-of-the-art equipment and computing methods. The paper covers the time up to the advent of the IBM System 360 in 1964.

The paper relates how some key IT applications developed in Iceland following the introduction of the first computers in 1964. The key applications treated are the National Register of Persons, real estate assessment, financial systems, centralised processing of bank checks, fish stock abundance computations, IT in fish processing plants, the control of hydroelectric power stations, and the challenge of adopting the Icelandic alphabet to the use of computers.

This paper will address the mechanisms of computer technology transfer and the perceived role of computers in the modernization project of the Danish society, by analysing the early computer projects in Denmark. Especially it focuses on the similarities between the perception of computer technology and the visions of the welfare state as a modern, science bases and rational society.

In this article, the first Finnish computer construction, previously claimed to have produced only an out-dated machine, is studied as an integral part of an attempt to establish a national computer center in Finland. I argue that the aim of the Finnish Committee for Mathematical Machines (1954–1960) was more similar to its Swedish and Danish counterparts than has been recognized, even though the Finnish Committee decided to duplicate a German Gla computer in 1954. The similarity with Sweden and Denmark arises from the aim of the Committee to establish a national computing center, like the ones in Stockholm and Copenhagen, in Helsinki during its first two years. Furthermore, this plan for the national computing center, or the building of a single computer, the ESKO, did not gain the support it needed either from the state nor the former punched card machine users, because of the politically and economically difficult situation in post-war Finnish society. In the uncertain economic year of 1956, the Finnish punched card customers of IBM decided to continue collaborating with IBM alone. Moreover, IBM also benefited by receiving expert work force educated in the Committee’s computer construction project. Hopefully this Finnish case, being unsuccessful and therefore unlike other Scandinavian countries, can also assist in further comprehending the preconditions that lead to more successful developments like those in Sweden and Denmark.

This paper departs from the notion that most accounts of the early period of digital computer design and construction in Sweden have had as starting points a business and producer-centered perceptive which has hidden many of those activities that surround all complex technologies. It reinvestigates the ideological foundations underpinning the forming of a State agency in 1947/48, Matematikmaskinnämnden (The Board of Computing Machinery), with the responsibility to monitor all options and, eventually, to construct and manage two digital computers. In doing so, it attempts to understand what kinds of goals that the machines were to accomplish. The argument is that it is perfectly possible to perceive the Swedish computer project as a part of a larger process of change. The paper shows how professionals gathered information in the U.S. and interpreted it locally, and also how the initiative on the whole was a part of a new and progressive post-war agenda favoring basic research and, in particular, the advancement of mathematics for the purpose of modernizing both scientific and technological research and the society at large.

Several Finnish universities established chairs in computer science/information processing in 1965–68. Rather than reflecting natural evolution within universities, external needs motivated this. The first professors came from computing practice but had also academic ambitions. This paper is a recollection on how the new discipline developed in an atmosphere of conflicting goals

This paper first tells the rather unusual story of the acquisition of the first scientific computer by the University of Iceland. It then goes on to describe the efforts by the staff of the University Computing Centre to introduce key persons to the use of computers and to teach selected groups of people programming and assist them in using the computer. Finally, it lists several applications in widely different areas that ensued during the first six years of the computer’s operation.