Recently a Delft University affiliated company received a
grant of 135 million euros for the development of a new generation of
computers, quantum computers. It can be seen as a renaissance of the computer
building at Dutch universities and scientific institutions.
The first computer in the Netherlands was the ARRA I (Auto Relay Calculator Amsterdam). It was built in Amsterdam by the Mathematical Centre, now named CWI. It was a machine which processed with relays, switches operated by solenoids. In practice, the machine was not really useful. During the presentation on June 21, 1952 the machine was shown in the presence of the Amsterdam Mayor d'Ailly and Minister for Education, Arts and Sciences FJ Th. Rutten. The device had been given the assignment to present the a table of random numbers. It did produce it during the demonstration, but then the computer gave up. Its successor, the ARRA II, was a success. The computer contained radio tubes and transistors and core memory. This computer successfully carried out calculations for the Fokker aircraft factory and Delft Hydraulics. The ARRA I nor the ARRA II have been preserved. From 1995 more universities and scientific institutes such as the TU Delft and TNO started to build computers and from 1958 an industry started to spin out from the academic field with the company Electrologica, which was later acquired by Philips.
A movie about the computer earliest construction in the
Netherlands is now on YouTube. The film is produced by Google and realized in
collaboration with the CWI, the National Research Institute for Mathematics and
Computer Science in Amsterdam. The Dutch film has been produced with
substantive contributions from science historian Gerard Alberts (UvA), Paul
Klint, Research Fellow at the CWI, and computer pioneers Gerrit Blaauw, Dirk
Dekker and Jaap Zonneveld. The film is available through the Google Computing
Heritage Youtube channel, where Google already shows several web films produced
with the aim to provide the European information technology heritage to a wider
audience and to acknowledge the computer pioneers of the past.
Although the Netherlands had a company like Philips with an
electronic background, the first Dutch computers came from the university. From
1952 onwards, not only scientists studied computers, but they began to develop
them. Universities and scientific institutions even started to building them.
(c) ISSG
(c) ISSG
The first computer in the Netherlands was the ARRA I (Auto Relay Calculator Amsterdam). It was built in Amsterdam by the Mathematical Centre, now named CWI. It was a machine which processed with relays, switches operated by solenoids. In practice, the machine was not really useful. During the presentation on June 21, 1952 the machine was shown in the presence of the Amsterdam Mayor d'Ailly and Minister for Education, Arts and Sciences FJ Th. Rutten. The device had been given the assignment to present the a table of random numbers. It did produce it during the demonstration, but then the computer gave up. Its successor, the ARRA II, was a success. The computer contained radio tubes and transistors and core memory. This computer successfully carried out calculations for the Fokker aircraft factory and Delft Hydraulics. The ARRA I nor the ARRA II have been preserved. From 1995 more universities and scientific institutes such as the TU Delft and TNO started to build computers and from 1958 an industry started to spin out from the academic field with the company Electrologica, which was later acquired by Philips.
The movie is interesting as it focusses attention on
hardware. Attention is also paid to the Dutch computer pioneers, not just the
male pioneers. Striking is the story of
the computer women. In the analogue era smart girls were recruited from high
schools to solve computational problems. In the computer age, these women were
trained as programmers.
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