History of the School

The School of Computer Science began in 1970 with four faculty members: Drs. P.A. Thomas, G. Lasker, W.C. Miller and B. Teiling, headed by Dr. Eric Channen.

There were two initial programs offered, a Bachelor of Computer Science (General) and a Bachelor of Computer Science (Honours). The popular language of the time was Fortran, and COBOL was also taught. Since that time, many undergraduate programs have been initiated, as well as a Master's and a Doctoral program.

The School boasted a Digital PDP-11 mainframe which ran on punch tape. In 1981, our first IBM PC was purchased for $10,000 and soon we were the proud pioneers of two PC networks on campus. In 1987, Dr. Richard Frost, steered the School in the direction of a workstation network which consisted of five stations run by Zaphod, our first Sun server, a 3/160 with two 155 MB disk systems.   Over the years our centralized yet distributed network has been based sucessively on: Sun 670 MP parallel-processing server, Sun Enterprise 350 server, Sun E6000 server, and Sun V800 servers.

The School's current state of the art facility now employs clusters of Sun Microsystems compute servers, NAS devices, and database servers to provide high-availability services.  A set of additional smaller servers to handle the diverse programming needs of services to support the School's teaching and research mission.  These servers run Windows 7, Windows 2003 Server, Ubuntu Linux and Mac OSX.