Timeline

Timeline of Computing at Purdue

The following provides a historical timeline of computing at Purdue University. Some of the early Purdue history was gathered from The Origins of Computing and Computer Science at Purdue University by Saul Rosen and John R. Rice, A Century and Beyond: The History of Purdue University by Robert W. Topping, an Interview with Duane Pyle on the early history of Computer Sciences at Purdue University, Defining a Discipline: The early history of Computer Science at Purdue University, Studies in Computer Science by John Rice and Richard DeMillo, and a History of ECN. More recent information is taken from my own personal notes and research. 

The timeline is intended to document the historical events of the Computer Science discipline, the Purdue University Computing Center, the Engineering Computer Network, and other units at Purdue. The timeline spans the early formation of computing at Purdue through more recent events. 

Early Purdue Computing Years

1947 - Prof. Carl Kossack joins the Mathematics Department at Purdue, focused on statistical analysis. In 1948, Prof. Kossack was named the director of the statistical and computing laboratory. He was then named head of Purdue's Department of Mathematics and Statistics, a position he held until leaving for IBM in 1959. 

1952 - Alan Perlis joins the Purdue faculty as an Assistant Professor of Mathematics, hired by Prof. Carl Kossack. Holding a PhD from MIT, Perlis was one of the developers of the Algorithmic Programming (ALGOL) language. and participated in Project Whirlwind, one of the first computers developed for the US Navy. His many accomplishments, including stories from his tenure at Purdue, are documented in his IEEE obituary. 

1952 (October) – An IBM Card Program Calculator (CPC) system is installed and used on campus, located in one of the temporary buildings (Chippewa Building?). This system is used for statistical analysis, and later moved to ENAD.

1953 (February) - Two floors of the former services and stores building, renamed to the Engineering Administration building (ENAD), is remodeled and the IBM equipment previously housed in the Chippewa and Bio Annex buildings is moved to the newly remodeled space. 

1954 (October) – An ElectroData Datatron 203 (or 204) from Consolidated Engineering Corporation in Pasadena is installed in the Statistical Laboratory at a cost of approximately $125,000 (a $25K discount). It is installed in the Engineering Administration (ENAD) building. Professor Alan Perlis was the primary promoter of acquiring the Datatron system, including the $125,000 funding request to President Hovde. Burroughs would later purchase ElectroData in 1956. Sibyl Martha Rock, a female pioneer in mass spectrometry and computing, working at Consolidated Engineering at that time, was personally involved in the sale. The Datatron was chosen over an IBM 650. Duane Pyle was a graduate student under Professor Perlis at this time. (Note: See the ElectroData/Burroughs Datatron 205 Emulator page to try it out.)

1955 - Under Professor Perlis, the design and implementtion of the Purdue Compiler was completed, one of the first algebraic language compilers for the Datatron 204, along with students Joe Smith and Tom Cheatham, who later became a professor in computer science at Harvard University. 

1955 (December) - The Datatron 204 is first used to schedule two selected groups of students, 209 students from the School of Agriculture and 1,600 students from the School of Engineering. This effort is led by James Blakesley from the Schedules and Space Department based on initial planning in 1955. Purdue would continue to lead in the use of online scheduling for its students. 

1956 – Professor Perlis leaves Purdue for Carnegie University.

1958 - The Statistical Laboratory was renamed the Statistical and Computing Laboratory. Duane Pyle becomes acting head of the Computational Division. 

1958 (November) – A Univac Solid State 80 Computer and associated Remington Rand punch card equipment is installed in ENAD, and used primarily for room scheduling on campus. The installation did not come without controversy. Many, including Dr. Rosen, viewed the Univac as the same class as the Datatron, and not an advancement in the next generation of computing for a major university. These concerns precipitated additional discussion and committee work surrounding the increasing use of computing across several disciplines on campus. 

1959 – Professor Kossack makes a recommendation to President Hovde to establish a separate School of Mathematics from the Science, Education, and Humanities Department, and include computing sciences into the curricula. A recommendation is made by Harold DeGroff, Dean of Aeronautical Engineering, to create a committee to explore the creation of a computer research center on campus. 

1960 - Dr. Duane Pyle receives his PhD in Mathematics and is named head of the Computational Division. Dr. Richard Kenyon is named assistant head. 

1961 – Stanley Reiter, Professor of Industrial Management and committee member, outlined a committee findings in a “Proposal of Ad Hoc Committee on Computers” to President Hovde. The recommendation is to establish a "Computer Sciences Center" to conduct both research computing and computer science education. Members of the committee includes Dr. Duane Pyle. Establishment of the Computer Sciences Center becomes the forerunner of the Purdue University Computing Center.

1961 – The Mathematics department is moved to the School of Engineering, and renamed the Division of Mathematical Sciences. 

1961 (Spring) – A recommendation is made by Virgil Anderson, Director of the Statistical and Computing Lab, proposing the following named departments: Mathematics, Statistics, Computer Sciences, and Mathematics Education.

1961 - Magnetic tapes loaded with computer programs are transferred by car to offsite computer locations, including Allison Motors in Indianapolis and the University of Chicago, to be run on their computing systems due to lack of available compute time.

1962 – An IBM 7094 is installed in the Engineering Administration Building and leased at a cost of $30,000 a month. At the September 1965 Board of Trustees meeting, a 7094 was purchased outright for $506,473 from IBM. 

1962 (July 1) – The Datatron is retired from service. At that time, the nameplate from the 203 (serial number 103) is in the possession of Duane Pyle. On the same day, Dr. Samuel Conte begins a position as the Director of the newly formed Computer Sciences Center.

1962 (Summer) - Dr. Samuel Conte hires Dr. Saul Rosen and Dr. Duane Pyle as faculty members of the newly formed Computer Science department. Both Pyle and Rosen would have a significant impact in the development of the computer science discipline at Purdue, and with the development and operation of the computing facilities. Dr. Richard Kenyon and Dr. Robert Korfhage were also professors of the newly formed department. 

Early Computer Science Years (early 1960s)

1962 (October 24) (CS) – The Purdue Board of Trustees approves the new Department of Computer Science - the first computer science academic program in the United States with an initial class of 24 masters and doctoral students. The Computer Sciences Center moves to the Division of Mathematical Sciences. Part of Dr. Kossacks lab is split off to form the Computer Sciences Center, the forerunner to PUCC.  

1963 (April) – An IBM 7090 and an IBM 1401 are installed in the Purdue Computer Sciences Center in the Engineering Administration building, funded by  a 3-year $500,000 grant from the NSF. The 7090 was upgraded to a 7094 at a later date. The 1401 helped to eliminate the need to transport compute jobs to Allison and the University of Chicago. Popular computer languages used on the 7090 include Fortran II, Fortran IV, COBOL, MAD, FAP, and IBMAP, with 300-400 compute jobs run each day. 

1963 (CS) - J. Richard Buchi joins the newly formed Computer Science department. Professor Buchi is the creator of Buchi automation, a machine for accepting or rejecting inputs. Professor Buchi has a major impact in the theoretical computer science field. Professor Buchi passes away on April 11, 1984. 

1964 - Due to the split computing time of the IBM 7090 between the High Energy Physics group during daytime hours and other research computing projects, the High Energy Physics department purchased an IBM 7044 and moved out of the Computer Sciences Center. 

1964 – It is believed that the Control Data Corporation (CDC) 6400 is installed this year. The 6400 is essentially a 6500 without the functional units. 

1966 (September) (CS) - The last cohort of new Computer Science grad students that started in ENAD begin their fall semester before the department moves to the Mathematical Sciences building. 

1967 (Fall) (CS) – Saul Rosen returns to Purdue from The State University of New York as a faculty member in the Computer Science department. Professor Rosen remains a faculty member until his death in 1991.  One of his early contributions at Purdue is a a joint project between the Computer Sciences Center and the Computer Sciences Department. The development project created PUFFT, the Purdue University Fast Fortran Translator. PUFFT streamlines the ability to compile and run Fortan programs on the IBM 7094, improving the throughput for students and research jobs. 

1967 (August) - A Control Data Corporation (CDC) 6500 supercomputer is installed in the MATH Sciences machine room, adding to an existing CDC 6400. The 6500 contains two 6400 processors sharing main memory, and has a purchase price of $3 million. The purchase is partially funded by an NSF grant of $1.2 million as announced by Prof. Samuel Conte, head of the Computer Science department. This is to to date the largest grant ever awarded to a university. A crypt was built on the south end of the building to enable the system to be lowered down to the ground floor on large concrete slabs using a crane, as parts of the system were too large to fit into the service elevator.

1967 - Maurice Howard "Maury" Halstead joins Purdue as a faculty member in the Computer Science department.  Professor Halstead would make significant contributions in the field of software metrics and considered the "father" of decompilers. Professor Halstead passes away in 1979 and is buried in West Lafayette.

Purdue University Computing Center (PUCC) Years (late 1960s)

1968 – Saul Rosen is appointed director of the Computer Sciences Center, which is renamed the Purdue University Computing Center (PUCC). Professor Rosen remains director of PUCC until 1987. Also in 1968, John Steele is named the Associate Director of PUCC.

1968 - The Purdue University Fast Fortran Translator (PUFFT) Time Sharing System (PTSS), a joint development between the CS department and the Computer Science Center, enables an IBM 7094 to provide remote access via Teletype Model 33 or IBM 1052 terminals for developing and running Fortran IV programs. Short for the Purdue University Fast Fortran Translator, PUFFT enables thousands of student Fortran jobs to be run each day.

1968 - Construction of the new Mathematical Sciences building is completed at a cost of $3.9M, becoming the home for the offices and classrooms for the mathematics department and mathematics extension, the administrative offices of the School of Science, and the Computer Sciences Center. The new building sits near the former Purdue Hall, which was torn down in 1961. Purdue Hall was one of the first four buildings on campus, opening in 1873 first as the Men's Dormitory. It later served as the first campus library, as a recitation building, and was also used for chemical engineering laboratories, departmental classrooms, and offices for the YMCA and YWCA.

1968 - A Control Data Corporation (CDC) 6600 is installed in the newly constructed Mathematical Sciences Building. The machine room was originally designed to house the new IBM 360 system, which was behind schedule. The elevator shaft had to be widened to deliver the CDC 6600 to the new machine room. 

1968 - The Indiana Regional Computer Network (IRCN) connects several universities across the state to the CDC 6500 and IBM 7094 computers. With funding from the National Science Foundation, ICRN connected Ball State University, Muncie; DePauw University, Greencastle; Hanover College, Hanover; Manchester College, North Manchester; Rose Polytechnic Institute, Terre Haute; St. Joseph’s College, Rensselaer, and Wabash College, Crawfordsville. It also connected four high schools in the West Lafayette area: Lafayette Jefferson, Central Catholic, West Lafayette and Klondike. Purdue regional campuses in Indianapolis, Fort Wayne, Hammond and Wabash also participated.

1967 (CS) - The Computer Science department moves to the fourth floor of the Mathematical Sciences building. The Computer Science Center occupies the basement and ground floors of the building. 

1969 – A used IBM 7094 is acquired for a reported purchase price of $24K (list price $2 million) and installed in the MATH building machine room as a secondary 7094. It is affectionally called "Oil 94" by the CS grad students as it it oil-cooled and not air-cooled as with previous models. 

1969 – Development of a front-end system to submit compute jobs to the CDC 6500 supercomputer using an IBM 7094 takes place. This job submission facility is called PROCSY – the Purdue Remote On-line Console System. A 7094 is used as a front-end for terminal access to the systems, and later replaced by Modcomp computers. 

1969 - Dr Duane Pyle leaves Purdue for the University of Houston after serving as assistant director of the Computing Center from 1961 to 1962,  and as assistant head of the Computer Science department from 1965 to 1969. Dr. Pyle made significant contributions to early computing and those are documented in the book Breaking Ground in Computer Science. 

1970s

1970 - A statistical consulting office is formed with funding provided by PUCC to assist students with statistical design and analysis using both BMD and SPSS. The office is led by Dr. George McCabe, professor in the Department of Statistics. Once of the first consultant was Mary Ann Ross, a PUCC employee and grad student. 

1971 (May) - An IBM 7094-1401 is donated to the Purdue Computing Center by the Mobil Oil Corporation. This 7094 is used to support 100 additional terminals, adding to an existing 7094 supporting 60 terminals. These two systems leveraged the PROCSY system as front-ends to to the CDC 6500.

1972 (Fall) - According to the Daily News student newspaper in Muncie, Ball State purchases an IBM 360 from Purdue for a price of $381,164 to be used for "research by professors and students, instruction in computer science courses, administrative work and student jobs within the department. A primary use will be for expansion of interactive terminal facilities-equipment to solve programs fed into the computer."  (Perhaps this is the same IBM 360 that was to be delivered in 1968 or perhaps a 360 used by LARS.)

1973 (Nov) (CS) - Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie, creators of the UNIX operating system, present their first UNIX paper at the fourth ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles at Purdue University in November 1973. Chairs for the symposium are Herbert Schorr, Alan Perlis, Peter Weiner, and W. Donald Frazer.

1975 - Purdue joins the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET) a packet-switching network serving sites across the United States. The first sites were connected in 1969.

1976 – The CDC 6400 is retired from service, and a second CDC 6500 is acquired and installed in the MATH machine room. 

1976 (ECN)- The School of Engineering installs a DEC PDP 11/70, the first computer owned by the department.

1977 (ECN) - Dr. C.L. Coates, head of Electrical Engineering, advocates for more interactive computing resources for the engineering department while a number of existing small mini-computers are not being fully utilized. His efforts help to launch the Engineering Computer Network (ECN), charged to create and support engineering computing facilities. 

1977 (Fall) (ECN) - The DEC PDP 11/70 in Electrical Engineering is connected to a DEC PDP 11/45 (likely using RSX-11) in lab of Professor (Steven?) Bass. Witha 50-foot limit in the serial-based connection, both systems are in the Electrical Engineering building.

1978 (CS) – The Computer Science department installs its first DEC VAX 11/780, reported to be the first installation in a university. Through a discount provided by DEC, a printer, disc, and terminals are also acquired and installed. The VAX system is configured to connect to the AT&T/Bell Labs Indian Hills Network Processor 4 (ihnp4) via phone line to enable email access using the UUCP protocol. 

1978 (Summer) (ECN) - An agreement between the Electrical Engineering and Potter Engineering Center is signed to join their respective systems to the Electrical Engineering Network, the forerunner to the Engineering Computer Network. 

1979 (ECN) - Dr. John C. Hancock, Dean of Engineering directs the Schools of Engineering to establish their own respective computer facilities and connect to the newly formed Engineering Computer Network. The first connection of computers across building is completed between two DEC PDP 11/70s.

1979 (CS) - A group of professors, including Peter Denning from Purdue, Dave Farber from Delaware, Lawrence Landweber (who received his PhD in Computer Science from Purdue) from Wisconsin, and  Anthony Hearn from RAND, begin plans for the Computer Science Network (CSNET). CSNET is focused on providing networking across computer science departments in the United States. The goal is to make CSNET available to academic and research institutions that cannot be connected to ARPANET because of authorization or funding issues. CSNET goes live in 1981 after recieving a $5M grant from the NSF.

1980s

1980 - Construction begins on a two-story underground addition to the MATH building to accommodate a planned supercomputer installation. The addition adds 10,700 square feet to the building. 

1980 (Spring) (ECN) -  A DEC VAX 11/780 is installed by Electrical Engineering for student instructional use. All lab machines within Electrical Engineering are switched to the UNIX operating system and connected to the Engineering Network. 

1980 (Summer) (ECN) - A data transfer link is connected from the Engineering Network to the PUCC central computing network. At the time, systems at ECN include a DEC VAX 11/780, two DEC PDP 11/70s, and four DEC PDP 11/45s.

1981 - Dr. Saul Rosen initiates a project to capture the history of Computer Science and computer history at Purdue with Dr. Duane Pyle, with notes edited by Alice Penrod. 

1981 (Feb) (ECN) - The fist DEC VAX 11/780 is installed by Mechanical Engineering and made available to the Schools of Civil, Chemical, and Materials Engineering for instructional use. 

1981 (Mar) (ECN) - A DEC VAX 11/780 is installed and made available to the Schools of Aeronautical, Industrial, and Nuclear Engineering. Another machine is installed and made available for the Potter Engineering Center's Computer Integrated Design, Manufacturing and Automation.

1981 (CS) - The Computer Science Network (CSNET) goes live with its first three sites, the University of Delaware, Princeton University, and Purdue University. The focus of CSNET is to provide networking capabilities across computer science departments using the UNIX operating system.

1982 (ECN) - George Goble and Mike Marsh create dual-CPU support for Unix BSD 4 on the DEC Vax platform. 

1982 (Aug) (ECN) -  A VAX system is installed and made available to Chemical Engineering. Electrical Engineering installs a third VAX system, and additional VAX systems are installed in Mechanical and Civil Engineering. 

1983 (January) – A Control Data Corporation (CDC) Cyber 205 Supercomputer is installed in the MATH data center, with a configuration of a single vector processor, a scalar processor, 106 64-bit words of main memory, and 3 x 109 bytes of disk space. A new underground data center addition was added to the MATH building to accommodate the supercomputer. It was the second installation of a Cyber 205 in the United States. To submit computing jobs to the Cyber 205, the CDC 6500 and VAX 11/780 systems are used as front-end systems. 

1983 (ECN) - A VAX system is installed in the Potter Engineering Center. Two additional VAX systems are installed by Electrical Engieering. A VAX system is intalled and made available by Agricultural Engineering. These systems are connected to the Electrical Engineering Network.

1983 (STAT) - The Department of Statistics under the leadership of Dr. Shanti Gupta, purchases and installs its first in-house computer, a DEC VAX 11/780.

1984 - Purdue is awarded $5.5M by the National Science Foundation to purchase access to the Cyber 205. Saul Rosen was the principal investigator. Purdue became one of the first national supercomputing providers, along with the University of Minnesota, and Boeing Computing Service. In the following year, NSF would start the supercomputing centers program, funding National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC), Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center (PSC), Cornell Theory Center, and the von Neumann Center.  Note that NCSA, SDSC, and PSC are still supercomputer centers today.

1984 (ECN) - A VAX system is installed and made available by Industrial Engineering. 

1984 - (Oct) - Purdue hosts the Supercomputer Applications Symposium for some 125 institutions that are using the Control Data Cyber 205. The symposium is to exchange common experiences and to discuss results of research projects performed on the Cyber 205 supercomputer.

1985 (Fall) – The Memorial Gymnasium is renovated and becomes the new home for the Computer Science department on the West Lafayette campus.

1985 (?) – A Sequent Computer Systems Balance 8000 parallel computer system is brought on-line in the MATH data center. This system used National Semiconductor processors, and ran a BSD Unix variant called DYNIX. Later versions installed at Purdue included at least two Sequent Balance 21000 models, with 12 processors, 24M of memory, and 3 single Eagle drives. One of the 21000 models was used as a campus print server. 

1985 (ECN) - A Gould PowerNode 9080 system is installed and made available by Electrical Engineering. The PN9080 ran the UTX/32 4.3BSD Berkeley Unix-based operating system, and was one of the first systems with Unix support for multi-processor shared memory. A second VAX is installed and made available by Agricultural Engineering. Additional CPUs are added and made available in two VAX systems by Civil Engineering.  

1986 (ECN) - Three additional Gould PowerNode 9080 systems are acquired and installed in Mechanical and Civil Engineering, and one in Grissom.

1987 (?) – A Sequent Computer Systems Symmetry system is installed in the MATH data center. Similar to the Balance line, the Symmetry uses Intel 80386 processors. At least 2 more Symmetry systems are installed over the next few years. 

1987 – Saul Rosen retires as the Director of the Computing Center.

1987 (June) (ECN) - The first Gould NP1 is delivered to Purdue University (Engineering) and installed for use.

1987 (ECN) - 100+ Sun Microsystems workstations are purchased and installed across the Schools of Engineering.

1988 – John Steele is named Director of the Purdue University Computing Center. 

1988 (ECN) -Three Gould NP1s are acquired and replace the Gould PN9080s in Mechanical and Civil Engineering, and in Grissom sites. The new Materials and Electrical Engineering Building (MSEE) is completed. 

1988 (March) – A second CDC Cyber 205 is acquired from a university in Florida in March for $1. It is shipped, installed, and running by late fall in the MATH data center.

1988 (March 7) – The CDC 6600 is retired from service. 

1988 (May) – A DEC VAX 8800 computer running Ultrix 2.2 is installed and made available to campus. Using a grant from the National Science Foundation, the 8800 (mace.cc) is used as a front-end to the Cyber 205 supercomputer. 

1988 (June) – Several new C.itoh Ion Deposition printers are installed across campus.

1988 (Nov 2) - PUCC Unix systems began exhibiting a high-CPU load with unknown activity, later determined to be from the Morris worm. Eugene "Spaf" Spafford would write a comprehensive evaluation titled The Internet Worm Incident about the Morris worm. 

1989 – An AT&T Information Systems Network (ISN) switch is installed, allowing terminals across the campus to “DIAL:” up various computer systems located in the MATH data center. It replaces the Serial Data Switch (SDS). The SDS was designed, built, and maintained by PUCC engineers, and provided serial communication from buildings across campus to computing services in the MATH machine room. 

1989 (ECN) - Additional systems from Sun Microsystems are purchased and installed across various engineering sites, bringing the total number of systems to 36 servers and 350 workstations. More than 90% of the 275 Apple MacIntosh computers are connected to the Electrical Engineering Network.

1989 – Approximately 20 NeXT Computer workstations are installed in MATH B22 for student use. These systems run an operating system called Mach, based on BSD UNIX, and use display postscript for rendering output to the monitor. NeXT was founded by Steve Jobs after his forced exit from Apple Computer. Interestingly, Steve Jobs ordered the first online order of pizza (with tomato and basil) from a NeXT workstation using CyberSlice.

1989 (January) - Computer labs in ENAD are outfitted with Zenith PCs and Apple Macintosh computers and used for student instructional computing. 

1989 (February) - Installation of an ETA-10P supercomputer is installed in the MATH data center. The ETA 10-P was provided by ETA Systems, a spinoff of Control Data created in 1983. The system undergoes configuration and testing before its general availability to campus in January of 1990. The ETAP 10-P was an air-cooled supercomputer. At Purdue, the ETA-10P used a variant of System V UNIX, not the optional EOS operating system (EOS was developed using Cybil and was binary compatible with the earlier VSOS operating system). Just 25 ETA 10 systems were delivered before CDC shut down ETA Systems in April 1989. The hostnames pete.cc and boiler.cc were assigned to the ETA-10P. The ETA-10P was shipped with a set of operator chairs for the console. 

1989 (May) – The last RSTS/E system (RSTS-F) is retired from service. The Resource Sharing Time Sharing Extended (RSTS/E) operating system provided multi-user time-sharing access. RSTS/E was developed by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) and ran on the PDP-11 series of 16-bit minicomputers, providing general computer access and word processing capability using Word 11.

1989 (July) – The DEC VAX 11/780 (i.cc.purdue.edu) is retired from service. 

1989 (August) – Three additional DEC VAX 11/780s (k.cc.purdue.edu, h.cc.purdue.edu, s.cc.purdue.edu) are retired from service. These systems provided general UNIX access for various departments, including instructional use.

1989 (August 2) – The Control Data Corporation (CDC) 6500 is officially retired from service and powered off. the 6500 served over two decades of service to the university. The machine is sold to the Chippewa Falls museum in Minnesota, and later (2013) to the Living Computer Museum in Seattle, Washington. The museum has the 6500 running, although the future of the museum is now unknown (as of 2022).

1989 (November) – Rob Stanfield moves from the Operations Group to User Services, working under Bill Whitson to support research activity. Primary responsibilities at that time were user support of the computing systems, magnetic tape management, data conversion, research and system usage, Kermit support, documentation development, and the development and teaching of short courses for the research systems and other computing services. 

1990s

1990 (January) – A CDC ETA10-P supercomputer is announced for use on campus. A vector computer, the ETA10-P runs a modified version of AT&T System V Unix and uses the Network Queuing System (NQS) for submitting batch jobs. 

1990 (August 7) – The VAX 11/780 (n.cc.purdue.edu) is retired from service. 

1990 (September) - The Purdue Computer Emergency Response Team (PCERT) team is established "in response to growing local and national concern about computer security, the Computer Science Department (CS), the Engineering Computer Network (ECN), and the Computing Center (PUCC)  have  formed a cooperative, non-binding  advisory group, called the Purdue Computer Emergency Response Team (PCERT), to consult on computer security issues at Purdue." Gene Spafford was one of the key people in establishing PCERT.  

1991 (June 9) – Saul Rosen, a true pioneer in the computing field, passes away. An abbreviated list of his life accomplishments are available in his IEEE obituary. 

1991 (ECN) - 50 additional Applie Macintosh computers are deployed and connected to the Electrical Engineering Network, bringing the total number of Macs to 331. A lab of 20 IBM PC clones is installed by Civil Engineering. 

1992 (ECN) - An additional 30 IBM PC clones are added to the Civil Engineering lab. 

1992 – An Intel Paragon XP/S Model 10 parallel computer (galaxy.cc) is installed in the MATH data center. This system consisted of 140 compute nodes, thirteen I/O nodes, three HIPPI (network) nodes, one Ethernet node, one boot/service node, and four service nodes, based on the Intel i860 RISC microprocessor. 

1992 (December 30) – The DEC VAX 11/780 (j.cc.purdue.edu) is retired from service. This particular VAX was the first Purdue system connected to the ARPAnet, and provided access to early download sites such as simtel20.arpa.

1993 (February) - An IBM 3083 mainframe is installed in the MATH data center to support campus library services. 

1993 (May 23) – The IBM 6670 Information Distributor (LASER1) connected to the VM/CMS system is retired from service.

1993 - An Administrative Computing Master Plan (ACMP)  was completed by MI, establishing campus electronic data as University-owned, and laying the groundwork for administrative and academic data to be used in decision support systems. 

1993 (ECN) - Upgrades in the Schools of Engineering brought the total number of systems to 14 major network hosts, 70 file servers from Sun Microsystems, around 600 Sun Microsystems workstations, and 729 Macintosh computers. with the majority connected to the Electrical Engineering Network. 

1993 (July) – Carol Shelley, a documentation specialist and maintainer of the PUCC document library, retires. Tom Putnam, manager of User Services, leaves PUCC for a position at Texas A&M. 

1993 (July) - The Computing Center reorganizes into four specific service areas:  Computing Services, Instructional Computing, Purdue Data Network, and Research Computing.

1993 (August) - An announced plan for retirement of the Cyber 205 supercomputers begins. 

1993 (December) - The ETA-10P is retired from service. Issues and delays in the move from the previous VSOS (Virtual Storage Operating System) operating system to UNIX contributed to the short lifespan of the company. 

1994 (March) - The ETA10P, also known as boiler.cc, is turned off and sent to salvage. The ETA-10P provided 30,588 hours of computing cycles to the Purdue community, in service from February 1989 through December 1993.

1994 (March) - The Versatec electrostatic printing service is retired. The Versatec printers used a long, continuous roll of paper that was periodically removed and separated into individual printouts. This required an operator to separate the individual printouts with a razor blade, "rolling" the printout, and filing each for pickup.

1994 (July 1) - The "LCD" Cyber 205 supercomputer is powered down at 9:45am (a Friday).

1994 (ECN) - A one million dollar upgrade project, sponsored by Engineering Dean Henry Yang, provides for the purchase and installation of 10 Sun Microsystems SPARCServer 1000 servers and 150 Sun Microsystems workstations. As part of the upgrade, the remaining VAX systems are retired, and all but two of the Gould systems are retired. 

1994 (Fall) – The first Residential Network (ResNet) on the Purdue campus is enabled in the Hillenbrand Hall residence hall using Data-over-Voice (DOV) modems. Connections speeds of 9600 baud provided internet access to each student dorm room. 

1994 (Fall) - The NeXT workstations in MATH B22 are retired from service. 

1994 (Fall) - The Sequent system expert.cc.purdue.edu becomes a computing home for students through the use of an Individual Instructional Accounts (IIA), which could be used for general computing needs. At that time, students chose their own username. Students could perform general computing needs using the expert system's DYNIX operating system, including the ability to send and receive email. 

1994 (September) - The MATH B6 lab is outfitted with NCD workstations (X19) running the X11 X-Windowing system.

1994 (October) - With the rise in computing needs, the consulting group is split into an Instructional Consulting group, with a general consulting group created and reporting to Rob Stanfield. The MATH Consulting group provided consulting services for PUCC computer systems, the forerunner of the campus IT help desk.

1994 (October) - An IBM RISC/System 6000 Model 590 is installed in the MATH data center. 

1995 (January) - The Zenith Z-29 terminals in the MATH B4 lab are replaced with NCD X11 (NCD19) workstations.

1995 - An IBM Scalable POWER system (cloud.cc.purdue.edu) is deployed. Originally installed with 18 nodes, each node used a POWER-2 processors, 256 MBytes of main memory, 2 MBytes of level 2 cache, and 2 GBytes of local disk space.

1995 (Summer) (ECN) - An operating system conversion to Sun Microsystems Solaris is nearly completed, along with the retirement of most Sun 3 systems. ECN begins support for the IBM PC systems. Two high-speed network links are installed.  

1995 (August) - To meet the growing demand for PC access, the MATH B10 area is converted into an overnight lab open from 6pm to 7am with 12 PCs and 12 Macs. The expert.cc server, used for general purpose access, is upgraded to a Sun Microsystems Sparcserver 1000. 

1996 (July 1) – The DEC VAX 8800 (mace.cc.purdue.edu) is retired from service. This system served general purpose research services and was a front-end for access to the Cyber 205.

1996 (July 1) – The first CDC Cyber 205 (LCD) is retired from service.

1996 (ECN) - An upgrade of the ECN network backbone from Ethernet to Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) is completed. Several Sun Microsystems Ultra workstations are installed. 

1997 (January) – Ken Adams, a longtime PUCC employee, passes away at the age of 49. Ken began working at Purdue in 1969, spending a large portion of his tenure in support of the Fortran programming language on several PUCC systems. Many of us will remember the stacks of printed output in Ken's MATH office. 

1997 (January) – The CDC 4680 archive server (keep.cc.purdue.edu) is replaced with a Unitree Mass Storage System running on Sun hardware (fortress.cc.purdue.edu).

1997 (February 28) – The VAX (sage.cc.purdue.edu) is retired from service.

1997 (August) - Intel awards a grant to Purdue for $6.2 million over a three year period. The grant provides Purdue both hardware and software to be used "primarily for research and teaching, with some equipment going into student labs. Nearly 150 faculty representing 17 academic departments across a variety of disciplines will use the equipment." per the Purdue News release. 

1997 (Fall) – Rob Stanfield moves from the User Services group to the Accounts Group. His primary focus is to implement a plan to provide the campus with a single account credential, called the Purdue Career Account, to be used across campus computing systems. The underlying system used to provision the Purdue Career Account is the Account Maintenance System (ACMAINT), originally developed by software engineers at ECN, and jointly implemented by PUCC and ECN. 

1998 (March) - John Steele, Director of the Computer Center, is awarded as the principal investigator an NSF grant of $305k to connect Purdue to the Very high-speed Backbone Network Service (vBNS). This provided high-speed connections between supercomputing centers and to select access points in the United States.

1998 (October 15) - The Sun 3 (csd.cc.purdue.edu) is retired from service. This system is used as the primary mail and file server for the Computing Services Division (CSD) of PUCC.

1998 (November) - A cluster of IBM RS/6000s is purchased and deployed for various research purposes. Consisting of IBM Model 560s, 580s, 590s, and 595s, the cluster provides batch services using the Network Queueing System (NQS). The hosts are known as rapid.cc, swift.cc flash.cc, lively.cc, quick.cc, fleet.cc, racer.cc and runner.cc.

1998 (December) – The Multimedia Instructional Development Center (MIDC), under the leadership of John Campbell, moves and becomes a part of the Purdue University Computing Center.

1998 (ECN) - A grant from Intel and Professor Kent Fuchs enables ECN and other departments on campus to increase the use of Microsoft Windows based PCs running Intel processors (the Purdue Data Network Infrastructure Intel Grant) and a migration to 10-Base-T networking. By December 31, 1998, there are 14,761 ECN users, 561,700 ECN accounts, and over10 Terabytes of disk space storage.

1998 - The Control Data Corporation (CDC) exits the computer hardware business, ending a long run of successful supercomputers. Several CDC systems are deployed over the years at Purdue, including the CDC 6400, CDC 6500, CDC 6600, Cyber 205, and the ETA10. 

1999 (April) – An ACMAINT transaction daemon (transd) was implemented and installed for use on the Student Systems Information (SSINFO)  system, thus joining it to the Purdue Career Account services. This enables students to use their Purdue Career Account to log in to SSINFO, reducing the number of credentials used by students.

1999 (June) – As part of a move to the consolidated Purdue Career Account, students visiting campus for Day on Campus are issued a Day-on-Campus ID card in their enrollment packet. The Day-on-Campus ID card is used to swipe at one of the on-campus labs to activate and set up their Purdue Career Account. Using specially programmed mag-stripe keyboards with custom firmware from Cherry GMBH, the ID card uses a custom application developed by PUCC software engineers. Students are then able to activate their career account credential, find their email address, set up a password, and print a copy of their Purdue Career Account information.

1999 (Fall) - An NCR WorldMark 5100 Teradata database system, donated by NCR and WalMart and valued at $7M, is installed in the MATH machine room to support large-scale database and data warehouse research. The system includes 80 processors, 20G of memory, and 400 drives with 1.6T of storage capacity, and believed to be the largest system in the world.

1999 (Fall) – PUCC begins a second phase of computer account consolidation by merging the Purdue Mail*Hub account with the Purdue Career Account. The Mail*Hub system provided the @purdue.edu email address for faculty, staff, and students. This change provided students, staff, and faculty a single logon credential across all of the various PUCC systems. Once the two usernames were merged, it is considered a coordinated career account, reducing multiple student credentials to a single logon credential.

2000s

2000 (January 6) - The IBM 3090 mainframe (vm.cc.purdue.edu) is retired from service. While primarily used for business computing of the university, it is also used for academic purposes including CPT courses. The system was connected to both the Internet and BITNET networks.

2000 (May 23) – The Intel Paragon XP/S Model 10 parallel computer (galaxy.cc) is retired from service.

2000 (Summer) – The IBM SP-2 parallel computer is upgraded to 64 nodes. Each node used a 375 MHz POWER3-II CPU with 4 GB of RAM. 

2000 (ECN) - A technology fee enables ECN to begin a refresh of servers and workstations across the Schools of Engineering. Network connections are moved to a new high-speed campus network backbone.

ITaP (IT@Purdue) Years

2001 (Fall) – The Purdue University Computing Center (PUCC), Management Information (MI, formerly ADPC), and the Telephone Office (TEL), are merged to form a centralized department called Information Technology at Purdue, or ITaP. James R. Bottum is named the first CIO of the combined departments. Two groups that are performing computer account management are merged under a single unit managed by Rob Stanfield. 

2001 (December) - A $5.3 million project connects Purdue, IU, and IUPUI with an ultra-high-capacity statewide communications system called I-Light. I-Light provides gigabit Ethernet connections between the campus networks at West Lafayette, Indianapolis, and Bloomington.

2002 - Purdue is awarded an $861K grant to build the Envision Center for Data Perceptualization. The center opened in the space formerly occupied by the PMU Billiard Hall. featuring a VR CAVE, a tiled wall, video conferencing capabilities, and haptic devices.

2002 (ECN) - Workstations running the Linux operating system are deployed and supported by ECN. The total number of supported computers is 3,721, with 8,684 users and 673,862 ECN accounts, Wireless networking is installed in four of the School of Engineering buildings. 

2002 (July) - An IBM RS/6000 Scalable POWERparallel (SP) supercomputer is installed, more than 15 times more powerful as it's current system per John Steele. The SP system contains 272 processors with a total memory of 288 gigabytes.

2003 (March) - A $3.6M gift from Sun Microsystems provided five new Sun Fire 6800 servers and two refurbished Enterprise 10000s for research applications. 

2003 (April) - Purdue deploys its first Beowulf Linux cluster using over 1000 PCs that were previously used in the academic computing labs. The "recycled" cluster initially dubbed "Scrap Iron", later dubbed "Radon", ran until 2018 using a continual refresh of retired lab PCs.

2003 (ECN) - Bill Simmons, a longtime Director of ECN, retires after 27 years of service to the Schools of Engineering. 

2004 (Summer) - Former PUCC office space in MATH is vacated for academic faculty and graduate students, moving ITAP staff to other spaces around campus, including converted retail space in the Purdue West Shopping Center. 

2004 - In 2004, the former PUCC research computing division is renamed the Rosen Center for Advanced Computing (RCAC) in honor of Saul Rosen.

2004 - The first research community cluster Hamlet is deployed with 4 faculty partners.

2004 (October 11) – The accounts group converts the ACMAINT infrastructure to a new Sun 240 server, and the underlying Oracle database to Sun 440 server hardware. 

2004 (ECN) - Dave Carmichael becomes Director of ECN.

2005 - A 1024-node community cluster named Lear is deployed. 

2005 - Purdue is awarded $4M to provide resources to the TeraGrid, an integrated set of high-performance computers, data resources, and tools provided by 11 research partners. Initially, the "Radon" recycled cluster and the IBM SP were offered as shared services to other Teragrid sites. 

2005 (July) – John “JJ” Jackson and Dale Talcott, long-time systems programmers with PUCC and ITAP, leave Purdue. 

2006 - The Lear cluster replaces Radon as Purdue's Teragrid system.

2006 - A Condor pool is made available as a computing resource to the TeraGrid.

2006 (CS) - The new Lawson Computer Science Building opens as the new home for computer science, information security, and high-impact computing for Computer Science. The new building is located on the site of the former Black & Gold (Barf & Gag!) restaurant and the Black Cultural Center. 

2006 (ECN) - ECN begins technology support for Discovery Park. More than 25 Terabytes of storage and 250 million files are managed by ECN.

2006 (June) – James R. Bottum leaves Purdue for a position as Chief Information Officer at Clemson University in South Carolina.

2006 (November) - Purdue is awarded $6M in support of the NorthWest Indiana Computational Grid (NWICG). Among other resources, the NWICG supported the deployment of an SGI Altix with 512 cores, 1 TB of RAM, and 33 TB of disk.

2006 (July) – Dr. William G. “Gerry” McCartney is named interim Vice President and CIO for Information Technology at Purdue (ITaP). Gerry accepts the permanent position as Vice President and CIO in September of 2006.

2007 (Oct) – Wendy Lin, systems programmer with PUCC and ITAP, leaves Purdue.

2007 (November) - Purdue is awarded $1.7M and named one of the High-Performance Computing Operations centers (HPC-OPS) to further support operations of the Lear and Condor systems to the Teragrid.

2008 (May) – The Steele supercomputing cluster is installed in the MATH data center in a single day. It consists of 852 64-bit, 8-core Dell 1950 and 9 64-bit, 8-core Dell 2950 systems with various combinations of 16-32 GB RAM, 160 GB to 2 TB of disk, and 1 Gigabit Ethernet (1GigE) and InfiniBand local to each node. The new system debuts at number 105 on the Top 500 list. The cluster is named after John Steele, former Director of the Computing Center. The new Steele cluster replaces Lear as Purdue's Teragrid system.

2008 (June) - An SiCortex SC5832 is deployed in support of research applications. The system uses 40 times less power than traditional supercomputers, containing 972 nodes and 5,832 cores.

2008 (Nov) - An online game is released by RCAC that enables players to run a virtual supercomputer. Called Rack-A-Node, the game enabled players to optimize the supercomputer to deal with waves of science jobs that are submitted, similar to how real supercomputers operate. (Note: Link no longer resolves.)

2010s

2010 (April) - Engineers from Purdue leverage the power-savings mode to enable compute clusters to continue running during a cooling event, the first of its kind to be deployed to nearly 2,000 compute nodes.

2010 (August) - The Steele computing cluster is moved to a new HP POD - Performance-optimized Data Center. The HP POD looks like a shipping container and is optimized for cost and flexibility. Purdue is the first university to install and use the HP POD.

2010 (Fall) (ECN) - The IT support team from the College of Technology merges with ECN.

2011 (May) – Chinh Le, research scientist with PUCC and ITAP, retires after serving 19 years at Purdue.

2011 (July) – William I. “Bill” Whitson retires from Purdue. Bill served in several roles, including the manager of the User Services group. Bill began his career at Purdue in 1976. 

2011 (Fall) – A new compute cluster named “Carter” is brought online. Named for Dennis Carter, a Purdue grad who went on to a career at Intel, the cluster features 648 compute nodes with 1,296 processors, with a combined core 10,368. The processing power uses the new Intel Xenon E-5 Sandy Bridge Intel processors, and HP Proliant servers. Interconnects between systems uses the Mellanox FDR InfiniBand, allowing speeds up to 56 Gb/s. It debuts at number 54 on the Top 500 list. 

2012 (July) – Gregory Flint and Paul Townsend, two long-time research staff in PUCC and ITAP, retire from Purdue.

2012 (September) – The Identity and Access Management Office converts the ACMAINT Oracle service over to new Oracle (Sun) 4240 servers. 

2012 (October 3) - William Johnson, a long-time Purdue employee passes away at the age of 67.  Will started his career at Purdue as a systems programmer in the IBM group.

2013 (January) – Scott Ksander, former Associate Director of PUCC and later Chief Information Security Officer, retires from Purdue.  Donnie Alban, an employee at PUCC and ITAP since 1973, also retires. 

2013 (April) – Cherry Delaney, outreach coordinator in the IT Security office retires after 17 years of service with Purdue. 

2013 (June) – The supercomputer Conte is installed in the MATH data center. The system uses HP 580 ProLiant SL250 Generation 8 servers (Gen8). Each server uses two Intel Xeon processors and two Xeon Phi co-processors, connected using Mellanox 56Gb/s Infiniband connections. The system peaks around 943.4 teraflops.  The system is named after Dr. Samuel Conte, a computing pioneer and former dean of the Computer Science department. It debuts at number 28 on the Top 500 list. 

2013 (July) - The SiCortex SC5832 is retired from service. SiCortex closed its doors in May 2025 after sales of at least 60 of their "green" ultra low-power supercomputers. 

2013 (November) – The Steele supercomputing cluster, named after the former Director of the Purdue University Computing Center John Steele, is retired from service. 

2014 (April) – Dave Seaman, a long-time research systems programmer in PUCC and ITAP, retires from the university. Dave began his career at Purdue in 1978.

2014 (September) – The Coates cluster is retired from service. It debuted at number 102 on the Top 500 list. 

2014 - The Engineering Administration Building (ENAD) and Heat and Power Plant-North (HPN), with its iconic smokestack, are torn down to make room for a new active learning center building. Over its time, ENAD serves as the home for numerous early computer systems. During the early PUCC years, ENAD serves as a remote site with key punches, card readers, and printers for submitting a retrieving compute jobs. Key punches were eventually replaced by computer terminals including ADDS Regent 20s and Zenith Z-29s. Later, student labs using various types of workstations, PCs, and Macs, replaced the terminal rooms. 

2015 (November) – The Rossmann cluster is retired from service.

2016 (December) - The Halstead supercomputing cluster is installed in the MATH data center. Halstead consists of approximately 580 nodes containing two 10-core Intel Xeon CPUs per node, 128 GB of RAM, and Mellanox EDR 100 Gb/s Infiniband interconnects between nodes. The cluster is named after Maurice H. Halstead, an early faculty member of Purdue’s CS department, best known for founding an early approach in the 1970s of defining and measuring software systems and processes, known as software science. 

2017 - Kay Hunt retires from Purdue.

2017 (April) – William I. “Bill” Whitson passes away. 

2018 - Bryan Putnam retires from Purdue. Bryan provided research support for PUCC and ITAP research systems.

2019 (August) - Amber Johnson becomes the first African American PhD graduate in Purdue Computer Science.

2020s

2020 - Phil Cheeseman retires from Purdue. Phil provided research computing support and development and maintenance of the Purdue Extended Plotting Language (PEPL), used to prepare and print output to Calcomp, Versatec, and other printers.

2020 (Fall) - The Bell supercomputer is installed for general use. The system contains 448 Dell compute nodes with two 64-core AMD Epyc “Rome” processors, 256 GB of memory, 8 large 1Tb memory nodes, and 16 AMD Instinct GPU nodes. Storage includes 5 petabyes using the Lustre parallel filesystem. Bell landed at number 431 on the Top500 supercomputing list. The supercomputer is named in honor of nursing professor and continuing education director Clara E. Bell, an African American who helped lead diversity and inclusion efforts in the nursing program. 

2021 - Jeff Schwab retires from Purdue.

2022 (March) - The Anvil supercomputer is deployed, consisting of 1,000 two 64-core AMD Epyc "Milan" nodes, a peak performance of 5.3 petaflops, 32 large memory nodes containing 1 TB of RAM, and 16 nodes with four NVIDIA A100 Tensor Core GPUs, providing 1.5 PF of single-precision performance. Interconnects are 100 Gbps Mellanox HDR InfiniBand.

2022 - The Fortress archive system is upgraded to more than 250 Pb of archival storage, using the SpectraLogic TFinity tape ExaScale tape library. The tape library has capacity for up to 9,000 tapes, with two robotic arms for loading tapes.

2022 (Sep) - The Living Computers: Museum + Labs temporarily closes after the death of its founder, Mr. Paul Allen, co-founder of Microsoft. The CDC 6500 supercomputer originally installed at Purdue was purchased by the museum after its retirement and subsequently restored to running condition. Its future fate, along with the rest of the historical computing systems and artifacts, is currently unknown and to be determined by Vulcan LLC. 

Purdue IT Years - 2020s

2023 (January) - Purdue rebrands the central IT unit from ITaP to Purdue IT, incorporating the campus academic IT areas into an Academic IT Support unit within the new central Purdue IT organization. A new Distributed Campus Services unit combines the IT units from the regional campuses into the new Purdue IT organization.

2023 (February) - The Negishi high-performance cluster is dedicated for use. The cluster contains 460 compute nodes, 2 64-core AMD Epyc Milan processors (128 cores per node), 256 Gb of memory, 6 large memory nodes with 1Tb of memory, and 15 AMD Instinct M1210 GPUs. The cluster is named after Ei-ichi Negishi, the Herbert C. Brown distinguished professor of chemistry and the winner of the 2010 Nobel Prize in chemistry. 

2023 (April) - An additional 104 NVIDIA GPUs are added to the Gilbreth High-Performance Cluster giving it a peak performance of 32 PetaFLOPs. 

2023 (April) - Purdue announces a new "Purdue Computes" initiative, with goals of advancing Computer Science into the top 10 of the nation's colleges, launching an "Institute of Physical AI", and expanding semiconductor facilities for the campus. 

2024 (April) - An additional 80 NVIDIA A100 GPUs are added to the Dell PowerEdge xe8545 compute nodes, bringing the Gilbreth cluster to 411 GPUs. This is nearly four times its original capacity. 

2024 (April) - A "modest reduction" in Purdue IT director and manager-level positions is announced by the local TV station. 

2024 (July) - According to a press release by the Seattle Times, the Living Computers: Museum + Labs is now permanently closed, nearly 6 years after the death of its founder, Paul Allen. One of the systems on display was Purdue's old CDC 6500 supercomputer, acquired by the museum and restored to a running stated. The 6500 and many other museum quality systems are headed for auction, according to the article.

2024 (Aug) - A planned $16 million, 21,000-square-foot renovation of the ground and basement floors of the Mathematical Sciences Building is announced by the Purdue Trustees. The project will expand the MATH data center for additional computer servers, with construction expected to begin in May 2025 and be completed by February 2026.

2024 (Sep) - The Purdue CDC 6500 supercomputer previously used at Purdue and owned by the now closed Living Computers: Museum + Labs, is sold at auction to an unknown buyer for a reported price of $252,000.

2024 (Sep) - A new community computing cluster called Gautschi is deployed, named in honor of Professor Walter Gautschi, a Professor Emeritus of Computer Science and Mathematics. The cluster uses Dell compute nodes containing two 96-core AMD Epyc Genoa processors with 192 cores per node and 384 GB of memory, with 200 Gbps NDR Infiniband interconnects. The system uses Rocky Linux 9 with batch scheduling done using Slurm. 

2024 (Dec) - Dave Seaman, longtime systems programmer in PUCC User Services, and later the manager of the Advanced Applications group, passes away. 

2025 (Feb) - Upgrades to the Anvil Supercomputer are completed using $5M of grant funds from the National Artificial Intelligence Research Resource Pilot (NAIRR). The upgrades include an additional 21 Dell PowerEdge XE9640 compute nodes with 4 Nvidia 80GB H100 SXM GPUs per node, 1PB of additional flash-based storage, and one additional NDR Infiniband fabric that enables larger AI workloads.