CWI History
I was tutored at
university by Dick Grimsdale, the man who built the first ever transistorised
computer.
He was tutored himself by Alan Turing.
I later worked in Turing's old department, alongside people who had worked with him, on the 5th computer in the series he had worked on.
I co-designed the programming language that Python was based on.
I was the first user of the open internet in Europe when it was set up by the CWI in 1988.
I helped design HTML, CSS, XHTML, RDFa, and many other web technologies.
Originally called "Mathematisch Centrum" or just "MC", the CWI was founded in 1946 to contribute to post-war reconstruction.
It has currently about 200 researchers.
CWI developed the first
computers in the Netherlands, the ARRA (1952) and its successors.
With those computers, CWI helped design the Fokker F-27 Friendship airplane, and performed calculations for the Delta Works.
CWI's first spin-off
company was Electrologica, later bought by Philips to produce the next
computer, the X8.
The last X8 has been installed in Boerhaave museum in Leiden.
It cost about €1M and could do between 14K and 400K instructions per second.
CWI co-developed the computer languages Algol 60 and Algol 68.
Most programming languages in use today are descended from Algol 60 (even Python).
The word "Dereference" comes from Algol 68.
Guido van Rossum designed and developed the programming language Python in the 1990s at CWI. It is now the world’s most popular programming language.
CWI
registered the NL top level domain '.nl' on 25 April 1986. It was one of the
first country domains in the world.
CWI had the first Internet domain in the Netherlands, cwi.nl,
from 1 May 1986.
CWI established the first public connection between Europe and the Internet on 17 November 1988.
Then only 64Kbps, it is now peaking above 14Tbps! Very nearly doubling every year.
Now the fastest internet exchange in the world.
CWI is currently cooperating on SCION, a new protocol for the internet.
CWI was involved with the Web right from
the beginning.
We were one of the first 500 websites, and I helped organise the first Web conference at CERN in 1994.
We have helped to develop many Web standards, including HTML, XHTML CSS, RDFa, and the multimedia standard SMIL (and many others).
Many of the cryptographic algorithms in use today were designed at the CWI in the 80's and 90's (using ABC, a programming language developed here).
CWI is renowned for factoring large numbers, the basis for cracking internet security codes.
We cracked RSA-512 in 1999, MDS in 2008, and SHA-1 in 2017 alongside researchers from Google.
CWI is involved in the two primary upcoming Post-Quantum Cryptography standards.
CWI was one of the first institutes worldwide to start researching quantum computing in the mid-1990s.
In 2015 CWI and the University of Amsterdam established one of the first quantum software research centers in the world: QuSoft.
CWI has done research on the mathematics of road traffic.
Surprisingly a motorway, mathematically, is like a hose of water.
Ideal speeds: allowing cars to go faster can surprisingly slow down journey times, and create more traffic jams,
Advisory speeds displayed on Dutch motorways use algorithms devised at CWI to calculate the optimal speed to avoid traffic jams forming.
CWI calculated the
current NL railway timetables.
Interesting fact: the timetables are mirrored. For instance, if a train arrives at 17 minutes to the hour from somewhere, the train back will leave at 17 minutes after the hour (plus or minus 2 minutes).
Since 1990 CWI has spun off 29 start-ups.
Every five years CWI presents the Van Wijngaarden Awards and Dijkstra Fellowships to outstanding researchers in mathematics and computer science.
Computer pioneer
Adriaan van Wijngaarden was the "Father of Dutch Computing", and designed both
Algol 60 and Algol 68. He was director of the CWI.
The inventor of
timesharing.
Co-designer of the IBM-360.
Edsger Dijkstra
is one of the most famous computer scientists in the world.
He did much to develop a science of computer programming.
He implemented the first Algol 60 compiler, the first compiler to implement recursive functions, and invented operator precedence parsing.
He designed the shortest path algorithm, now used in route navigation programs.
This
famous writer did his PhD on linguistic analysis with computers at CWI.
Piet Beertema,
the "Godfather of .nl", who set up the internet in the Netherlands, starting at
the CWI.
Guido van Rossum, the inventor of Python, now the most-used
programming language.
Floor
Sietsma, the youngest-ever PhD in the Netherlands.
Got her PhD at the CWI at age 20 (after 3 year's work).
She first went to University at age 12.
CWI is an international and dynamic research centre, where loads of great things happen!