Uni•c – A true internet pioneer, the danish computing centre for research and education

Abstract

In 1985 it was decided to merge the 3 regional computing centers NEUCC, RECKU and RECAU located respectively at the Technical University of Denmark, the University of Copenhagen and the University of Aarhus. The background for the merger was the rapid development of computing equipment which meant that small computers could now be purchased for local use by the university departments whereas the need for high performance computing could only be satisfied by a joint national purchase and advanced network access to this central computer facility. The new center was named UNI‐C and succeeded in helping Danish frontline research to use innovative computing techniques and have major breakthroughs using the first massively parallel computer architectures, but the greatest impact of UNI‐C on Danish society was the successful early roll out of the Internet to universities with a follow‐up of establishing the first Danish Internet service to ordinary PC users. This very first Internet service became a great success and helped to put Denmark on the international map as one of the very early Internet adopters. It also meant that UNI‐C was tasked by the Ministry of Education with delivering a number of different groundbreaking services to Danish schools like e.g. the Education Portal EMU, the school intranet SkoleIntra and the single sign on service, Uni‐login. The growth of the service portfolio to schools meant that UNI‐C stayed with the Ministry of Education when the universities were moved to a separate new ministry, and today UNI‐C only delivers services to schools, whereas the service portfolio for universities is now taken care of by the DeIC, the Danish e‐Infrastructure Collaboration.