If 1961 “is the year that changed Italian computer science”, as they say today in Pisa for 60 years of the Pisan Electronic Calculator, November 13 is the day to celebrate. Because on November 13, 1961 the CEP was inaugurated, but 4 years later, again on November 13 and always in Pisa, Cnuce, the National University Center for Electronic Computing, is born.
If it doesn’t tell you anything, never mind, but know that if one day many years later, Italy was one of the first countries to connect to the nascent Internet network, we owe it to Cnuce and its researchers (a documentary I wrote for RaiPlay also tells it). For the pioneers of Italian computer science, Cnuce is not an acronym, but the name of an epic season.
In short, I don’t know if this story of the double November 13 was just a coincidence, but it was not a coincidence that the two events took place in Pisa. Which was, and in some ways remains, the capital of the Italian Internet.
The story of Cnuce is soon said: in 1963 Professor Alessandro Faedo, rector of the Pisan university, had gone on a trip to the United States where he had met the vice president of IBM, Eugenio Fubini (son of the famous mathematician Guido). Thanks to Fubini he had been able to visit a factory where the IBM 7090 was assembled, a second generation transistor computer that was designed to scientific applications on a large scale. Here Faedo had discovered that the buyers of that car were different universities in the world, but not even one in Europe and had said more or less: “Since soon the 7090 will become obsolete (the first integrated circuits were coming, ed), why don’t you donate a couple to us? ”. We do not know if it was thanks to this request from Professor Faedo that IBM decided to make the same 7090 available to 3 European universities for 5 years. The three universities chosen were London, Copenhagen and Pisa, where the legendary CEP was already in operation.
The Pisan convention was signed on July 5, 1965 and November 13, in the presence of the President of the Republic, Giuseppe Saragat, the 7090 was put into operation. We will not make the history of Cnuce here, but we will only say that its researchers played a fundamental role in the development of Italian space activity thanks to Stefano Trumpy; and in that of networks with the projects Rpcnet, Stella and Osiride by Professor Luciano Lenzini. The two activities probably reached their peak on April 30, 1986 when Italy will be connected to the Internet.
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