Subject Guide: Computer Science: Archives and Special Collections

The University Computing Laboratory was formally opened in Newcastle on 21 January 1958. It contained a Pegasus Electronic Digital Computing machine which was then named ‘Ferdinand’. Computing soon became an element in a number of Applied Science courses,  especially in the Diploma in Numerical Analysis and Automatic Computing. With the independence of Newcastle University in 1963, Durham now needed its own machine and Durham’s first computer was installed in November 1963 when an Elliott 803 was acquired at a cost of £35,000, with a further £20,00 spent on ancillary equipment including a tape store. The Computing Unit was formally inaugurated in October 1964 and a Board of Studies for Computing was set up in April 1965. At that time, reports measured the hours spent by departments on the machine, with Physics and Mathematics being in the 100s if not 1000s, and Classics being the first Arts department to make use of it, for just 10 hours in 1965. Cooperation in the North-East was developed in 1967 with the establishment then of the Northumbrian Universities Multiple Access Computer (NUMAC), which claimed to be the most advanced University Computing Centre in Britain (1969 Calendar). 

Much of this is recorded in the publications of the university at the time, its Calendars, Gazettes, and Journals, digital copies of some of which can be accessed online. There is also much in the university’s archive on the increasing range of committees administering computing within the university, both as an administrative tool with the Computing Unit growing into the current major support service Computing and Information Services (via being the Computer Centre in 1985, the Computer Service in 1991, and the Information Technology Service in 1994), with an archive including various guides, reports, handbooks, newsletters and manuals), and also as an academic discipline, as a department from 1975 (variously also part of Engineering). 

There are some recent works on Computing in the rare book collections of Archives and Special Collections, and on the application of computing to such as library cataloguing including R.N. Oddy’s Computer processing of library files at Durham University (1971). Perhaps the earliest printed work which might be said to be on the topic is Robert Heath’s Astronomia accurata; or, … The seaman's ready computer, or new and easy navigation (1760).  

There is also quite a range of printed works on cryptography and ciphers in the collection of the pathologist and Durham graduate George B. Elliott (1918-1994),  beginning with Trithemius's Polygraphiae Libri Sex (1518), with his manuscripts also including a couple of diplomatic letters in cipher. Further material on ciphers is in the papers of diplomats such as John Viscount Ponsonby, and also Albert 4th Earl Grey, and there is a quantity of French pamphlets on the topic in the Abbas Hilmi II papers.