After some encouragement by Nobel Prize
winner Dorothy Hodgkin and others,
the Oxford computer lab is set up under
Leslie Fox in 1957, with one hand-me -down computer
known as the monster in the
basement...
and a lot of paper to write on by hand. Two years later our first
computer arrives – we have to explain to
the funders what programming is. In 1960 our
first PhD is awarded to Joan Walsh.
In 1965 Christopher Strachey becomes our
first Professor of Computation: "We will
have to start straight from the
admission that he has an unusual kind of
person" says Fox. Strachey made
computers write love letters and wrote
the first computer checkers program... in
his spare time. More importantly, he was
interested in the semantics of
programming - Strachey asked what almost
no one else did: "what does this program
mean?" He also insists on the vital
combination of theory and practice that
marks the department to this day.
1970: the Numerical Analysis Group is founded
by three women and one man down the road in Harwell
part of a pattern of
spinouts in "Science Vale"as no one yet calls it.
1977: Tony Hoare, a visionary in parallel
computing and the networked future starts
his more than 20 years at the department
making it a centre for formal analysis
to understand systems rigorously.
We apply those methods to the IBM CIX
payment system, and out of that our software
engineering program is born, and is an
immediate success with industry with
more than a thousand courses delivered.
1979: our first masters program begins
with students from across the world.
Here's a photo of the second course
which we have a photo of. 1985 sees us
teaching undergraduates in maths and
computing at first. In 1990 we win the
first of our Queen's awards for
improving the design of the
revolutionary Inmos chip,
twenty years ahead of its time, and will
win another the next year for our work
with IBM. In 1993 our Queens Awards flags fly from our new purpose-built home on Parks Road.
In 1995 the computation
undergraduate degree accepts its first students.
Some time in the nineties, we start
working with Intel to ensure chip
designs will function properly. Work of
this kind was once called impossible –
today, thanks to our help, it's routine. By
97 were on the web: what a useful invention.
In the 2000s our numbers
really start growing: we get a new
e–science building and immediately fill it.
Our numerical analysis team leave for
maths but we keep growing and in 2011 we change our name to the Department of Computer Science.
We form joint
fellowships with DeepMind, building on
our strengths in machine learning, we
make our virtual model of the heart
available to drug companies and welcome
the founder of the World Wide Web and
Oxford grad Tim Berners-Lee to our
faculty: and that's not talking about our
work on open data, quantum computing,
cryptography, location-finding, the ethics
of computing, taking unstructured data
through the web and making it useful,
writing AI that understands code to test
it, teaching computers new ways to learn,
making an Internet of Things you can
trust... much of it building on the legacy
of our earliest research. To fit all
that in we're planning to move home again,
to somewhere truly special. By our
60th birthday we were rated one of the
top three computer science departments
in the world; still uniting theory and practice,
still excited for what's to come.
