Notre Dame's first computers — the UNIVAC and the Computing Center

1962 – 1975

The installation, photographed: The first computers in this record are the university's, and the university's archive holds the moment in photographs: a UNIVAC computer installation at Notre Dame, photographed about 1962 with the Rev. Edmund P. Joyce, the university's executive vice president, in attendance, and the Computing Center's interior with its Univac machine, photographed the same year. The machine stood in a new building raised for the purpose — the Computing Center and Mathematics Building, which the university's magazine in the fall of 1962 showed under construction, "to be completed this fall"; the university archives' building file dates the building from 1963. A second archive photograph of the Computing Center in the 1960s names the machine in its caption: a UNIVAC 1107, the thin-film-memory machine Sperry Rand had announced in 1962. Which model the 1962 installation itself was, the archive captions reached do not say, and this entry does not supply it: the documented floor is a UNIVAC installed about 1962 and a UNIVAC 1107 at work in the Computing Center in the 1960s. No earlier electronic computer at the university, and none elsewhere in the city, is documented in the sources reached for this section; the punched-card and unit-record equipment that preceded the UNIVAC stands as this entry's named gap.

The mainframe years: The Computing Center–Mathematics Building — CCMB in the campus shorthand of the next decades — housed the university's computing through the mainframe era. By 1975 the center's machine was an IBM System/360, the single computer, one faculty memoir of that year recalls, that most faculty could use — a machine with less computing power, the same memoir notes, than a modern wristwatch — and its punch-card queues emptied on football Saturdays, when the faculty economist who wrote the memoir had it to himself. Microcomputers reached the university libraries in 1983, in the Hesburgh Library's own milestone history; by the late 1980s the university itself acknowledged a deficiency in computer facilities and answered it with the funded laboratory building of 1988–89 — labs in O'Shaughnessy Hall and LaFortune on 24-hour schedules, and a third in Hesburgh Library with some forty Macintoshes and thirty DOS machines. The research-computing institution that succeeded the center is the subject of the Center for Research Computing entry below.

Sources:

1. University of Notre Dame Archives, ArchivesSpace — "UNIVAC Computer Installation with Rev. Edmund P. Joyce, circa 1962"; "Computing Center Interior — Univac Computer, circa 1962"; "Computing Center — Three Men Working with Computers, includes UNIVAC 1107, circa 1960s"; the building file "Computing Center and Mathematics Building (1963– )."
2. Notre Dame: A Magazine, vol. 15, no. 3 (Fall 1962) — the Computing Center and Mathematics Building "to be completed this fall," shown under construction.
3. Lawrence C. Marsh, memoir (sites.nd.edu, June 2023) — the IBM 360 in the Computer Center in 1975, the only machine most faculty could use, and the football-Saturday punch cards.
4. University of Notre Dame Hesburgh Libraries, "60 Milestones" — microcomputers introduced to the libraries in 1983; the late-1980s deficiency acknowledged; the October 1988 labs and the Hesburgh Library lab's forty Macintoshes and thirty DOS PCs.