The CNUCE archival fonds within the S&TDL
On the initiative of the Institute of Informatics and Telematics of CNR and its division (UOS) based in Cosenza, coordinated by the Prof. Guarasci, the digitisation of the large documentation belonging to the Centro Nazionale Universitario di Calcolo Elettronico (CNUCE), the first high performance computing centre serving the Italian scientific research starting from the renowned collaboration with IBM, has begun.
To make cutting-edge technology – calculators and calculator networks – the protagonist of scientific and technological frontier research, the pillar of the collaboration among HPC centres in Italy, and the fulcrum of a solid collaboration between universities and research centres in an integrated way: this was the primary objective of the CNUCE, that put together research and service from its very beginning.
The CNUCE was founded in 1965 at the University of Pisa on the initiative of Alessandro Faedo, converted to a CNR Institute in 1974, began an EARN (European Academic Research Network) and Internet node, respectively in 1984 and 1986, but had always remained faithful to its original vocation.
CNUCE had not only collaborated with IBM in an effective way, but it was one of the eight main nodes of the GARR network, and most important, was the father of the Italian web: starting from the connection standards to the registration of .it web domains, CNUCE opened the net to everyone far beyond the boundaries of the academic and research world, putting the Internet at the disposal of the Italian society as a whole.
Thanks to the committment of the IIT-UOS of Cosenza, S&TDL will host a wide selection of digitised documents coming from the CNUCE archives, ensuring their broad fruition.
Among the first available documents, the most notable is the minute of a meeting held on June 8th 1978 of the General Commission for Informatics in charge of the renovation of CNUCE, that defined its new institutional tasks, underlining its multidisciplinary vocation and the European landscape, and focussing on the relationship between service and research, that was its peculiarity.