The Newcastle University Historic Computing (NUHC) Committee is a special-interest group dedicated to collating, preserving and promoting materials and artefacts relating to the usage and development of computing across the whole University,  not least the School of Computing and the IT Service, (see below). Materials include: photos, videos, commissioned art, documents, publications, software, and a very large number of physical computer artefacts.

Computing at Newcastle has a long and prestigious history. The original Computing Laboratory, founded in 1957, served a dual function, providing computing support as well as taking an academic role. In 1992 the University chose to separate the functions and today the School of Computing serves the academic function, alongside the support provision of Newcastle University IT Service (NUIT).

The main method of communication for the group is via the cs-historic-committee mailing list. We maintain a public todo list on Trello. If you have an interest, information or expertise in Computing History, we encourage you to join our group!

Strands

The strands of work that the SIG are looking at are as follows:

• Hardware: the Historic Computing Collection
• Digital Assets (including software)
  • Research publications
  • Artwork
  • Archiving
• Data Recovery
• Department (and spin-out) “genealogy”

Is there something missing? Could you help us with our work? Get in touch and let us know!

Historic Computing Committee

The committee is:

1. Troy Astarte (Chair)
2. Sara Bellwood
3. Adèle Davison
4. Jonathan Dowland
5. Clive Gerrard
6. John Law
7. Lindsay Marshall
8. Brian Randell
9. Nick Tones
10. Michelle Wright

The committee can be reached via the cs-historic-committee mailing list.