Scientific Computers at the Helsinki University of Technology during the Post Pioneering Stage

摘要

The paper describes the process leading from the pioneering phase when the university was free to develop and build its own computers through the period when the university was dependent on cooperation with the local computer companies to the stage when a bureaucratic state organization took over the power to decide on acquiring computing equipment to the universities. This stage ended in the late 1970s when computing power gradually became a commodity that the individual laboratories and research projects could acquire just like any resource. This development paralleled the situation in many other countries and universities as well. We have chosen the Helsinki University of Technology (TKK) as a case to illustrate this development process, which for the researchers was very annoying and frustrating when it happened.