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50 years of IT-Services - Congratulations!
The University of Basel's computing center has now been in existence for 50 years, or half a century. That is a proud age, but in the IT sector it is already half an eternity. A lot has changed in these 50 years.
Be it the change of name from the University Computing Center( URZ) to the IT services we know today, or the technical equipment, possibilities and challenges.
What has remained the same is the aspiration to provide members of the University of Basel with technical innovations in the best possible and most user-friendly way.
We would like to take this milestone anniversary as an opportunity to look back on the eventful history of IT services, from upheaval and stability to challenges and successful transformations. We are grateful to all the people who have made IT Services what it is today.
The history of IT Services began in the 1960s, when the University of Basel was still paying over 210,000 Swiss francs a year to Sandoz for the use of its mainframe computer. But this amount was not enough and soon more computing time was needed; much more computing time. The Grand Council and the University of Basel therefore decided to open their own computing center in order to secure computing power for their research. And in 1974, the time had finally come: the University of Basel was the last Swiss higher education institution to have its own computing center.
Initially, a small team of less than 8 people was solely responsible for ensuring the computing work. But this was not enough. The university still buys computing capacity from Sandoz. In the last year before the URZ was able to support the computing power itself towards the end of the 1980s, over 1.3 million Swiss francs were paid to Sandoz.
In the 1990s, the URZ was caught up in the incipient digital revolution. While 100,000 megabytes were used per year at the beginning of the decade, consumption rose to over 250 gigabytes per month towards the end. To cope with this exponential increase in computing power, the URZ purchased the Convex C120.
As the new millennium dawned, the focus was no longer just on computing power, but also on switching from outdated copper to fiber optic cables. The University Computing Center was in a state of flux and was increasingly changing from a computing power provider to a service provider. This also included the service that all students now received their own e-mail address. Towards the end of the noughties, just 25 co-workers were responsible for these academic achievements.
Modernization took place over the 10 years. The focal areas of this work were university-wide access to WLAN and the introduction of a VPN. IT support for the respective university organizational units was also centralized, which led to a restructuring of the URZ. Now came the turning point: The significant name change took place. On February 2, 2015, the era of the URZ came to an end and the ITS was born. But it wasn't just the name that changed to better reflect the changed work of the last decade. The workload also increased exponentially. During this decade, the number of employees rose from the initial 25 to over 150, who now make up the core of IT Services at the University of Basel.