Our history

In 1958, mathematician Hans Künzi was appointed Professor of Operations Research and Electronic Data Processing at what was then the Faculty of Law and Political Science at the University of Zurich (UZH). Four years later, UZH acquired its first computer, the IBM 1620 – this desk-sized monster weighed half a ton and could store a phenomenal (for that time) 20,000 decimal numbers of 6 bits each. Nowadays, in terms of computing capacity, any smartwatch would simply pulverize that colossus.

At that time, this electronic calculating machine formed the basis for the steady development of computer science at UZH. In 1967, the Department for Operations Research and Electronic Data Processing was founded, which was then split into an Institute for Operations Research and, who would have guessed, a Department for Electronic Data Processing in 1970. In the same year, Prof. Dr. Hans Künzi, Director of the Department for Electronic Data Processing, was elected to the Government Council of the Canton of Zurich. Incidentally, it was under his leadership that the Zurich Transport Network (Zürcher Verkehrsverbund, ZVV) and the Zurich S-Bahn came into being. Prof. Dr. Kurt Bauknecht was subsequently appointed as the new Director of the Institute and first Associate Professor of Electronic Data Processing.

In 1973, the Department for Electronic Data Processing, which was spun off in 1970, was renamed the Department of Informatics. The so-called IfI (Institut für Informatik) has been thriving for more than half a century. During this time, the concept of computer science has evolved from many mathematical initializations into theoretical, practical, system and socio-technical instances, and the IfI as a department has grown steadily in terms of the number of professorships, staff and, above all, students.

Here are some key facts: In 1980, Information Systems was established as a fully-fledged degree course. In 1984, three professors were working at the IfI, ten years later there were already seven, supplemented by a Professor of Computational Linguistics. In 1994, the first department homepage went online. In 2002, the first professors still active at the IfI took up their posts. The establishment of Bachelor's and Master's programs in informatics from 2004 onwards led to a doubling of the number of professors in the following decade. Currently, 18 professors with over 100 doctoral students are active in research and teaching at the IfI – with well over 1000 students at Bachelor's and Master's level in six major study programs.

Source: Oec. Magazin 20/2023

History of the University of Zurich