Centennial video series: The R1 computer

David Ruth
713-348-6327
david@rice.edu

 Centennial video series: The R1 computer
Rice University’s weekly centennial videos run through Oct. 12 

 HOUSTON – (Aug. 24, 2012) – In 1956, three Rice University faculty members brought supercomputing to the school for the first time in the form of the R1 computer. While it wasn’t the first computer at Rice, it was the university’s first large computational research computer. At the time, the researchers couldn’t simply go out and purchase a mammoth supercomputer; they literally had to design and build the R1 themselves. The R1 took up a large amount of space on the second floor of the Abercrombie Engineering Building. Bart Sinclair, associate dean of Rice’s Brown School of Engineering, credits the R1 in creating the path for Rice to be a leader in hardware and software design.

Working with Centennial Historian Melissa Kean, video producer Brandon Martin takes a look at the R1 computer. For more information on Rice’s history, visit Kean’s blog at www.ricehistorycorner.com.

To help celebrate the university’s centennial Oct. 12, Rice University is producing weekly videos exploring the school’s unique history.

The video, available on YouTube at http://youtu.be/HMA0R2nKZE0, is also available to media in high quality and without music for editing purposes. For higher-quality video, contact David Ruth, director of national media relations at Rice, at david@rice.edu or 713-348-6327.

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Follow Rice News and Media Relations via Twitter @RiceUNews.

To see other stories in the centennial video series, go to www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL60D6D71E71B66B3D&feature=plcp.

Located on a 300-acre forested campus in Houston, Rice University is consistently ranked among the nation’s top 20 universities by U.S. News & World Report. Rice has highly respected schools of Architecture, Business, Continuing Studies, Engineering, Humanities, Music, Natural Sciences and Social Sciences and is home to the Baker Institute for Public Policy. With 3,708 undergraduates and 2,374 graduate students, Rice’s undergraduate student-to-faculty ratio is 6-to-1. Its residential college system builds close-knit communities and lifelong friendships, just one reason why Rice has been ranked No. 1 for best quality of life multiple times by the Princeton Review and No. 4 for “best value” among private universities by Kiplinger’s Personal Finance. To read “What they’re saying about Rice,” go to www.rice.edu/nationalmedia/Rice.pdf.