Regnecentralen

~ the eulogy ~

A country of five million people built its own computer in 1958 and ran it as a national service bureau for the next ten years. DASK was switched off in 1967, three decades before I got a modem, in a country whose language I have never learned. Regnecentralen reaches me anyway, because one idea that came out of it sits in the design of almost every operating system kernel written since.

The Danish Academy of Technical Sciences set up a calculating machine committee in 1948, and on 12 October 1955 its proposal turned into an institute called Regnecentralen, the Danish Institute of Computing Machinery. It opened on a one off grant of 900,000 kroner. Danish Wikipedia credits that money to Marshall aid and the Danish Data History Society credits it to the state, which is probably the same money described from two ends. Niels Ivar Bech was the first director and Bent Scharøe Petersen was chief designer of the first machine.

DASK, the Danish Arithmetic Sequence Calculator, was inaugurated in February 1958 with help from Sweden's Matematikmaskinnämnden, and spent about ten years as a service bureau for technical calculation and then for administrative work. GIER followed from 1959, named after the Geodetic Institute that ordered the first one. Nearly fifty were built and sold on both sides of the iron curtain. For GIER the company produced the RC2000, a paper tape reader that read by light rather than by mechanical contact at 2,000 characters a second, which made it the fastest in the world at the time and a decent export in its own right from 1963.

Peter Naur worked here from 1959 to 1969. He is the N in Backus Naur form and he took the Turing Award in 2005 for his part in ALGOL 60. He did that work while lecturing in Copenhagen and holding a day job at a Danish computer company most of the world has never heard of.

Building ten GIERs and opening branch offices left the institute short of cash at the start of 1964, so it was reorganized as a public company to raise more.

~ the dossier ~

~ the nucleus ~

The RC4000 arrived in 1968 as the third generation machine. It needed eighteen sales to pay for its own development and it found seventeen, which nearly ended the company and put bank people in charge of it instead.

What it produced instead of a profit was an idea. Per Brinch Hansen, working at Regnecentralen on that machine, decided that no existing operating system suited it and that he was tired of bending other people's systems to fit. His answer was a small underlying kernel, which he called the nucleus, carrying almost nothing but communication, with the rest of the operating system assembled from programs that talked through it. The RC 4000 Multiprogramming System of 1969 was never widely used. It is also where the microkernel concept comes from, the idea that dominated operating system research through the 1970s and 1980s and that resurfaced later in Mach and then in L4.

~ the school machines ~

The last stretch where ordinary Danes touched this company was in classrooms. After a final reconstruction in 1979, a new entity called Regnecentralen af 1979 took over hardware and software development, lost 10 million kroner in its first year and 36 million in its second, and then found a market in schools with the RC700 Piccolo and later the RC759 Piccoline. ITT came in for half the shares in 1981 and took operational control under a five year management agreement. There was an export line too: the telephone directory enquiry system was sold to Kuwait, which meant building an RC853 terminal that displayed Arabic.

Then the IBM PC arrived, and a national school computer stopped being something a small country had any reason to design for itself.

~ the long handover ~

ITT Europe was sold to Alcatel in 1986, so the half share changed hands without anyone in Denmark being asked. ICL took Alcatel's stake in 1988 and signed its own management contract with 70 million kroner behind it. The company was renamed RC International A/S, which means the word Regnecentralen came off the business four years before the business stopped. In 1991 the pension fund Pensam and the remaining Danish shareholders sold out to ICL, which had already bought Nokia Data, and the three were merged into ICL Data.

ICL wound up all product development in Denmark in 1992. Danish Wikipedia puts the final lights out a year later, in 1993, by which point there was nothing left to switch off but a name that had already been replaced twice.

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