The pioneer era in Norwegian scientific computing (1948-1962)

This paper gives a survey of the pioneer era in Norwegian scientific computing. Right after the Second World War research councils and research institutions were established and young scientists got scholarships to study abroad. Many caught interest in the new mathematical machines. In 1950, the Royal Norwegian Council for Scientific and Industrial Research decided to build a Norwegian computer, later called NUSSE, and by 1952 the Norwegian Computing Center for pure and applied research, was organized. The paper describes activities at the universities in Oslo, Bergen, and Trondheim, as well as at the Norwegian Defense Research Establishment at Kjeller. In the late 1950s, both the Central Bureau of Statistics and the Norwegian Meteorological Institute installed their first general-purpose computers. This was before such computers were installed at the University of Oslo and at the NTH, the technical university in Trondheim. The paper closes noting the contract signed in 1962 for the first UNIVAC 1107 to Europe.