Did you know that...

• CWI was founded in 1946 to contribute to the post-war reconstruction.
• CWI developed the first computers in the Netherlands, the ARRA (1952) and its successors.
• CWI used one of these machines to do calculations for the successful Fokker F-27 Friendship airplane. building computers by CWI was continued in Electrologica (1956), the first spin-off company of CWI.
• CWI performed calculations in the 1950s for the Delta Works to protect the Dutch coastline after the great flood of 1953.
• CWI (co-)developed the computer languages ALGOL 60 and -68.
• Computer pioneers Adriaan van Wijngaarden and Edsger Dijkstra used to work at the Mathematisch Centrum - now called CWI.
• CWI established the first connection between Europe and the Internet. This happened on 17 November 1988.
• CWI registered the NL top level domain '.nl' on 25 April 1986. It was one of the first country domains in the world. The .nl top level domain was registered by Piet Beertema (CWI), also know as the 'godfather of .nl'.
• CWI had the first internet domain in the Netherlands, cwi.nl, from 1 May 1986.
• CWI changed its name from Mathematisch Centrum (Mathematical Centre) into Centrum voor Wiskunde en Informatica ('centre for mathematics and informatics'), because of the growing importance of computer science.
• CWI is co-founder of SARA Computing and Networking Services. It was founded in 1971 by CWI, VU University (de Vrije Universiteit) and the University of Amsterdam (UvA).
• CWI designed and developed the computer language Python in the 1990s, now used by tens of thousands of users, such as Google, Yahoo, Walt Disney, ABN AMRO and NASA.
• Python was started by Guido van Rossum, at that time working at CWI, in his Christmas holiday.
• Brilliant scientist David Chaum co-founded modern cryptography research - science of digital safety - when working at CWI in the 1980s. He designed an anonymous payment system that was not only safe for banks but also for clients and their privacy. He started a spin-off company, DigiCash, which was far ahead of its time and went bankrupt. Chaum's ideas are still being used by scientists.
• CWI is renowned for factoring large numbers. This line of research attracted worldwide attention with the 'crack' of the RSA-512 internet security code in 1999, coordinated by Herman te Riele of CWI.
• CWI started 21 spin-off companies from 1990 until now.
• CWI houses the chair of the international XHTML Working Group, making the web standards of tomorrow.
• over 120 professors in mathematics and computer sciences worked at CWI, once in their career.
• CWI manages the Benelux World Wide Web Consortium Office.
• CWI cooperates with over 200 partner organizations.

Read more about CWI's history (in Dutch)