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From Stanford CSD History

Welcome to the Stanford Computer Science Department History Wiki

This site is a repository of historical information about Stanford's Computer Science Department and Computer Systems Laboratory. For more about the site itself, including how to contribute to the site, see Stanford_CSD_History:About.

Some of the history has already been added to this site:

  • Timeline - originally compiled by Nils Nilsson with extensive help from faculty and staff
  • Notes on the founding of the Stanford CS department.
  • Early_Computers_at_Stanford - Compiled by Gio and Voy Wiederhold, and John Sauter, with recent contributions from many early computer users.
  • Historical Faculty List - focusing on former and retired faculty, compiled by Gio Wiederhold.


Some more of the history will be here someday (Pseudo-links in red like this indicate pages that should be created):

  • Faculty books - A list of textbooks written or co-written by the faculty
  • Digital Libraries, Stanford, and Google by Gio Wiederhold with participation of DL funders.
    • Google was founded September 1998 by two Stanford Computer Science Department students, Sergey Brin and Larry Page. Research leading to the page rank algorithm that distinguished Google was supported by Professors Rajiv Motwani, Jeffrey Ullman, and Terry Winograd. The algorithm ranks web pages that match search terms by assessing breadth and depth of interest. Sergey’s and Larry’s research was funded by the Digital Library Initiative (DLI), directed starting 1994 by Su-Shing Chen and from 1998 by Stephen Griffin of the National Science Foundation (NSF].

Some of the history is on other sites:

  • Wellspring of Innovation A searchable compilation of companies founded by people affiliated with Stanford. According to this website, “In the last several decades, over 1,200 full-time companies were founded by members of the Stanford University community.” Just a few of these are listed in the timeline.
  • Stanford’s Robotics Legacy An overview of Stanford Robotics projects, published in the Stanford Report, 16 January 2019. by Taylor Kubota.


Page created --Dbrown 14:07, 23 March 2006 (PST)

Last edit --Dbrown 20:23, 2 April 2006 (PDT)

Update --Gio 13:20, 4 July 2008 (PDT)

Update --Jsauter 05:31, 30 September 2008 (PDT)