In December 2008, the IT staff at STFC - who had been centred in the historic Atlas Building - held a small event to celebrate the achievements since the installation of UK's first supercomputer in 1964. In January the staff move to a new building labelled R89.
The Atlas Centre and its staff (although components of the central IT team were located at various times in other buildings on site) achieved much: from superb 24/7 operations of a major computer centre over many years and with many different kinds of equipment (now 1100 servers and 360000 users); provision of services in administration and management for the organisation (and others) front-ended by office systems, directories etc; provision of systems for other scientific departments, the library and others; development of websites and behind it all a powerful R&D capability from graphics, visualisation and virtual reality through databases, information retrieval and office systems to formal software engineering, knowledge engineering, trust/privacy/security and onwards via advanced user interfaces and management to applied mathematics and computational optimisation. From this team came the original UK e-Science concept. Along the way companies were spun out and contibutions made to standards notably OSI networking, GKS, SVG and SMIL.
