John Bardeen co-invented the transistor while at Bell Labs. He subsequently joined the Illinois engineering faculty and physics faculty, where he co-developed the theory of superconductivity. Professor Bardeen became the first person to win two Nobel Prizes in the same field, in 1956 for inventing the transistor and in 1972 for his work on superconductivity. Photograph by Bill Wiegand, University of Illinois, courtesy AIP Emilio Segre Visual Archives.

The Coordinated Science Laboratory started as a multidisciplinary control systems laboratory in the 1950s and has evolved into a world-class research facility in electronics, telecommunications, and information technology.

ORDVAC (Ordnance Variable Automatic Computer) was designed and built at Illinois for the Ballistic Research Laboratory at Aberdeen Proving Ground. In contrast to earlier computers, ORDVAC's von Neumann architecture enabled it to solve a variety of ballistics problems, rather than being hardwired to solve a single application.

ILLIAC I was completed in Fall 1952 and was the first electronic computer built and owned by an educational institution. Operating initially only eight hours a day, its schedule was gradually expanded to 24 hours a day, six days a week. ILLIAC I would provide the major portion of the computer services for the University for 10 years, finding use in the design of other research instruments such as high-energy particle accelerators and the University's radio telescope.

In the four-movement Illiac Suite: Quartet No. 4 for strings, composer and scientist Lejaren Hiller and Leonard Isaacson specified a different set of rules (reflecting a particular genre and style) for each of the first three movements, and a mathematical process (Markov chains) for the final movement. Hiller established the University's Experimental Music Studio in 1958.

Illinois alumnus Harlan Anderson co-founded Digital Equipment Corporation, which revolutionized the computing industry by creating the minicomputer market. DEC has also been called "the first home-run of venture capital."

Illinois alumnus Jack Kilby (BS, 1947) invented the integrated circuit, for which he was subsequently awarded a Nobel Prize.

PLATO was conceived by Professor Chalmers Sherwin and developed by faculty member Don Bitzer. Its many pioneering concepts were described in papers such as " The Uses of PLATO: A Computer Controlled Teaching System "

PLATO subsequently became the first on-line community, with pnotes (email), gnotes (newgroups), term-talk (IM), multimedia (microfiche & audio device), and a plasma touch panel.

The first practical visible spectrum LED was invented by Nick Holonyak, Jr., whose doctoral advisor at Illinois had been John Bardeen, two-time Nobel Prize winner and co-inventor of the transistor. In 1963, Holonyak joined the faculty at Illinois.

Don Bitzer and Gene Slottow, Illinois alumni and professors, and Illinois graduate student Robert Willson invented the plasma display while working on the PLATO system (the first computer-assisted instruction system). The inventors have been honored with many awards, including an Emmy in 2002 for their role in revolutionizing television technology.

HAL (Heuristically programmed ALgorithmic Computer), star of 2001: A Space Odyssey, directed by Stanley Kubrick. Author Arthur C. Clarke wrote in his book of the same name: "I am a HAL Nine Thousand computer, Production Number 3. I became operational at the HAL Plant in Urbana, Illinois, on January 12, 1997."

ILLIAC IV pioneered a number of parallel computing innovations. Its advanced features included the first use of circuit card design automation outside of IBM, the first use of ECL (Emitter-Coupled Logic) integrated circuits and multilayer circuit boards on a large scale, and semiconductor memory. With its 64 processing units, ILLIAC IV had an unprecedented scale of parallelism.

Former Computer Science department head Dan Reed is shown at the Computer History Museum's ILLIAC IV display. The platter behind him is from one of the 80 MB disk drives built by Burroughs and used in ILLIAC IV.

The University of Illinois obtained the first license of the UNIX system from Bell Labs.

Proved by Illinois professors Kenneth Appel and Wolfgang Haken, the four-color theorem was the first major mathematical theorem to be proved using a computer.

The Center for Supercomputing Research and Development was home to innovative hardware and software research in parallel computing during the 1980s and 1990s. The National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), has had an unparalleled record of innovation, which continues to this day. NCSA's first supercomputer was a Cray X-MP/24, which was designed by Steve Chen, who received his PhD in Computer Science from the University of Illinois.

Professor Herbert Edelsbrunner received the prestigious award for his pioneering research in computational geometry. The annual award was established by Congress in 1975 to recognize an outstanding young researcher in any field of science or engineering supported by the National Science Foundation.

"The Whole Internet User's Guide and Catalog," was written by Illinois alumnus Ed Krol, who was assistant director of the campus central computing organization at the time. The book was included in the New York Public Library's "Books of the Century" list, indicative of its impact on millions of readers.

Mosaic, developed by Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina while working for NCSA, was initially viewed as an exciting new tool, but no one at the time could have predicted that its wide adoption would lead to e-commerce, online classrooms, downloadable music and films, and new worldwide communities of people with shared interests.

CS alumnus Max Levchin founded PayPal, allowing payments and money transfers to be made via the Internet. At PayPal, Levchin created one of the first commercial applications of a CAPTCHA. Many early PayPal alumni went on to found major industry companies, including Slide, Yelp, IronPort, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

Two Illinois alumni, Jawed Karim and Steve Chen, along with Chad Hurley, were co-creators of YouTube, which has had global impact on everything from popular culture to governmental policies. President Bill Clinton, pictured with Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Google co-founder Larry Page, honored YouTube at the Clinton Global Initiative 2007.

Professor Klaus Schulten's research group carried out the first atom-by-atom simulation of an entire life form, the satellite tobacco mosaic virus.

Professor Paul Kwiat's group set the world record for the amount of information encoded in a single photon, an important breakthrough for optical communication and quantum computation.

Illinois was chosen to build the world's first sustainable petascale computing facility. The Blue Waters project will provide a computational system capable of sustained petaflop performance on a range of science and engineering applications.