The Department of Informatics of the University of Coimbra (DEI.UC) will inaugurate the "Informatics Museum Centre" with the exhibition "From ENER to Space". The event will take place on Friday 12 January at noon at DEI (Building C, 4th Floor 4), at Campus II. The exhibition is sponsored by Critical Software.
"From ENER to Space" pays tribute to the ENER 1000, the first computer designed and manufactured industrially in Portugal, developed at the Electrical Engineering Department of the University of Coimbra by the group that led to the creation of DEI (Department of Informatics Engineering): António Dias Figueiredo as group leader and João Gabriel Silva as general coordinator of the project; the team also included Carlos Correia and Francisco Fraga from the Physics Department.
The ENER project began in 1980 and was marketed by Enertrónica, winning the first prize for innovation at the National Meeting for the Development of Electrical and Electronic Industry (ENDIEL) in 1983. The project underwent several modifications and was replaced in 1985 by a more advanced version, the UNIC, which was also marketed in Portugal by RIMA. This project gave rise to Xception, a fault injector that quickly simulated real faults. This technology was used in NASA satellites. Later, other versions were sold to the European, Chinese, Brazilian and Japanese space agencies.
The ENER project is at the heart of DEI, CISUC (UC Centre for Informatics and Systems) and LIS-IPN (Informatics and Systems Lab of the Pedro Nunes Institute). It has also played a direct role in the creation of leading companies such as Critical Software and Wit Software. The Informatics Museum Centre houses a collection of computer equipment used at DEI, with pieces from 'From ENER to Space', the museum's inaugural exhibition.