Norsk Regnesentral

About NR

Norsk Regnesentral (Norwegian Computing Center, NR) is a private, independent, non-profit foundation established in 1952. NR carries out contract research and development projects in the areas of information and communication technology and applied statistical modeling.

The clients are a broad range of industrial, commercial and public service organizations in the national as well as the international market. Our scientific and technical capabilities are further developed in co-operation with The Research Council of Norway and key customers. The results of our projects may take the form of reports, software, prototypes, and short courses.

A proof of the confidence and appreciation our clients have for us is given by the fact that most of our new contracts are signed with previous customers.

NR is one of the technical and industrial research institutes in Norway. Research institutes carry out approximately 25% of the research in Norway. NR receives a small basic funding from the government through the Research Council of Norway but depends mainly on funding for all the research projects from the organization that benefits from the research. Typical clients are large companies like Hydro and Gjensidige, smaller private companies, public sector and international organizations.

NR has contributed to the constitution of a large number of private companies. These companies were founded either by NR as an organization or by some of the employees, who either continued working for NR or became an employee in the new company. NR has also helped persons and other organizations to start new companies, contributed in developing new business areas for private companies and participated in the reorganization of work in public organizations.

NR was established in 1952. Until 1970 an important part of the activity was to perform mathematical computations for other organizations. After 1970 NR has been a methodological research institute. In 1985, NR became an independent institute and moved to its present location in 1988. NR is famous for inventing the first object oriented programming language Simula in the 1960s. NR has worked with data communication since 1963, the Internet since 1973 and multimedia since1994. NR started working with statistics in 1952, remote sensing in 1982, geostatistics and petroleum in 1983, marine resources in 1988 and electricity prices and finance in 1994.

History book

The history of NR is described in a book published in 2002, which is available from the institute.

 

NR's logo

Here are different versions of NR's logo:

Contact nr@nr.no if you need other formats.