Computing at Stanford

Stanford Libraries

Stanford University Libraries and Academic Information Resources (SULAIR) supports Stanford’s mission of teaching, learning and research by making information and knowledge accessible and preserving it for the future. The libraries have amassed collections of books, journals, scores and printed reference works numbering more than 8.5 million volumes. There are nearly 1.5 million audiovisual materials, more than 75,000 serials, thousands of digital resources and nearly 6 million microform holdings. Access to the libraries is extended to non-university users for seven days a year free of charge upon registration. Contact the Privileges Office at (650) 723-1492.

Special Collections and University Archives include about 260,000 rare or otherwise special books and 59 million pages of unpublished materials, including the archives, manuscripts, papers and correspondence of luminaries, scholars, technologists and writers; hundreds of thousands of archival photographs; corporate records and archives, with an emphasis on the Silicon Valley region and California history; and deep resources in Stanford’s own history. These primary-source and historical resources are available both to students and researchers for use in the Field Special Collections reading room in Green Library. Undergraduates are encouraged to conduct original research among these collections.

Stanford houses one of the most extensive computing environments of any university. Services include e-mail, web hosting, distributed file systems, wireless and remote Internet access, courseware and research and high-performance computing facilities.

SUNet, the Stanford University Network, includes more than 150,000 computers with assigned Internet protocol addresses. About 60,000 are active on any given day. More than 9.5 terabytes of data flow between SUNet and the Internet each day. Stanford has 40,000 e-mail accounts and delivers about two million incoming mail messages daily on systems supported by Information Technology Services.

Students are not required to own computers at Stanford, although an estimated 99 percent own at least one, with about 94 percent owning laptops. All residences on campus have a cluster of computers for use day or night.

Stanford has been a leader in computer use, research and instruction. A high-speed electronic calculator was installed on campus in 1953, and the university’s first computer was installed in 1956. The first faculty member specializing in computers joined the Mathematics Department in 1957, and the Computer Science Department was founded in 1965. In 1968, researchers debuted the computer mouse and hypertext linking. In 1984, trenches were dug for SUNet and, in 1988, Stanford’s network was one of the first to connect to the Internet. In 1987, Stanford established the first residential computing program in the country. In 1991, the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center created the first U.S. website. In 2005, Stanford joined the Google Library Project to make millions of books available electronically without charge.

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