The boards of the KIVI Department of the History of Technology and of the Histechnica Association have the pleasure of inviting you to attend a lecture to be given by ir. Rob van Vliet, entitled "The development of 100 years of information technology within Centric".

Programme:

10.30:00: Building open; reception with coffee

11:00: Lecture by ir Rob van Vliet (Centric, Enterprise Services & Innovation).

11:45: Break.

12:15: Continuation of lecture / closing discussion.

12:45: End of the meeting

Summary of lecture "The development of 100 years of information technology within Centric."

Centric is one of the largest IT companies in the Netherlands. Among other things, Centric builds software for municipalities' automation (for departments such as Burgerzaken, Belastingen, Werk, Inkomen and Zorg), for salary administrations and administrations for pension funds, for financial service providers and for logistics applications in shop and warehouse automation. Centric's data centres house many applications from governments, large companies, retail chains and other organisations.

Although Centric as a company in its current form was founded in 1992, parts of the company are much older. Over the years, nearly 100 companies and organisations have been acquired and integrated. The combined history of these predecessors goes back more than 100 years.

During this integration and the subsequent reorganisations and relocations, as well as from attics and garages of former employees, many pieces of technology have surfaced, which people have started to collect in a company museum. Collectively, all these pieces give a nice overview of the development of information technology over time. The older equipment worked mainly on the basis of mechanical technology, such as calculators, accounting machines and punched cards. After the war, electronic components and punch cards gradually make their appearance. To finally result in complete digitisation of administrations.

Using a number of museum pieces (such as programmable memories), Rob (as "curator" of this business museum) will show how record-keeping and the underlying control logic ("Business Logic") evolved over time from mechanical to electronic programming.

Information about the speaker, ir. Rob van Vliet

Rob van Vliet has more than 40 years of experience in information technology, gaining his first experience with computers in 1972. After studying electrical engineering at Delft University of Technology, Department of Information Processing Systems, he started as a programmer and developed from there to head of various software departments and Technical Director of the Centric divisions IT Solutions and Software Engineering.

He is currently head of the Enterprise Services department, a staff department that supports and facilitates all product departments in the development of their software products and cloud services. He is also a member of Centric's innovation team, which researches the application of new technologies (such as augmented reality, data science, blockchain, et al).

From this background, he is interested in the history of technology and started collecting Centric's heritage.

Sign up:

Registration is required to attend this talk. The registration deadline closes on Saturday, 7 December 2019. KIVI members should register via the KIVI website (red button on the right). Interested parties who are not KIVI members are also welcome and can register there. Please note that there are costs involved.

Upcoming activities:

- saturday 11 January 2020: "One hundred years of Geotechnics in the Netherlands" . Lecture by ir J. Heemstra, Deltares GeoEngineering, retired.

- saturday 8 February 2020: "Indonesia on the map" (Land surveying in period 1850-1950). Lecture by Dr H. Ekkelenkamp.

- 19 - 25 April 2020: Study trip to Turin and Bologna.

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