In the early 1980s, before the birth of SURF, ICT was a rare phenomenon at universities. The Netherlands was lagging behind in the field of computerisation and electronics. There was a call to pay attention to the issue in the government policy. The result of this was the Informatica Stimuleringsplan (Informatics Incentive Plan), with which the government challenged educational institutes to come up with ideas concerning ICT use.
A national research network was at the top of the universities’ wish list. The business sector also showed interest in participating in such a project. The universities, colleges (via the Council for Higher Professional Education) and the major research institutes committed their innovation activities to writing in the first long-term SURF plan. With the backing of the innovation subsidy they subsequently established the cooperative organisation SURF in March 1987 with the objective of pooling their ICT interests. And with success.
The initial activities of SURF focused on the development of the research network to which the first users and services could be connected. The SURFnet project was launched towards the end of 1986 to gauge the possibilities and limitations of such a network and its administration. The first network, SURFnet1, was launched in 1988. SURFnet1 was followed by a series of increasingly advanced network infrastructures. The current version, SURFnet6, has been in operation since 2006. In addition to the “regular” internet, the network also offers lightpaths to allow demanding users bottleneck-free use of the optical network. This network serves as a model for other research networks across the globe.
The use of ICT in education and research led to the establishment of a second network company in 1991. SURFdiensten provides higher education and scientific research institutes in the Netherlands with affordable, superior quality products and services in the field of ICT. Some 150 mediation agreements have since been signed with more than 100 ICT providers and SURFdiensten has expanded its activities to Flanders. SURF has also developed a broad range of products, services and expertise in recent years around information architecture, the digital publication of scientific knowledge and ICT in education.
Stichting SURF (now known as SURFfoundation), SURFnet and SURFdiensten joined forces at the beginning of 2007. Together “we” make up SURF, the cooperative organisation in which universities, colleges and research institutes work together on groundbreaking ICT innovations.