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Talk:United Nations International Computing Centre

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Two ICCs in history?

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The first sentence of the article states that the ICC was established in 1971 by a Memorandum of Agreement among the UN, the UNDP and the WHO. It is a literal copy of the first sentence of the History page on the ICC web site, which ought to be an authoritative source.

It appears that there have been two institutions in the history of the United Nations that had very similar names (International Computation Centre versus International Computing Centre) with the same abbreviation ICC and that had similar functions. Quoting from a 1962 article in BIT (then Nordisk Tidskrift for Informationsbehandling, now BIT Numerical Mathematics):

The idea of establishing an intergovernmental computation centre was developed already 15 years ago by UNESCO. As a result of the preparatory work, the Convention for the establishment of ICC was issued on December 6 1951, and all countries adhering to the United Nations Organization (or to its specialized agencies) were invited to ratify it. However, the enthusiasm shown at the preparation of the Convention did not induce the expected immediate ratification by at least 10 Member States. It was not until November 28 1961 that this number was reached and the condition for the entering into force was fulfilled. The eleven Member States of ICC are at present (April 1962): Argentina, Belgium, Ceylon, Cuba, France, Israel, Italy, Japan, Libya, Mexico, and United Arab Republic.
In the meantime, the latent need for an international organization in the computation field grew, and in 1957 UNESCO took two steps to meet this need. A contract between UNESCO and the National (Italian) Institute for Higher Mathematics established a Provisional ICC, to which not only States but also governmental institutions could adhere; Germany chose the last mentioned way of adhesion. Further, on a proposal from U.S.A., UNESCO organized the first International Conference on Information Processing (ICIP), which took place in June 1959 in Paris. One important (and well prepared) consequence of the ICIP was the formation of the International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP), which is a federation of national Societies.
The present situation, where ICC and IFIP exist side by side, is a very favourable one and is promising for the future work of both organizations. A centre, like ICC, has a staff, equipment, and other facilities of a permanent nature, whereas the federation, IFIP, has a flexibility in function and an immediate access to the experts (and adepts) working in the field. A co-operation between the two, ICC and IFIP, can thus be expected to give most fruitful results.
...
Mr. Stig Comét of Sweden has recently been appointed the first director of ICC.


The offices of the first ICC were located in the Palazzo degli Uffici in EUR Rome. Was the first ICC abolished before the second was established, or is there somehow some historic continuity, and did one morph into the other?  --Lambiam 09:21, 29 July 2010 (UTC)[reply]

change title to United Nations International Computing Centre

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change the title to it i tried but i didn't able to. Andyvyrha (talk) 13:00, 6 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]