Informatics is the German term for everything concerning communications and information technology, software, hardware, interfaces and – as I see it these days – also controlling complex projects.
The word was originally used at Munich Technical University (TUM) by my much-admired teacher Professor F. L. Bauer, before it became a generally accepted way of referring to the subject matter.
Personally, I was privileged in that I was among the students who listened to the first lecture held by professor Bauer called “informatics” in the winter of 1969/1970. The accompanying book “Bauer-Goos – Informatik 1″ had newly appeared just on time for the lecture!
For much of what was taught at the lecture, I took many years to understand it. And I was able to dig deeper into it during wonderful discussions with F.L. Bauer (Friedrich Ludwig Bauer) not all that long ago. Consequently, informatics became a special word for me.
A few years later, I sat in the executive committee of the GChACM (German Chapter of the ACM) with my friend Wolf-Rüdiger Gawron. Even at the time, Wolf-Rüdiger had the vision of a German informatics portal, where all German ”stakeholders of informatics“ were to be represented. He had the ingenious idea to name the domain for this purpose “informatik.org”.
Until such a time as the informatics portal was to be ready, he allowed the German Chapter to use this “informatik.org” for the then newly introduced society website.
Now I decided to approach the project “Informatics Portal“ with InterFace AG. Of course, our first idea was to use the domain “informatik.de”. Unfortunately, however, I found out that this domain is used by an Austrian marketing enterprise. They mostly seem to do “domain dealing“. Well, they wanted a price of well into the seven-digit Euros for the “informatik.de”.
Naturally, that is not what I was interested in. So I made a reservation for five domain names with informatics:
informatik.cc informatik.co informatik.io informatik.me informatik.mu
Currently, the InterFace design team is working on a very special interface – and IF-Lab develops a totally new technology for personalized websites. It is exclusively for our informatics portal. We plan to present the first version this summer. And then we will start. We will fill our informatics portal with the best links of the computer science world.
Of course, in order to do so, we need the support of the best computer scientist in the world – your support!
RMD
(Translated by EG)
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