In my talk I will discuss the creation and evolution of the first national computing service in Canada from the mid 1940s to the late 1950s in Canada. In particular, I will argue in favor of a user-driven framework to understand the position of computing centres as a mediator between technology and user. Most historians have portrayed computing centres differently: as statistical or mathematical laboratories extending well back in to the 19th century; as the home of high-speed large-scale computer hardware development from the 1930s to the 1950s; or as the birthplace of computer science in the 1960s. These accounts tend to emphasize the technological advances or professionalization of computing labour; only a few have considered a whole relationship between the technological hardware, computing centre and its end-users.

No major scientific computing centre existed in Canada until the late 1940s, although many had existed in the U.K. and the U.S. for many years. In 1948, the University of Toronto, with the support and blessing of several government and military research agencies, created the Computation Centre as a national computing service for Canadian scientists and engineers. Initially, the Centre was equipped with electromechanical calculators and served a small set of relatively passive clients with unremarkable computational needs. However, in 1952 it acquired the first electronic computer in Canada, a Ferranti Mark I from Manchester, and immediately faced numerous challenges acquiring the new skills to use the machine and communicating the new knowledge to its clients. Critically, this latter group was expanding with curious non-scientific end-users who would actively shape computing practice. Throughout the 1950s as the Computation Centre constantly and continually mediated between the shifting social and technological demands, configuring users and reconstructing the technology as necessary at an unstable boundary.