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The establishment of the Computer Science and Engineering Department at the Polytechnic Institute of Bucharest in late spring of 1969 was an important event that was welcomed with enthusiasm and hope by teachers and students alike. Grigore Moisil's prestige has made possible the participation of Lotfi Zadeh and Peter Naur at a major scientific meeting in Bucharest in 1966. These developments were happening on the background of the emergence, in Romania, of the first digital electronic computers. The developments of higher education courses in this domain were related to previous research, on the design and construction of computer systems and automatic data processing equipment on the industrial platform for computers (FCE, FEPER, IIRUC). The “Computer Science” Section was attached from the first semester of the academic year 1967 - 1968 within the Faculty of Automatic Control by the rector of the institute, the Academician George Baranescu.
	The Computer Science and Engineering Department was supported from the Faculty of Automatic Control by vice-dean Professor Adrian Petrescu, and from the Faculty of Electronics and Telecommunications by Professor Mircea Petrescu who was at the time the Head of the Department of Vacuum Tubes and Transistors. The first team of the Department also included Marius Guran, Petre Dimo, Ivan Sipos, Mariana Necula Florian Moraru, Valeriu Iorga, Petre Dumitru, Theodor Danila, Nicolae Cupcea, and Adrian Davidovici. Also, recent graduates Valentin Cristea, Cristian Giumale and Marian Dobre (from the Faculty of Automatic Control), as well as Serban Petrescu and Dan Ciocan (from the Faculty of Electronics and Telecommunications) joined the Department. The first entrance exam for the Computers Science specialization took place in 1967, and the newly graduated students Nicolae Tapus and Eugenia Kalisz joined the team of teachers from the Computer Science Department. The first Head of the Computer Science Department was Professor Mircea Petrescu (until 1973, and then between 1985 and 1990). He was succeeded by Professors Adrian Petrescu (1973 to 1985), Nicolae Tapus (1990 to 2008, and 2012 to the present), and Valentin Cristea (2008 to 2012).
The curricula suffered a number of changes. In 1977 it was separated in the two directions, namely hardware and software. The first promotions of hardware/software-graduates finished their studies in 1979. The 1990 curricula included Specializations in Computer Science and Engineering, on four directions of teaching. The latest significant change occurred in 2005, and marks the transition to the "Bologna" model of Bachelor / Master in Computer Science and Information Technology. The undergraduate studies comprise four years of education, with two distinct specializations (Computer Science with four tracks and another track on Information Technology). More information can be found here. The Master program includes nine distinct directions of study, spanning a number of topics from hardware to software technologies. More details can be obtained here.
	The PhD studies within the Department were initiated in 1969 by Professors Mircea Petrescu and Adrian Petrescu. The PhD studies were ever since a core component of the Computer Science Department. To date, the Computer Science Department has granted over 300 doctoral titles. Ever since the very beginning of the Department its members held a meritorious scientific research activity, addressing important conceptual and practical issues, belonging to the vast domain of computer systems, microprocessor design, information processing applications.
Numerous collaborations were done with the Institute for Research and Design for Computing Techniques on multi-access operating systems as well as the State Computer Company on the behavior of the operating system for FELIX C 256. The purchase of the first computer system within the Department consisted of an HP 2116 B and an IBM 1130. Between the years 1974 - 1990 a number of collaboration with research institutes and industry were conducted. The applications were based on the microcomputers FELIX MC-8, using the 8-bit Intel 8008 microprocessor and having an operating system developed in our Department, the FELIX M18 system, and later the dual processor system FELIX M-216 which was outfitted with a 16-bit Intel 8086 and an 8-bit Intel 8080 microprocessor. The first PC in Romania – with a production of over 1000 units – was developed in our Department from 1984 to 1990 as FELIX-PC and was based on Intel's 8086 microprocessor. Later, a number of collaborations were initiated with highly prestigious universities from Europe and the United States of America. We mention here the University of Grenoble, University of Rennes, Brunel University, University of Michigan-Ann Arbor, University of California-Berkeley, Technical University of Darmstadt, and University Provo. Famous teachers visiting the department in those years and with which long-term scientific collaborations continued included Louis Bolliet, a central personality in the domain of compilers; James Gray - Turing Award winner, founder of the theory of transactions; Keki Iran – a personality "encyclopedia" of the domain; Douglas Lewin - renowned specialist in the data processing design systems.
	The results of the UNDP-UNESCO Project were a better quality education and a substantial increase in the level of the research activities within the Department. This was the first of a series of major projects developed within the Department that marked major changes in its orientation, among which we can enumerate the DISCO, CoLaborator, EU-NCIT, and most recently the European FP7 ERRIC, SENSEI, P2P-Next, TWISNet, EUWB, Change, HP-SEE, EGEE-SCI, SEE-Grid, LEXNET or Trilogy-2 projects. For more details on past and ongoing research projects in our department please visit this page.