The first computer at RMIT, an
Elliott Automation model 803, was acquired at the instigation of the Department of Mathematics during the early 1960s, and located on the ground floor of
Storey Hall. The School of Computer Science and Information Technology (which has had several names) became a separate academic department of RMIT in 1980. The first PhD in Computer Science awarded at RMIT was in 1988 to Dr Alan Kent for his thesis on "File access methods based on descriptors and superimposed coding". In 1990, the Multimedia Database Systems group within the school became a research centre led by Professor Ron Sacks-Davis. Following the development of
TeraText (a non-relational text database system), the commercial arm of the group (including TeraText) was in 2001 spun off into a separate company, InQuirion. RMIT subsequently sold TeraText and InQuirion to
SAIC in 2006. ==References==