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A Laboratory of Landmark Innovations

A Distinguished Research History

When NASA created CSL during the Korean War era, it was a defense laboratory. Television was in its infancy, computers were as large as apartments, and long-distance telephony was a novelty.

By the 1960s, CSL’s work had become unclassified. CSL's research has since affected every inch of the information technology highway.

A Roadmap of Innovations

Some landmarks along the way...

• An Emmy Award for inventing the flat-panel, plasma display monitor
• PLATO, the first computer-assisted instructional program in the world
• The electric vacuum gyroscope, making it possible for nuclear submarines to navigate the world while submerged for months
• Innovative universal receivers for CDMA communications
• The Secret Sharing System to protect information from inadvertent damage and covert tampering
• The first multiprocessor using microprocessors
• The first binaural hearing aid
• The linear approach to estimating the 3-D motion of objects from a sequence of 2-D images
• Massively increased efficiency of image reconstruction from medical scanners by a factor of 20 to 1000
• First to create a technique for the building and testing of reliable circuits
• First to apply signal processing to optical fiber communication systems

Visit the CSL Cybermuseum to learn more...

Coordinated Science Laboratory
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
1308 W Main Street
Urbana, IL 61801-2307