The department also ranks in the top two among all universities for faculty submissions to reputable journals and academic conferences, as determined by CSRankings.org.

[8] From before its official founding in 1964 to today, the department's faculty members and alumni have contributed to projects including the ORDVAC, PLATO, Mosaic (web browser), JavaScript and LLVM, and have founded companies including Siebel Systems, Netscape, Mozilla, PayPal, Yelp, YouTube, and Malwarebytes.

[9] The ORDVAC and ILLIAC computers the two earliest von-Neumann architecture machines to be constructed.

NCSA was one of the first places in industry or academia to develop software for the 3 major operating systems at the time – Macintosh, PC, and UNIX.

In the 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey, the antagonist and sentient computer HAL 9000 says it was made operational at the HAL Plant in Urbana, Illinois which was meant to represent the Coordinated Science Laboratory where the ILLIAC project was conducted.