In the contest environment the user has a limited time to solve a small set of problems The UVa OJ was created in 1995 by Miguel Ángel Revilla, a mathematician teaching algorithms at the University of Valladolid in Spain.
Ciriaco García de Celis, an informatics student at the University of Valladolid, implemented the first version of the judge using Bash, and then developed and maintained it for more than eight years.
In November 1999 and 2000 UVa hosted the ACM-ICPC SWERC programming contest.
In July 2000, UVa Online Judge started to host training contests.
In September 2007 a new system, developed by Miguel Revilla Rodríguez, was launched at a new server at the Baylor University, the headquarters of the ACM-ICPC contest.