They Were the Pioneers
The World of High Technology Museum at the Kyiv trade center City.com recently hosted the launch of an exhibition entitled “IT History in Ukraine.” It is no accident that its organizers, the Information Society of Ukraine Foundation and the Foundation for History and Development of Computer Science and Technology, threw open its doors on November 6. On this day fifty-four years ago the first trial run took place of the so- called Small Electronic Calculating Machine (MERM), the first computer in the history of mainland Europe.
Borys Malynovsky, one of the pioneers of Ukrainian computer science and technology, who is also a keen historiographer of hi-tech in our country and a corresponding member of the Ukrainian National Academy of Sciences, read out a historic document, a report that recorded all the operations that were tested on the prototype (this was the official name of the first electronic computer). Among them were the functions of addition and subtraction of two numbers with the result entered into the memory element, as well as multiplication of two numbers. All the algorithms were completed in three ways: in manual, automatic, and semiautomatic mode.
The Small Electronic Calculating Machine was the first to use parallel processing of numbers (simultaneously for all digits). Today, the fundamentals of constructing the first electronic computers, which were established by their designer, director of the Electrotechnology Institute of the Academy of Sciences of the Ukrainian SSR Serhiy Lebedev, are used largely unchanged in contemporary systems. In the early years of his career he worked on developing electronic computers based on vacuum tubes, and toward the end of his life he developed integrated circuit machines. In addition to his pioneering work on the Small Electronic Calculating Machine, after relocating to Moscow, Lebedev created fifteen more supercomputers in a matter of two decades. Many of them were the fastest in all Europe and no worse than the best American models. According to Malynovsky, it is no accident that when the centennial of Lebedev’s birth was marked in 2002, American researchers called him an individual with the greatest creative potential among the world’s pioneers of computer technology.
The name of academician Viktor Hlushkov, the founding father of information technology in Ukraine, has been engraved in gold letters in the annals of information technology. In the 1950s he directed a team that developed the “Kyiv” vacuum-tube electronic computer, which was followed by the first Soviet semiconductor control machine “Dnipro,” built in record time. It was mass-produced from 1961 to 1971, and broke all records of industrial longevity, initially at the Kyiv-based plant Radioprylad and later at Electronmash. Hlushkov’s biography was featured in the book The Computer Pioneers published in the US in 1995. And this, despite the fact that Ukrainian scientists’ projects had long been hidden from the outside world by a veil of secrecy, says Malynovsky.
The exposition features little-known computers used in military-purpose systems. The Scientific Research Institute of Radioelectronics was the first in the USSR to begin developing naval radioelectronic systems. The “Carat” electronic computers for submarines were built by the Kyiv Research and Production Association “Quant” and were noted for their high reliability.
The new exposition has occupied its rightful place in the World of High Technology Museum. It naturally blends with the museum’s concept, which consists of three parts: the past, present, and future, according to Information Society of Ukraine Foundation president Andriy Kolodiuk. After all, the museum was conceived as a platform for showing the general public the inexhaustible opportunities of information technology in solving the problems faced by humanity. According to Kolodiuk, a forthcoming exhibition in the museum will be dedicated to the cities of the future.
