Secrets of Communist computing | News | TechRadar UK

Description

Secrets of Communist computing

How the USSR's thirst for computing power led to its downfall

By Jon Thompson

Cold War paranoia may have brought the world to the brink of destruction, but it sparked an era of invention on both sides of the pond.

In September 1950, fearing that Soviet computing trailed America by 15 years, Director of the Moscow Institute of Precise Mechanics and Computer Technology Mikhail Lavrent'ev outlined the problem in a speech to colleagues.

The Russians understood what worked, but they had only produced a handful of primitive analogue devices. New digital number-crunching systems gave their scientists the opportunity to make huge leaps forward, but at what cost?

This is the story of the machines they created, and how the technologies intended to boost Communism played a key part in toppling the Soviet state.

The secret laboratory

Building digital computers in Soviet post-war Russia was a dangerous business. To protect himself and his staff from criticism that could end in them being sent to labour camps, Russian computer pioneer Sergei Lebedev of the Kiev Electro-Technical Institute declared that the computers they wanted to build would carry out only ideologically correct calculations.

Described as 'the Soviet Alan Turing', Lebedev had been thinking about how to build a computer since 1948, and by the end of 1949 he had the basic principles down on paper. In a climate of deep suspicion, Lebedev assembled a team of 12 designers and 15 technicians at a disused monastery at Feofania, near Kiev, and gave it the seemingly ironic name 'Secret Laboratory Number One'.

The team's first machine was called MESM, which was short for 'Small Electronic Counting Machine' in Russian. It contained over 6,000 vacuum tubes and had its own small power station to overcome local supply difficulties.

NAMING FAIL: Called ...

Original URL

http://www.techradar.com/news/computing/secrets-of-communist-computing-618217

http://www.techradar.com/news/computing/secrets-of-communist-computing-618217