be one of the principal for the national economy.
Up to the beginning of the 1950s there were only small productive capacities which specialized in the producing accounting and account-perforating (punching) machines. The electronic numerical computer engineering was only arising and the productive capacities for it were close to the naught.
The first serious steps in the development of production base were made initially in the late 1950s when the work on creating the first industry samples of the electronic counting machines was finished and there were created M-20, “Ural-1”, “Minsk-1”, which together with their semi-conductor successors (M-220, “Ural-11-14”, “Minsk-22” and “Minsk-32”) created in the 1960s were the main ones in the USSR until the computers of the third generation were put into the serial production, that is until the early 1970s.
In the 1960s the science-research and assembling base was enlarged. As the result of this measures, all researches connected with creating and putting into the serial production of semi-conductor electronic computing machines were almost finished. That allowed to stop the production of the first generation machines beginning from the 1964.
Next decades the whole branch of the computer engineering had been created. The important steps were undertaken to widen the productive capacities for the 3d generation machines.
Kiev
the homecity of mesm
MESM was conceived by S.A.Lebedev to be a model of a Big Electronic Computing Machine (BESM). At first it was called the Model of the Big Electronic Computing Machine, but ,later, in the process of its creation there appeared the evident expediency of transforming it in a small computer. For that reason there were added: the impute-output devices, magnetic drum storage, the register capacity was enhanced; and the word “Model” was changed for “Malaya” (Small).
S.A.Lebedev was proposed to head the Institute of Energetics in Kiev. After a year; when the Institute of was divided into two departments: the electronical one and the department of heat-and-power engineering, Lebedev became the director of the first one. He also added his laboratory of analogue computation to the already existing ones of the electronical type. At once he began to work on computer science instead of the usual, routine researches in the field of engineering means of stabilization and structures of automated devices. Lebedev was awarded the State Prize of the USSR. Since autumn 1948 Lebedev directed his laboratory towards creating the MESM. The most difficult part of the work was the practical creation of MESM. It might be only the many-sided experience of the researches that allowed the scientist to fulfill the task perfectly; whereas one inaccuracy was made: the hall at the ground-floor of a two-storied building was assigned for MESM and when, at last, the MESM was assembled and switched on, 6,000 of red-hot electronic lamps created the “tropics” in the hall, so they had to remove a part of the ceiling to decrease the temperature.
In autumn 1951 the machine executed a complex program rather stabile.
MESM WITH SOME OF THE PERSONAL (KIEV, 1951)
Finally all the tests were over and on December, 15 the MESM was put into operation.
If to remember those short terms the MESM was projected, assembled, and debugged - in two years - and taking into consideration that only 12 people (including Lebedev) took part in the creating who were helped by 15 engineers we shall see that S.A.Lebedev and his team accomplished a feat (200 engineers and many workers besides 13 main leaders took part in the creation of the first American computer ENIAC).
As life have showed the foundations of the computer-building laid by Lebedev are used in modern computers without any fundamental changes. Nowadays they are well known:
such devices an arithmetic and memory input-output and control ones should be a part of a computer architecture;
the program of computing is encoded and stored in the memory as numbers;
the binary system should be used for encoding the numbers and commands;
the computations should be made automatically basing on the program stored in the memory and operations on commands;
besides arithmetic, logical operations are used: comparisons, conjunction, disjunction, and negation;
the hierarchy memory method is used;
the numerical methods are used for solving the tasks.
The main fault of The 70s
or
the years of “might-have-been hopes”
The great accumulated experience in creating computers, the profound comparison of our domestic achievements with the new examples of foreign computer technique prompted the scientists that it is possible to create the computing means of new generation meeting the world standards. Of that opinion were many outstanding Ukrainian scientists of that time - Lebedev, Dorodnitsin, Glushkov and others. They proceeded from quite a favorable situation in the country.
The computerization of national economy was considered as one of the most essential tasks. The decision to create the United system of computers - the machines of new generation on integrals.
The USA were the first to create the families of computers. In 1963-64 the