Beginnings of a revolution - The Computing Universe: A Journey through a Revolution - page 22

Few specifics are known about the Soviet machines, since most of the documents were never pub-
lished. There is a general perception that computing in the Soviet Union in the 1950s and 1960s was far less
developed than in the West. However, it is hard to imagine that the Soviets would have been able to achieve
the spectacular results in space exploration, defense, and technology without possessing some serious com-
puting capacity. Doron Swade, a senior curator of the London Science Museum, traveled to Siberia in 1992
to procure a Soviet BESM-6 computer for his museum's collection. In an interview for BBC Radio 4, he was
asked about Lebedev's contribution and the MESM computer:

Was MESM original? I would say almost completely yes. Was its performance comparable? Certainly. Was
BESM's performance comparable? I'd say BESM by that stage was being outperformed by the equivalent gen-
eration in the [United] States. But as a workhorse, as an influential machine in the plenty of Russian com-
puter science in terms of its utility and its usefulness to the space program, to military research and scientific
research it is probably, arguably the most influential machine in the history of modern computing. 19

Trevor Pearcey and the CSIR Mark I

Trevor Pearcey ( B.1.12 ) was born in the United Kingdom and had worked on applying advanced mathe-
matics to radar development during World War II. In 1945, he emigrated to Australia and visited Harvard and
MIT on the way; he saw both Aiken's Mark I and Bush's Differential Analyzer in operation. By 1946 Pearcey
was working at the Division of Radiophysics of the Australian Council for Scientific and Industrial Research
(CSIR) located at the University of Sydney. He understood the limitations of the machines he had seen in
the United States and saw the potential for using vacuum tubes to create a high-speed digital computer. By
the end of 1947, Pearcey, working on the theory, and Maston Beard, an electrical engineering graduate from
Sydney working on the hardware, had defined their design. Although Pearcey visited the United Kingdom
near the end of 1948 and saw the Manchester Baby and the Cambridge EDSAC, he saw no reason to change
his original design. He later asserted that the CSIR Mark I “was completely 'home-grown' some 10,000 miles
distant from the mainstream development in the UK and USA.” 20 As with all the early computers, the devel-
opment of computer memory technology was one of the major chal-
lenges. It was left to engineer Reg Ryan on the Australian team to
design the memory system for the CSIR Mark I using mercury delay
lines. The machine operated at 1 kilohertz and its delay line mem-
ory could store 768 words, each 20 bits long. By the end of 1949,
their computer was able to run some basic mathematical operations
and could genuinely claim to be one of the first operational stored-
program computers. By 1951, CSIR had changed its name to the
Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation, and
the computer became the CSIRO Mark I. At Australia's first confer-
ence on Automatic Computing Machines in August 1951, the Mark
I gave the first demonstration of computer-generated music by play-
ing the popular wartime song “Colonel Bogey.” In 1954, the CSIRO
project was officially ended, and the machine was transferred to the
University of Melbourne in 1955. The university's new Computation
Laboratory was opened in 1956 with the CSIRO machine as its work-
horse, rechristened CSIRAC. The machine ran for the next eight
years, with only about 10 percent of its running time taken up for
maintenance.

B.1.12 Trevor Pearcey (1919-98) was
born in London and graduated from
Imperial College with a degree in phys-
ics and mathematics. After working
on radar systems during the war, he
emigrated to Australia and was responsi-
ble for designing and building the CSIR
Mark I at the University of Sydney. This
was one of the world's first computers to
use vacuum tubes.