Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
A nonworking version of the CSIRAC Mark I can be found in the Melbourne
Museum. The Mark I is perhaps the ninth working digital computer, after ABC,
BINAC, COLOSSUS, EDSAC, ENIAC, Harvard Mark 1, MESM, and Z3.
Computers in Russia During World War II
For a variety of reasons, cooperation between the Soviet bloc and the western Al-
lies during World War II did not encompass cryptanalysis or code-breaking com-
puting devices. There was never the same level of cooperation as existed between
the United States and Great Britain.
After World War II, the Cold War increased hostility between the former allies,
which meant that Soviet work on computers was not known in the West, except
perhaps by those military and security officers with very high clearance levels.
Russia and other Soviet countries such as Ukraine were fairly active both during
World War II and the later Cold War.
Some of the Russian computer pioneers were contemporaries of Turing, Aiken,
Mauchly, Atanasoff, and von Neumann in the 1940s, but their names are hardly
known in the West. Some of these Soviet computer pioneers included S. A.
Lebedev, I. S. Brook, B. I. Rameev, V. M. Glushkov, and others equally unknown
in western computer literature.
There is not much information about Soviet computing during World War II it-
self, but by 1948, Lebedev in Ukraine built the first Soviet computer, the MESM
(a small electronic counting machine). The MESM was later used for calculations
involving nuclear devices, space exploration, and electrical transmission. This is
one of the first indigenous general-purpose computers built on the continent of
Europe except for the work of Konrad Zuse in Germany.
Lebedev later transferred his operations from Ukraine to Moscow and contin-
ued to build advanced computing devices, some of which pioneered new techno-
logies and gathered useful patents.
In later decades, Russian and Soviet computers would approach western com-
puters in processing power and capabilities.
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