MESM, the Soviet Union's first electronic computer
MESM, primer ordenador electrónico de la URSS
- Date
- 1950-1951 · confidence high
- Place
- Feofania, Kyiv, Ukraine
- Credited to
- Sergey Lebedev and the Kyiv Institute of Electrical Engineering
- Field
- Knowledge & symbols
What it is
A stored-program computer with about six thousand vacuum tubes, installed in a former monastery building at Feofania near Kyiv. It performed calculations for rockets and nuclear energy. It was the first universal programmable electronic machine in the Soviet Union.
The first tests were in November 1950 and the commissioning in December 1951. It is sometimes presented as the first computer in continental Europe, but it was preceded by Zuse's Z4 (electromechanical) and the Swedish BARK.
What it led to
- the BESM in Moscow and the Soviet computer series
- the Ukrainian computer-science school of Glushkov
- scientific computing in the Soviet space programme