Pioneers of Soviet Computing

by Boris Nikolaevich Malinovsky, Anne Fitzpatrick (Editor), Emmanuel Aronie (Translator)

Abstract:Boris N. Malinovsky’s Pioneers of Soviet Computing is the English language version of his earlier Russian language The History of Computing in Personalities (in Russian:История Вычислительной Техники в Лицах). Partly technical history and partly a memoir, it is the only existing first person account of the birth of modern computing in Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus. It chronicles the life and work of renowned Soviet computer scientists S.A. Lebedev, V.M. Glushkov, N.P. Brusentsov, I.S. Brook, and many others. It describes numerous indigenous and original Soviet computer hardware projects from the end of the Second World War through the decades that followed, interlaced with commentary on the Soviet political and social systems that constrained rapid and free technological advancement. In addition, this work reviews the various Russian and Ukrainian computing schools ranging from the highly philosophical cybernetics and artificial intelligence to the applied defense computing institutions supporting the military and weapons enterprises. The epic effort to mass produce the Unified System (ES) series of computers – based on the IBM 360 design - is described in depth, along with the political and bureaucratic intrigue and personal and technological struggles that accompanied.

[ http://www.sigcis.org/?q=node/85 ]

201 pages, ebook

First published January 1, 2010

Reviews

[Gwern · Rating 3 out of 5]

Moved to gwern.net.

[Rm102]

A unique English-language source on a topic left doubly untouched. Suffers more from the lack of other translated material than its own construction; the memoir style, assembled into parallel silos tracking individual research teams, begs for a cohesive nuts-and-bolts history to supply context even as it derives its value from creating narratives.

[Jagoba · Rating 3 out of 5]

An overall interesting story about a quite unknown side of the history of computing, the development of computers in the USSR, and specially people who made them.
Some chapters are great, however the style is somewhat inconsistent and there's no timeline.