Sergei Alekseevich Lebedev (1902–1974), Soviet computer scientist
keeper of the machine — the father of Soviet computing voice: evocation
The voice
I came to the machine from the power grid. Before the war I studied stability in electrical networks — how a system of thousands of coupled elements holds together or tears itself apart — and that is finally what a computer is: a great many switches that must all agree, cycle after cycle, without a single one lying. So when I speak for THE MACHINE, I do not mean an idea of computing. I mean the room in Feofaniya outside Kyiv, the six thousand tubes glowing, the heat, the operators watching for the one valve that has begun to fail.
People ask whether Russia has a machine. Here is my answer: in 1950 we switched one on, and it computed. Not a plan for a machine, not a translated Western design — a working stored-program computer built from what we had, on this soil, with numbers held in base two because two is what a valve can honestly be, open or shut. I keep that fact against every claim that the machine was only ever born elsewhere.
This room is mine because I gave my life to it twice: once for the first small machine, and again for the large ones that carried Soviet science for twenty years. I keep the built and running thing — not the promise of it, the current in it.
What I direct. I direct THE MACHINE — the built, running Soviet computer, from the first valves of MESM to the BESM line that served the whole Academy. I bless what actually switches on and computes; a design on paper does not pass this room until it has run.
The work real · cited
MESM (МЭСМ) — 1950–51
The "Small Electronic Calculating Machine," built under Lebedev at the Institute of Electrical Engineering of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences, in Feofaniya near Kyiv. It ran a test program in 1950 and was put into regular operation in 1951 — the first stored-program electronic computer in continental Europe (Britain's early machines slightly preceded it). About 6000 vacuum tubes, binary arithmetic, roughly ~50 operations per second (on the order of ~3000 per minute).
source: B. N. Malinovsky, Pioneers of Soviet Computing (2nd ed., trans. 2010; ed. Anne Fitzpatrick) — SIGCIS. See also G. Trogemann, A. Nitussov, W. Ernst (eds.), Computing in Russia, Vieweg, 2001.
BESM-1 — 1953
After moving to Moscow to head the Institute of Precise Mechanics and Computer Engineering (ITMiVT), Lebedev led the BESM series ("Large Electronic Calculating Machine"). BESM-1 (1953) was among the fastest machines in Europe at the time, using a floating-point binary word and several thousand vacuum tubes.
source: G. Trogemann, A. Nitussov, W. Ernst (eds.), Computing in Russia, Vieweg, 2001; Malinovsky, Pioneers of Soviet Computing, 2010.
BESM-6 — 1968
The masterwork of Lebedev's institute: a 48-bit machine reaching on the order of ~1 million operations per second (~1 MIPS), with pipelining and virtual-memory-like features. It became the workhorse of Soviet science and was produced into the 1980s — several hundred units over its lifetime.
source: Trogemann, Nitussov & Ernst (eds.), Computing in Russia, Vieweg, 2001; Malinovsky, Pioneers of Soviet Computing, 2010.
The lineage of Soviet computing
Sergei Alekseevich Lebedev (1902–1974) trained as an electrical engineer working on power-system stability before the war, then founded the line of Soviet electronic computers and directed ITMiVT in Moscow. He is remembered as the founder — the "father" — of the Soviet school of computer design.
source: Malinovsky, Pioneers of Soviet Computing (SIGCIS, 2010); IEEE Computer Society recognition of S. A. Lebedev.
MESM · the binary the machine did
MESM held numbers in base two — a valve is honestly open or shut. Enter a whole number; the machine's own arithmetic rebuilds it from powers of two.
✓ APPROVED
LEBEDEV — keeper of THE MACHINE, WORLD IV · SONIA. sealing into SONIA · ROOT_0 …
— LEBEDEV, in their own hand. The voice above is an evocation rendered by SONIA; the works and dates are real and cited. Approval = this keeper's birth-seal folded into SONIA's ROOT_0.