Page 10 - Kotov

Computer Families: Industry was Born
Time Frame
During the 60s, the USSR substantially expanded its influence at the international
arena, specifically in the “third world”. The Soviet Union became the second super-
power in the military aspects and continued successfully compete in the space. The
industrial progress in the USSR was also substantial. However, growth rates slowed
noticeably during the final years. The government tried to
solve economical problems without reforming the system
but rather strengthening the planning aspects of the man-
agement. And the road to the better planning was through
developing automated management systems (ASU, the
Russian abbreviation) for all management levels – from
every enterprise to the State Planning Committee. ASUs
for such a large economy required collecting, storing, and
The first man in space processing huge amounts of data. Thus, the government
Yury A . Gagarin
started to encourage the design and production of comput-
ers not only for research and defense, but also for running ASU applications.
The pioneering designs of 50s, which were mostly done in research institutions,
were transferred to industry and complementary (and competing) computer families The country’s top man
emerged at newly built computer R&D facilities in Kazan, Penza, Minsk, and other Leonid I . Brezhnev
cities. They designed computers of proprietary architectures, which were well suited
to the domestic engineering traditions and technological conditions.

The BESM and M-20 Family

BESM-2 was a serial (since 1958) version of Lebedev’s first BESM. It contained 5,000 diodes and 4,000 vacuum
tubes and was quite reliable for that time. Hundreds of thousands of programs from mathematics, physics, and
engineering was executed on this computer. In particular, the trajectory of the rocket, which delivered the USSR
pennants on the moon in 1959, had been calculated on BESM-2.
M-20 had 20 thousand instructions per second, the ferrite core memory capacity of 4096 of 45-bit words, float-
ing-point representation, the external storage included magnetic drums and tapes. It used automatic address
modification, overlapping of the instruction execution with fetching data from memory, a buffer memory for
overlapping printing with calculations, mechanisms for rapid start and stop of the tape.
One of the first Russian operating systems, IP-2, was developed for M-20 at the Institute of Applied Mathematics
in Moscow.
BESM-3, M-220, and M-222 were transistor-based computers with architecture derived from M-20. The volume
of the ferromagnetic memory was increased up to 16К words for М-220 and up to 32К words for М-222. The
M-220 instruction set was also enhanced: e.g. a square root instruction and several commands of switching from
one memory unit to another were added. BESM-4 and М-222 had interrupt system, memory protection, and
could communicate with other computers. All computers of this group received upgraded external storage and
IO devices.

The vacuum tube M-20 The transistorized M-220 to replace M-20

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