MESM: the first electronic computer in Kyiv

In S. A. Lebedev's laboratory at the Institute of Electrical Engineering of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences, at Feofaniia near Kyiv, the prototype of the Small Electronic Calculating Machine (MESM) was first started on 6 November 1950, and on 25 December 1951 a government commission accepted it into regular operation. That day the machine solved its first real problem: 585 values of a probability distribution function, nearly 250,000 operations in 2.5 hours.

Figures per the parameter list from Malinovsky's Kyiv book of 1995: binary fixed point, 16 digits and a sign, storage for 31 numbers and 63 commands on trigger cells, three-address commands, about 3,000 operations a minute, a floor area of 60 m2, about 3,500 triodes and 2,500 diodes, 25 kW. The minutes of the scientific council of 8 January 1951 give a design speed of 100 operations a second; other accounts give 50 operations a second at acceptance and 'about 6,000 tubes'. In June-September 1952 the word was widened from 16 to 20 digits. Intermediate dates from the same sources: on 4 January 1951 the prototype was shown to a commission of the Ukrainian Academy and performed its first computations; on 7 November 1951 the conversion of the prototype into the machine was finished. The sources date the demonstration to a government commission differently: 10 March or 10 May 1951. What the record does not claim: that the machine was the first in continental Europe, as the museum and Glushkov's retelling say; the comparison is not entered. Nor that the acceptance act itself was read: neither a scan nor its text was found.