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 commission accepted it into regular operation. In December 1951, by Lebedev's list of stages, real problems were also run on the machine, among them 585 values of a probability distribution function: nearly 250,000 operations in 2.5 hours.
Why it matters
Ukraine had its own stored-program computer, and the laboratory that built it became the seed of the Computing Centre of 1957 and the Institute of Cybernetics of 1962. The Kyiv work on recognition, proof and self-learning that the atlas already holds comes from there. This is an editorial assessment.
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. The sources name those who accepted the machine differently. By the memoir of Dashevsky and Shkabara, which Malinovsky quotes in his book of 1995, at the end of 1951 a commission of the USSR Academy of Sciences came to Feofaniia, headed by Academician M. V. Keldysh, with Academicians S. L. Sobolev and M. A. Lavrentiev and Professors K. A. Semendiaev and A. G. Kurosh; it tested the machine for three days and decided to accept it into operation from 25 December 1951. The memoir gives no day for the decision itself; 25 December is the day from which the machine was accepted. Malinovsky's article of 2002 calls the commission a government one. The document closest to the event that could be read is an extract from the minutes of the Presidium of the USSR Academy of Sciences of 4 January 1952, in the museum's Ukrainian text: it says only that the machine was put into operation in the fourth quarter of 1951, with no day. Another document dates an act on putting the machine into operation. In his book of 1998 Malinovsky prints, in Russian (and in the book's Ukrainian edition, p. 27), the covering letter of the Institute of Electrical Engineering of the Ukrainian Academy to the Committee for Stalin Prizes, signed by the director, A. D. Nesterenko. It has no date of its own in print; an enclosure dated 18 November 1952 puts it after that day. The list of enclosures names resolution No. 12 of the Presidium of the Ukrainian Academy of 11 January 1952, an act of 12.01.1952 on putting the small electronic calculating machine into operation, and a separate act of 5 January 1951 on the prototype. So the act on putting the machine into operation that this list names is dated 12 January 1952, not 25 December 1951. That is also the end of the span in the entry from Lebedev's workbook retold by Ivanenko in 1978: '25.XII.1951 - 12.I.1952: the act of handing MEOM over into operation was drawn up'. Ivanenko calls this prehistory a reconstruction from documents and recollections and in 2018 puts 'an interval of time?' after the last date. No source read says whether this is the act by which Keldysh's commission accepted the machine, or what it says about 25 December. The list of the stages of development of the first electronic (small) calculating machine, which ends with Lebedev's name as chief designer, dates the start-up to 25 December 1951. Malinovsky first prints it in his book of 1995 under the heading 'Secret': item 15, headed December 1951, puts the start-up on 25.XII.51 and goes on to the solution of real problems, among them 585 values of a probability distribution function, with no day for that. The list has no date of its own and its last entries are October-November 1952, so it is not a document of December 1951. It names an act only for the prototype (January-February 1951); it lists reports by Lebedev to the Presidium of the USSR Academy on 4 January 1952 and to that of the Ukrainian Academy on 11 January and, under 12 January 1952, the filling of orders for calculations. By Dashevsky and Shkabara the first real problem of the machine was a trial ballistic one, which in their account comes before the commission's arrival. 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, nor any document of December 1951 - January 1952 that names 25 December. In volume 8 of Outstanding Designers of Ukraine (2018) Malinovsky writes that 'acts of commissions on the acceptance of MESM at different stages' are among Lebedev's archival documents, copied in a collection prepared for his 100th anniversary by a fund at the House of Scientists of the Ukrainian Academy; that collection was not found. Also unread are the act of 12 January 1952, resolution No. 12 of 11 January 1952 and the Presidium's order thanking the participants, which Dashevsky and Shkabara say was issued at the same time (no date given); no source says whether the order is that resolution.