Antoni Kiliński

Antoni Kiliński (born October 20, 1909 in Anton in what is now Lithuania , † May 6, 1989 ) was a Polish computer pioneer.

UMC-1

Kiliński studied electrical engineering at the Warsaw Technical University with a degree in 1935. He then taught at the Warsaw Technical University and worked at the same time in the Patent Office and from 1937 to 1939 in the National Telecommunications Institute. During the Warsaw Uprising he was an intelligence officer in the underground army. In 1948 he worked at the Central Institute of the Polish Army and at the Technical Military Academy, where he headed the theoretical electrical engineering department and also gave lectures at the University of Wroclaw and from 1951 at the Technical University of Warsaw (Faculty of Communication Science). In 1953 he left the army and went entirely to the Technical University of Warsaw, where he became associate professor in 1955, assistant professor in 1959 and professor in 1965. From 1951 to 1954 he was deputy dean and from 1956 to 1960 dean of the Faculty of Communication Studies. In 1963 he became head of the newly founded department for computers, which became its own institute in 1970 and was its director until his retirement in 1978. 1969/70 he was rector of the university.

At the end of the 1950s he built one of the first electronic computers in Poland, the UMC 1 tube computer ( Uniwersalna Maszyna Cyfrowa , Polish for Universal Digital Machine). It was produced by the Elwro company from 1962 (after the tube version, there was also later a transistorized version UMC-10). The Elwro company existed until 1989 and also manufactured the Odra computers (from 1959/60 in Breslau) and ELWAT computers and later replicas of the ZX Spectrum .

In 1996 he received the Computer Pioneer Award . He wrote several books.

Web links

• Computer Pioneer Award