Bashir Iskandarowitsch Ramejew

Bashir Rameev 1980

Bashir Iskandarowitsch Ramejew ( Russian Башир Искандарович Рамеев , English transcription Bashir Iskandarovich Rameev ; born May 1, 1918 in Baimak , Tatarstan ; † May 16, 1994 in Moscow ) was a Soviet computer pioneer . He is known for developing the Ural computer series.

Youth and education

His grandfather Zakir Ramejew was a well-known Tatar poet and entrepreneur (gold mining), his father a mining engineer who studied at the Bergakademie Freiberg and drew attention to himself through inventions in gold mining. The young Rameev drew attention to himself as a teenager by inventing a radio-controlled armored train and was accepted into the Soviet Society of Inventors, although he was still a minor. He studied at the Moscow Electrical Engineering School (MPEI), but had to leave it because his father was arrested in 1938 (he disappeared into the Gulag system and is believed to have died around 1943). During World War II, he invented a cryptographic machine that was also good enough to be mass-produced and was a radio operator at the front.

Bashir Rameev 1929

Beginning of his work with computers, Strela

In 1944 technical specialists were pulled from the front in the Soviet Union and he came to an electronics institute (Institute No. 108) headed by Aksel Ivanovich Berg , one of the fathers of radar in the Soviet Union. Rameev had heard about ENIAC on the radio and began to be interested in computers, whereupon Berg let him work with Isaak Semjonowitsch Bruk at the Institute for Electrical Engineering of the Soviet Academy of Science in May 1948 . In just four months they designed a digital computer with program storage (i.e. of the Von Neumann type) - it wrote its output on punched tape, which in turn could be used as program input. In December 1948 both received a Soviet patent on it. Before they could start building the computer, Rameev was sent to the Far East by the military to instruct Naval personnel on radar. In 1950 he was released again after a Soviet minister (Parschin) intervened, and took up work in the Special Design Office (SDB) 245 in Moscow, which was supposed to build computers (mainly for civil purposes).

On the basis of his design with Bruk, Ramejew designed the Strela computer, the first mass-produced Soviet computer. It was built by a team led by Yuri Jakowlewitsch Basilewski (1912–1983). At the instigation of Rameev it was built with tubes instead of relays. A total of seven copies were made, one of which was at the Institute for Applied Mathematics of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, one at the Academy's computing center and several in ministries. The Strela was used, among other things, for the calculation of nuclear reactors and for space travel.

A first model was tested in 1953 and then series production started. In 1954, Rameev and the Strela team received the State Prize of the USSR .

Rameev also gave the first lectures on digital computers in the Soviet Union from 1951 at the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology (MEPI), which were attended by many engineers in the early days of computers in the Soviet Union and were later taken over by Sergei Alexejewitsch Lebedev .

Because of his father he continued to face difficulties - he was not allowed to continue his university studies and since he did not have a diploma he was not allowed to continue his lectures in 1953. At SDB 245 he was first given a permanent apartment - before that he had to move constantly because he was considered a politically unreliable person.

Ural computer

In 1953/54 he started the successor computer project to Strela, the Ural computer. In 1955 he moved to the planned production facility 600 km southeast of Moscow in Penza . The Ural-1 was finished in 1957, had a magnetic drum memory and additional external memories and was mainly used for technical and scientific purposes. Other computers of the Ural series followed, such as the Ural-4 from 1961 with ferrite core memory for the internal memory (RAM) and magnetic drums and magnetic tapes for the external memory.

In addition to the Ural computers, special computers were manufactured, for example for meteorology , statistical data analysis from experiments (called granite, used in ballistics), X-ray crystal structure analysis and radar location.

On the initiative of Berg, Lebedew and Bruk, he received a doctorate in 1962.

Around 1960 he developed a Ural series of 2nd generation computers (Ural -11, Ural -14, Ural -16) with upward-compatible software and semiconductor logic. For these computers he developed semiconductor modules that were mass-produced in large numbers and were also used in other computers (in the 1960s, the number went into the millions). Ural 11 and 14 were produced in series from 1964, Ural 16 from 1969.

Also in software development (under VI Burkov) one broke new ground in the USSR. Burkov developed operating systems and system-related software on instruction level and the ARMU assembler for the whole family. In addition, Algol variants ran on the computers (Algol-60, ALGAMS, ALGEC).

The Ural computers were widely used in the Soviet Union in banks, in space travel and in factories.

In 1968/69 a multiprocessor Ural computer was also under development (Ural -25 under V. Burkov, A. Nevskiy, A. Gorshkov) and Ramejew dealt with computers based on ICs .

The time after

In the late 1960s, the development of third generation computer systems began in the Soviet Union. A major problem in the Soviet Union as well as in the West was the incompatibility of hardware and software from different computer projects. A new research institute was therefore founded in Moscow in 1967 (SRIDEC under Sergei Arkadjewitsch Krutowskich ), which was supposed to develop the next generation of computers on a uniform basis. At first Rameev had fought for his own line, which he wanted to develop in cooperation with the British ICL , and was supported by leading computer engineers such as Lebedev and Viktor Mikhailovich Gluschkow . But it was officially decided to rely on clones of the successful System / 360 from IBM and its successor (called ES Computer), which meant the end of many independent computer projects in the Soviet Union. Clones of DEC minicomputers followed later . Rameyev submitted his resignation and in 1971 took an administrative post in the State Committee of the USSR for Science and Technology, in which he had to evaluate computer projects.

literature

• Georg Trogemann, Alexander Nitussov, Wolfgang Ernst (editors): Computing in Russia: The History of Computer Devices and Information Technology Revealed, Vieweg 2001

Web links

• Russian Virtual Computer Museum, biography of Nitussov

Individual evidence

1. ^ Ural family in the Russian Virtual Computer Museum
2. ↑ Who could also run the software of the IBM / 360. This resulted in a very extensive project of cooperation between different Comecon countries.