Isaak Semjonowitsch Bruk

Isaak Semjonowitsch Bruk ( Russian Исаак Семенович Брук , English transcription Isaac Semenovich Bruk ; born November 8, 1902 in Minsk , † October 6, 1974 in Moscow ) was a Soviet computer pioneer .

Training and early years as an electrical engineer

Bruk came from a poor Jewish background, his father worked in a tobacco factory. From 1920 he attended the Higher Technical School in Moscow (MHTS), where Karl Adolfowitsch Krug was one of his teachers in electrical engineering. After graduating in 1925 (on the control of three-phase asynchronous machines ), he conducted research under Krug at the All-Union Institute for Electrical Engineering (UEEI) founded by the latter in 1922, which played a central role in the electrification of the Soviet Union and received the most generous state support. Bruk worked as an electrical engineer on the development of electric motors (asynchronous motors) and other issues in Kharkiv .

First concern with computers

In 1935 he moved to the Institute for Electrical Engineering of the Academy of Sciences in Moscow (PEI). In 1935 he developed his first analog computer for the simulation of line networks, for which he received his doctorate in 1936 (candidate title) and habilitated in the same year (Russian doctoral degree).

A large mechanical computer followed, which was used to solve differential equations. The machine was finished in 1939, and Bruk was accepted into the Soviet Academy of Sciences that same year because of this and other achievements.

During the Second World War, he continued to research electrical engineering and control systems for Flak, which also had simple mechanical analog computers installed. Because of the work he became a member of the Soviet Academy of Artillery Science in 1947.

In the immediate post-war period he developed an electromechanical analog computer at the PEI ( Differential Analyzer ) for solving integral equations.

Electronic computers

Bruk knew that the future belonged to electronic computers and he seized the opportunity when Aksel Ivanovich Berg introduced him to the talented young engineer Bashir Iskanderovich Ramejew , who was also interested in electronic computers, in May 1948 . In just four months they developed the design of a von Neumann type electronic computer (with a stored program) for which they received a Soviet patent in December 1948. While Ramejew had in the meantime returned to the military to work in the Far East as a radar instructor for the Navy, Bruk started building the M tube computer in 1950/51 with a team of engineers from the Moscow Institute for Electrical Engineering (MPEI) from the radio section -1. He was supported by the young computer engineer Nikolai Jakowlewitsch Matjuchin (Matyukhin, 1927–1984). Despite financial bottlenecks (thanks to his contacts to the Artillery Academy, he received electronic parts from captured German stocks) the prototype was completed in 1952, roughly at the same time as Sergei Lebedev's MESM in Kiev, which, however, did not know about each other due to the secrecy.

In 1952 the M-2 followed under the direction of Mikhail Alexandrowitsch Karzew (1923-1983), in which the logic was already partially implemented with semiconductors. It went into operation in the summer of 1953 and various copies were installed at important scientific institutes for ITEP . At that time there was only competition in the Soviet Union from the BESM from Lebedev and the Strela from Ramejew.

The further developed M-2 (whose construction Karzew directed) also used truncated addresses like the computers of the second and third generation (e.g. System / 360 ), i.e. the registers involved were no longer specified directly in the instructions, but via a Memory address.

In 1956/57 Bruk also turned to the design of smaller computers, the M-3. He had to find customers for her himself, since she was not provided for in the state plan. He found them in space travel ( Sergei Pavlovich Koroljow ), in Yerevan in Armenia (Razdan and Aragat's computers, after convincing Viktor Hambarzumjan ), in Hungary (where it formed the basis of the first Hungarian electronic computer), in Beijing (in a Telefonfabrik) and in the Institute of Andranik Gewondowitsch Iossifian (1905–1993) in Moscow. In 1957 the M-3 was finally taken over into state production and produced in Minsk under Georgi Pawlowitsch Lopato , who developed the Minsk series of computers from it. The control computers developed at the Moscow Institute for Electronic Machinery also had their origin in the M-3.

Director of the IECM and after

Bruk received official recognition and became director of the newly established Institute for Electronic Control Machines (IECM) of the Academy of Sciences in 1958 and prepared a basic report for the Academy of Sciences (1958).

In 1957, a team led by Kartsew at the IECM developed a process computer for controlling radar networks, the M-4, which went into series production in 1962. Due to the rapid advance in computer development, a modernization was soon necessary, the M-4M, which went into production in 1964 and was produced for fifteen years.

Another process computer for controlling power plants, the M-7, was developed under the direction of Bruk.

The M-5 project of a computer of the second generation (with transistor logic and ferrite core memory and bus architecture) did not get beyond a prototype stage in 1961.

In the second half of the 1950s, Bruk increasingly turned to the use of computers in economic planning (influenced by the ideas of Wassili Wassiljewitsch Leontjew and Leonid Witaljewitsch Kantorowitsch ). This met with opposition from the state planning bureaucracy and in 1964 he was forced to resign as director of the IECM.

He remained a consultant to the IECM in computer architecture and was involved, for example, in the late 1960s and 1970s in the development of M-4000, M-4030, M-400 and SM-3, SM-4 - the SM series being the Minicomputer copied from DEC (PDP).

Web links

• Biography of Nitussov in the Russian Virtual Computer Museum

Individual evidence

1. ↑ The Soviet computer pioneer Sergei Alexejewitsch Lebedew was also a student of Krug at the MHTS