Yuri Jakowlewitsch Basilewski

Yuri Jakowlewitsch Basilewski ( Russian Юрий Яковлевич Базилевский , English transcription Yuri Yakovlevich Basilevskiy ; born May 3, 1912 in Voronezh ; † June 10, 1983 in Moscow ) was a Soviet computer engineer.

Life

Basilewski was a teacher's son and went to school in Maikop . He worked as a technician in factories and studied on the side, first at a correspondence school and later at the Moscow Mechanical Engineering Institute, graduating in 1936. He then worked in the development department of the manometer factory in Moscow and during World War II in Tomsk , where the factory had been evacuated (Factory No. 838). In 1942 he received a teaching license as a toolmaker, but due to an operation in 1944 that resulted in his leg being amputated, he had to give up his position as chief engineer of the factory. From 1947 he worked at the Moscow Institute for Laboratory Instruments and Automation, where he was awarded two high medals for his work (including the Red Banner of Labor).

In 1950 he went to the special design office SDB 245, where he managed the construction and industrial production of Bashir Ramejew's Strela computer . Seven of them were built from 1953 to 1956, with all specimens slightly different from each other. At that time there were two similar computer projects in the Soviet Union, the M-1 by Isaak Bruk and the BESM by Sergei Alexejewitsch Lebedew . In 1954 Basilewski became a socialist hero and was awarded the Golden Star medal. Basilewski became vice director of SDB 245.

In the second half of the 1950s he was working on the project of an automated air defense (evaluation of the radar data and subsequent targeting of missiles for air defense) with the code name Dal-111. The testing took place in 1960/61, but has already been further developed into the 5E61 system. In 1960 came a new director, Sergei Krutowskich , under whom the SDB 245 (since 1958 Scientific Institute for Electronic Machines, SIEM) turned to on-board computers for aircraft and space travel. Basilewski's air defense project lost its priority.

Basilewski left the institute in 1961 and went to the State Commission of the USSR for Science and Technology and when the Ministry of Instrumentation responsible for computers was founded in 1965 he became head of the technical office there. There he dealt in particular with process computers for industry. In 1982 he retired from the Ministry.

Web links

• Biography of Nitussov in the Russian Virtual Computer Museum
• Carr on the architecture of the Strela, in Bell u. a. Computer Structures