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Analógový počítač SAV (1958)

Science is the future - a truth proven by history

9. 3. 2016 | 1880 visits
Science has a future. However, as time flows by, it has also its past. The better we know it, the more precisely we perceive its progress. A permanent exhibition on the history of computer technology in Slovakia, in the 60th anniversary year of the birth of informatics in the Slovak Republic, is an interesting confrontation of past notions and present reality, a source of knowledge and maybe also an inspiration. It is housed in the Slušovická hall, located above the SAS Computer Centre in the Patrónka premises of the SAS.

The birth of informatics (originally part of cybernetics) at the Slovak Academy of Sciences (SAS) can be traced back to the foundation by the academic Ján Gonda of the Theoretical and Applied Mechanics Laboratory; he employed two ambitious young engineers, Štefan Petráš and Ivan Plander. The former immediately directed his attention to the control of technological processes and the latter to computers. Ivan Plander introduced his first analogue computer, which helped solve theoretical tasks, only two years after joining the SAS. He worked in tandem with Štefan Petráš until the seventies when, for political reasons, they were both removed from their posts. Later they came across each other again thanks to robotics and artificial intelligence. Until 1990 they set the tone for developments in the field of informatics and information technology and were acknowledged throughout Slovakia.

The permanent exhibition attracts attention, among other things, for the RPP-16. The first Czechoslovak third-generation master computer, which was in its time one of the SASʼs most daring projects in the area of IT. Basic research into the third-generation fast programming processor (RPP) at the SAS began only three years after the first tests of a third-generation multi-user computer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the USA. Four years later a laboratory sample of the RPP-16 had been released and in five years serial production started in Námestovo, in the Orava region. It was the result of basic and applied research at the SAS. More than forty applications in the national economy, the origin of computing research and the computer industry in the Slovak Republic, several thousand new jobs which did not exist before, all this came about thanks to intensive scientific and managerial work at the SAS Institute of Technical Cybernetics.

The participation of the SAS in the SMEP project initiated by Comecon members was a follow-on from the RPP-16 project. The design and subsequent production of the UART integrated circuit in the TESLA plant in Piešťany in 1977 was a great success. It was a vital circuit for the SMEP project. Nobody in Comecon was able to produce it and the TESLA plant exported the circuit to all members until 1990. There followed parallel systems; theoretical tasks of artificial intelligence; controlling, adaptive and learning systems for process management; and image processing.

Exhibits from the era of the beginnings of computing in Slovakia and many other matters of interest can be found at the permanent exhibition of the history of computer technology in the Patrónka premises of the SAS.

Štefan Kohút