His K-202, on which he worked with his team in 1970-73, was unique on a global scale due to its small dimensions – thanks to 16-bit integrated circuits, it could fit in a suitcase – and high computing power – it could perform up to a million operations per second. The minicomputer was resistant to shocks and humidity, and most interestingly, it was faster than IBM PCs produced a decade later.
Initially, the communist state Security Service regarded the Polish engineer as an ideal spy of Western technology, but over time it found the information he provided to be useless and began to be disturbed by Karpiński’s individualism. The production of the K-202 was possible thanks to the financial support of British companies, and half of the 30 units produced were exported to Great Britain. The conflict between the brilliant – and apparently difficult to cooperate with because of his explosive nature – engineer and the authorities and, as some say, the envious IT community, was growing. Karpiński himself said straightforwardly:
They didn’t want to allow my project to be implemented because Poland was allowed to be a country where potatoes and beets are grown but not where minicomputers are developed.
When he was dismissed from work and refused a passport, he started breeding poultry and pigs in Warmia. In the 1980s, he finally went to Switzerland, where he worked for Stefan Kudelski, the manufacturer of Nagra tape recorders, and later he constructed, among others, a voice-controlled robot and a handheld scanner for loading text. In the 1990s, he was an advisor to the Polish government on IT matters. He ran into financial problems when he wanted to implement his inventions, so he started designing websites. He died on 21 February 2010.
From the factory to the basement
