‘The Abacus Acquired Reason’: A Short History of Polish Computers
Which machine refused to work when the room was too cold? Why were technological wonders created at night? Who was the Polish Bill Gates? What was the name of the computer that conquered space? Let’s find out how Poles taught machines to count.
This story could have started in a watchmaker’s shop in Hrubieszów. It was there that, approximately 250 years ago, young Abraham Stern took his first steps in cybernetics. When learning how to repair watches, he probably did not expect that in a few dozen years he would construct a series of calculating machines capable of performing basic arithmetic operations and taking square roots, he would build an ‘accounting machine’ that would be able to calculate ‘by itself’, and the world of science would recognize him as one of the precursors of cybernetics. However, Stern’s abacuses were very remote from today’s information technology. So let’s start this story in the mid-20th century, when in three rooms of a newly constructed building of the Warsaw Scientific Society, a few daredevils changed – or rather created – the face of Polish computer science.
If a day lasted a second
It was Thursday, 23 December 1948 (this date will go down in history as the birthday of Polish computer science). Six men met at the Institute of Experimental Physics in Hoża Street in Warsaw. They were given a specific task: to build a computer. If Americans from the University of Pennsylvania could produce a ‘robot-mathematician’, why couldn’t scientists from Warsaw create a Polish ENIAC?
What is required to construct a calculating machine yourself? Firstly, it’s faith. This was not lacking for Kazimierz Kuratowski, who had just returned from a trip to the United States, where he saw ENIAC with his very own eyes and believed that a similar device could be built by the Vistula River. Secondly, conviction. Kuratowski, as the director of the newly established State Institute of Mathematics, gained the support of the relevant minister, and he also managed to convince his trusted colleague, Andrzej Mostowski, and several talented logicians and engineers to participate in the project. The third factor was an extraordinary mind. The brain of the entire operation was Henryk Greniewski, who may not have known anything about mathematical machines but was willing to share his life experience. Fourth was imagination. Enthusiasts in their twenties were responsible for designing and building the calculating machine: Leon Łukaszewicz (he said about the ENIAC: ‘What I count during a whole day, this machine counts in seconds’), Romuald Marczyński (after forty years of work, he would say that ‘the computer is a super-idiot; it can’t do anything without people’) and Krystyn Bochenek (he repaired radio stations for underground organizations together with Marczyński). The three newly minted engineers certainly lacked neither knowledge nor skills, but they had no idea about building computers (especially since this word did not exist in the official Polish language). Yet, their creativity was undeniable. What could also come in handy was equipment, technology and funds. In the capital of a communist country emerging from the ruins of war, one could only dream of these.
Although Janusz Groszkowski was absent at this historic meeting, his role was that of a visionary. He realized that a device such as the ENIAC could serve more than just military purposes. It was he who persuaded Łukaszewicz (and the latter two of his friends from university) to contact Kuratowski. Thus, at the end of 1948, the Group of Mathematical Apparatuses (Pol. Grupa Aparatów Matematycznych – GAM) was established. One could venture to say that it was virtual because they did not have their own headquarters and were mainly involved in planning and exploring hard-to-find foreign-language literature on the matter.
Everything changed in the fall of 1950, when GAM received its own premises at 8 Śniadeckich Street (the building of the Warsaw Scientific Society that was being rebuilt). Each of the three rooms served a different function: the first was a meeting place, the second – a parts warehouse, the third – a laboratory. Each of the three engineers had his own team. They worked mainly at night, when the network voltage was stable and there were no trams running (the crackling of the overhead contact line was too bothersome). It was in such conditions that technological wonders were born.
EMAL almost counts
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ZAM-2 computer, photo: Wikimedia Commons
The oldest zero-generation computing machine was the miniature ‘Gamuś’, officially known as GAM-1. Zdzisław Pawlak’s team created it in November 1950 in two weeks (one week for design, one week for assembly). It’s ability to add at a rate of one operation per second served only experimental purposes. Five years later, Marczyński took it apart. Not out of jealousy at all, because in the years 1953-55 he was already working on the first Electronic Automatic Calculating Machine (Pol. Elekroniczna Maszyna Automatycznie Licząca – EMAL). In theory, EMAL could perform up to 2,000 additions or 450 multiplications per second. In practice, there were no appropriate parts to make it fully operational, and those left by the German army were of little use. The malicious said that ‘EMAL almost counts’, and two years after its launch the first digital machine ended up like GAM-1.
Simpler and cheaper analogue devices had better luck. According to Bartłomiej Kluska in his book Machines Count: Computers of the Polish People’s Republic (Pol. Automaty Liczą: Komputery PRL), the first ‘Polish electronic analogue machine was AWA, used for the analysis of algebraic polynomials’. Although the 25-kilogram grey box with knobs served its purpose and impressed foreign specialists at the international congress in Brussels, it looked modest in comparison to the two-ton, six-cabin Differential Equation Analyzer (Pol. Analizator Równań Różniczkowych – ARR). The ARR of Łukaszewicz’s team was launched in 1954, and a year later the creators received a state award. This first systematically used calculating machine is now in well-deserved retirement at the National Museum of Technology in Warsaw.
The success of the analogue camera motivated other designers, such as Bochenek, who constructed the Analyser of Algebraic Linear Equations (Pol. Analizator Równań Algebraicznych Liniowych – ARAL) in three versions. More specialists, including women, joined GAM, so the original group of enthusiasts had to change its name to a more serious one – in 1957, the Office of Mathematical Apparatuses (Pol. Zakład Aparatów Mathematycznych – ZAM) was established, to be transformed in 1962 into the Institute of Mathematical Machines (Pol. Instytut Maszyn Matematycznych – IMM). Regardless of the name, one figure stood out among the team of engineering mathematicians.
The clumsy box flashes neon lights
The first Polish computer scientist – as Leon Łukaszewicz is called today – was born on 20 November 1923 and died on 5 March 2013. When this former Warsaw insurgent took on heading ZAM, it employed several hundred people (800, according to data from 1963). For comparison, over 100,000 engineers and technicians worked for the IT success of the United States, and financial outlays exceeded $1 billion dollars. Łukaszewicz persuaded the government of the Polish People’s Republic to invest in the construction of mathematical apparatuses. While the production of ‘Gamuś’ had a modest budget of 5,000zł, in 1965 the subsidy amounted to approximately 3 million złoty (in the 1960s, the US dollar exchange rate fluctuated between 70 and 90 złoty). Despite fewer employees and a more modest budget, the first Polish computer was constructed in 1958. Bogdan Miś, a mathematics student at the time working as an operator and programmer at XYZ, recalls his first encounter with the machine:
The clumsy box of the operator’s table flashed neon lights, the two oscilloscope screens glowed green above the rows of switches. A technician was sitting on an ordinary, crooked office chair, a row of strange cabinets by his right side, half the shelves entangled with a thicket of cables and glowing with hundreds of electron tubes. On his left, an infernal device – a reperforator – roared, rumbled and quivered, swallowing and spitting out stacks of cardboard rectangles with information encoded on them. At the back there was a huge wardrobe full of mysterious pipes – the machine’s memory.
[Quoted from ‘Machines Count: Computers of the Polish People's Republic’ by Bartłomiej Kluska, trans.]
XYZ computer without drum, photo: WikipediaXYZ was built of 4,000 electron tubes and 2,000 diodes (ENIAC had approximately 18,800 tubes), it performed up to 4,500 additions and subtractions per second (ENIAC – up to 5,000), it worked without failure for up to 50 minutes at a constant temperature of 30 degrees Celsius (ENIAC stopped working when heated to 48 degrees Celsius,) and almost always won in Tic-Tac-Toe (this likely first Polish computer game was written by Miś). In addition, it ‘spoke’ Polish (without diacritics) – Łukaszewicz developed the Automatic Operation Coding System (Pol. System Automatycznego Kodowania Operacji – SAKO) for him, dubbed the Polish Fortran. A few years later, he created the completely original EOL programming language, which was used in two American models of IBM computers.
Odra by the Vistula River
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Odra 1304 computer, Wrocław, 1973, photo: Aleksander Jałosiński / Forum
While the Warsaw mathematics centre was improving its calculating machines (ZAM series of computers), competition was growing by the Odra River. In 1959, Wrocław Electronics Enterprise (Pol. Wrocławskie Zakłady Elektroniczne, called ‘Elwro’ for short) was established to produce television receivers. However, thanks to the persistence of Elwro’s director, Marian Tarnkowski, the factory made computers instead of televisions. And they were the best in the country. This would not have been possible without the help of the capital. Two groups of mathematicians and engineers were sent from Wrocław to Warsaw, some of them still students. One team was trained by Marczyński at the Institute of Nuclear Research of the Polish Academy of Sciences (the creator of EMAL was transferred when the Ministry of Internal Affairs noticed the potential of the machine), the other studied at the Department of Mathematical Apparatuses under the supervision of Łukaszewicz. They left Wrocław as amateurs but returned as professionals.
The inhabitants of Wrocław were hungry for beating the record. They watched Warsaw designers design a digital machine with a fixed programme, made a few corrections, replaced some of the tube circuits with transistors, and within a year they created Odra 1001. More modern than the machines produced in the capital, but unreliable. Twelve months later, Odra 1002 appeared. Better, but also flawed. On the Odra 1003 model, Witold Podgórski, one of the first six students with a specialisation in ‘digital machines’ at Wrocław University of Science and Technology, installed the Marienbad game modelled on the Chinese number game (considered by some to be the first computer game written in Poland). He deciphered the algorithm during a lecture at the Military College. He mentioned:
ODRA 1003 could play on 8,000 rows, with almost a trillion matches in each row. A total of 1,000 cubic kilometres of matches. Unfolding them would require 3 Polands. The only question left was the response time – less than an hour. None of the regular players I know could handle a total of 16 matches in 4 rows.
It is not known whether Odra 1013 was better at Marienbad than its predecessor, but it could certainly count twice as fast (up to 1,000 operations per second). In turn, Odra 1204 had more advanced software. This was not enough for the Elwro crew. Wanting to build a data processing device, they went to England in 1967. The ICT company from Manchester sold them two computers with logical documentation (but without technical documentation) and agreed to train several programmers from Wrocław (including Thanasis Kamburelis, Bronisław Piwowar and Podgórski). The British did not expect that the Poles would be able to create a device compatible with their software. They were wrong. In 1970, Odra 1304 appeared in the country along the Vistula River. The machine’s capabilities were used by employees of the Central Statistical Office, among others. Its successor, Odra 1305, operated faultlessly for 30 years at the Hutmen factory in Wrocław. Sometimes it just didn’t want to start when the temperature in the room was too low.
The computer beat the brain
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R-32 computer at Poznań International Fair, 1977, photo: Wojciech Kryński & Zbigniew Wdowiński / PAP
The Odra era may have ended in the late 1960s, when Moscow demanded close cooperation between the countries belonging to the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance. Everyone was to work on the Unified System for Electronic Machines (RIAD; Pol. Jednolity System Maszyn Elektronicznych). Elwro was tasked with producing R-30 devices according to the Armenian model, which in practice would mean technical backwardness. Contrary to top-down recommendations, the decision was made to continue production of the Odra, and Bogdan Kasierski’s team, which was responsible for the Soviet equipment, improved the project. In 1973, the entire RIAD family was tested at the Brno fair. The Polish R-32 model turned out to be unrivalled.
The communists wanted to control not only technology but also language. From the very beginning, the word ‘computer’, associated with the ‘rotten West’, was censored. It was recommended to use familiar-sounding terms such as ‘mathematical machine’, ‘electronic computing machine’ or ‘electron brain’. When in 1967 mathematician Adam Empacher repeatedly used a prohibited word in one of his articles, the editorial staff included an explanation that it was ‘at the express request of the author’ and contrary to the views of the editorial office. Linguists joined the discussion, and Witold Doroszewski stated that there was no reason to oppose this international term. At the end of the sixth decade of the 20th century, the ‘computer’ finally defeated the ‘electron brain’.
When stopping the technology or censoring the language was unsuccessful, eliminating outstanding individuals was attempted.
A million in a suitcase
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Jacek Karpiński, creator of the K-202 minicomputer at the Poznań International Fair, photo: Aleksander Jałosiński / Forum
Today, Jacek Karpiński’s name would be mentioned in the same breath as Bill Gates and Steve Jobs if his talent had been fully utilised. What did he do to offend the Polish authorities? Born on 9 April 1927, he wanted to become a musician. As ‘Little Jacek’, he fought in the ranks of the Home Army (shoulder to shoulder with the poet Krzysztof Kamil Baczyński), but he was seriously injured on the second day of the Warsaw Uprising (initially paralyzed, he limped for the rest of his life). After studying at the Lódź and Warsaw Universities of Technology, he built the first ultrasound machines, including a shortwave transmitter and a weather forecasting machine.
Winning the UNESCO Youth Technical Skills Competition could have been the gateway to an international career. In 1960, Karpiński was among six laureates from around the world and went on a two-year scientific trip to the USA. He studied at Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, was persuaded to work at the University of Berkeley and for the then technological giant IBM (several decades later, Elżbieta Płóciennik would carry out a number of orders for IBM), and he was even offered the opportunity to organise his own institute in San Francisco. He rejected all offers. He preferred to work for Poland and did not want to leave his mother behind.
He returned to the country and developed a scanner for analysing photographs of elementary particles (in three weeks), as well as a minicomputer (according to Karpiński: a small, fully functional machine, the cost of which did not exceed $10,000). It was a revolution in the world of technology.
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
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Mazovia 1016 computer, Poznań International Fair, 1986, photo: Wojciech Kryński & Krzysztof Szeloch / PAP
While K-202 minicomputers were produced in the professional MERA Minicomputer Systems Plant in Warsaw, microcomputers were created, for example, in a basement in Warsaw’s Grochów district. The magazine Przegląd Tygodniowy (Weekly Digest) reported in 1986 that engineer Jacek Kiełczewski had launched the artisanal production of Agat personal computers at 73 Kobielska Street in Warsaw’s Praga district, and customers were lining up. Agat computers built in the USSR took part in the international programme of unmanned space flights of probes exploring the planet Venus and Halley's Comet.
Mazovia also flew into space. Not literally, but only as a prop in the feature film Mr. Kleks in Space (Pol. Pan Kleks w Kosmosie), the third part of the series directed by Krzysztof Gradowski. The Mikrokomputery Company was established in order to produce the first Polish personal computer in the mid-1980s (project completed in 1984; public presentation in 1986). It brought together several recognized companies, including the Institute of Mathematical Machines, MERA plants and Polkolor. This was a clear signal that not only the inside of the machine (structure) was important but also its appearance (design). Mazovia’s greatest advantages include its 16-bit processor, the same one that IBM PCs had at that time. It had two disadvantages: poor quality components and price – the cost of approximately 3 million złoty was too high even for scientific institutions, let alone for an average-earning user.
In the Polish People’s Republic, Poles were not only brilliant designers but also great imitators. Agat had the same microprocessor as the Apple II constructed by Steve Wozniak. Lidia was also a clone of an American personal computer, which, thanks to software modifications, could display Polish diacritics on the screen. Several hundred copies were produced by the Gdynia-based private computer company Computer Studio Kajkowscy in 1984-86.
Along with the political transformation came the change in market realities and strategy – importing electronics from the West became more profitable. In Golem XIV, Stanisław Lem brings to life an advanced digital machine, a harbinger of artificial intelligence. He argues: ‘To pinpoint the moment when the abacus acquired reason is as difficult as saying exactly when the ape turned into a human’. As we can see, Poles stirred things up a bit in this story.
Written by Agnieszka Warnke, 22 February 2023; translated by Michał Pelczar
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