The Origin of Informatics and Creation of the First Electronic Computing Machines in the USSR

Under the frame of a project of IEEE Computer Society for compiling a world history of informatics, at the end of1996 Russian National Sub-Committee of IEEE Computer Society was working on historiography of Soviet and Russian informatics. To ascertain the chronology of the main events, the Committee looked through numerous documents and talked to those who had lived at the period when the first Soviet electronic computing machines had been developed. Thus the Committee established the dates when first computers were created, first programs written, first books and manuals were published and first university courses were read. The results were summed up in a paper on “Computers in Russia: Science, Education, and Industry”, published in IEEE Annals of the History of Computing (vol. 21, No. 3, Jul-Sept, 1999).