How it began
Sergey Alexeyevich Lebedev built the MESM in Kyiv, then the capital of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. Lebedev and his team worked at the Kyiv Institute of Electrotechnology. The machine first ran in 1950 and was in regular operation by 1951. It had been conceived as a model for a larger machine and was then turned into a fully functional computer to meet government needs. It was the first universally programmable electronic computer in the Soviet Union. An article published by the Association for Computing Machinery notes that this made Ukraine the third European nation to create its own computer.
How it works
The MESM was a digital electronic computer whose logic was built from vacuum tubes. It was a stored-program machine, meaning that the program was held in the computer's memory together with the data, so the machine could be given a new task without being rewired. It used about 6,000 vacuum tubes, drew 25 kW of power and read data from punched cards. The design was worked out independently of Western technology.
What changed first
The MESM gave the Soviet Union its first working universally programmable electronic computer. It demonstrated that the stored-program approach could be realized with locally developed components, and it gave Lebedev and his colleagues the experience on which the next Soviet machines were based.
What lasted
The MESM laid the groundwork for the Soviet computers that followed, including the BESM-1, the M-1 and the Strela, which brought advances in binary and floating-point computing. It is generally described as the first stored-program digital computer in continental Europe, a claim that depends on how earlier machines elsewhere are classified.
