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BESM (short for the Russian term for High-Speed Large Electronic Computing Machine) is a historic family of general-purpose mainframe computers developed in the Soviet Union, led by pioneering computer scientist Sergei Lebedev at the USSR Academy of Sciences, designed to support complex scientific, aerospace, and military calculation tasks through the Cold War period.
Key moments
The BESM line was built deliberately to bypass Western technology trade embargoes targeting the USSR, eliminating reliance on imported foreign computing hardware to guarantee sovereign access to high performance computing for critical national priorities including nuclear research and national air defense systems.
BESM machines were tasked with a wide range of specialized calculation work outside of standard academic research: they computed orbital paths for hundreds of minor solar system planets, ran core processing for the Soviet Union's first operational anti-ballistic missile defense system, and supported trajectory planning for the Soviet lunar exploration program.
The 1965 BESM-6 implementation of split instruction pipelines, hardware-assisted memory mapping, and dedicated data caching predated the widespread adoption of these now-standard computing features in mainstream Western commercial mainframes, representing a distinct independent Soviet contribution to global computer architecture evolution.
BESM (БЭСМ) is the series of Soviet mainframe computers built in 1950–60s. The name is an acronym for "Bolshaya[1] (or Bystrodeystvuyushchaya) [2] Elektronno-schotnaya Mashina" ("Большая электронно-счётная машина" or "Быстродействующая электронно-счётная машина"), meaning "Big Electronic Computing Machine" or "High-Speed Electronic Computing Machine". It was designed at the Institute of Precision Mechanics and Computer Engineering
The BESM series included six models.
BESM-2 also used vacuum tubes.
BESM-3M and BESM-4 were built using transistors. Their architecture was similar to that of the M-20 and M-220 series. The word size was 45 bits. Thirty BESM-4 machines were built. BESM-4 was used to create the first ever computer animation.[5][6] The prototypes of both models were made in 1962–63, and the beginning of the series release was in 1964.[7]
EPSILON (a macro language with high-level features including strings and lists, developed by Andrey Ershov at Novosibirsk in 1967) was used to implement ALGOL 68 on the M-220.[8]
The BESM-6 was the best-known and most influential model of the series. The design was completed in 1965. Production started in 1968 and continued for the following 19 years.[9]
