Computer engineering in the 1950s⁠

In the new main building of Moscow State Univer­sity that opened in 1953 there were the newest computers installed that were used during the prac­tical classes of the depart­ment of mechanics and math­e­matics.

This docu­mental video is a part of a film telling about the complex of new build­ings of MSU on the Lenin hills (now called Voro­bievi) and a film about acad­e­mi­cian Sergei Sobolev, the chef of the chair of «Compu­ta­tional math­e­matics» at that time.

A keyboard counting machine — is a machine «that imme­di­ately does four arith­metical rules itself».

A tabu­lator that «prints itself the results of compu­ta­tions».

A machine that being given coef­fi­cients solves a system of differ­en­tial equa­tions and draws the solu­tion on it's screen. Who knows why, but discon­tin­uous...

«A student from Armenia Anrei Gonchar» long ago became acad­e­mi­cian. From 1972 till 2002 Andrei Alexan­drovich was the chef of the Divi­sion of complex calculus in Steklov Math­e­mat­ical Insti­tute, RAS.

An electro inte­grator is a machine with «the highest math­e­mat­ical abil­i­ties».

All that happened not so long ago, but look how the world has changed since then…