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22-449: Its history dates back to December 1954, when Saab got a license to build its own copy of BESK , an early Swedish computer design using vacuum tubes , from Matematikmaskinnämnden (the Swedish governmental board for mathematical machinery). This clone was completed in 1957 (67 years ago)  ( 1957 ) and was named SARA . Its computing power was needed for design calculations for

44-482: A magnetic phenomenon, which has been called the Karlqvist gap . BESK was a 40-bit machine; it could perform an addition in 56 μs and a multiplication took 350 μs. The electrostatic memory could store 512 words. The instruction length was 20 bits, so each word could store two instructions. BESK contained 2400 "radio tubes" ( vacuum tubes ) and 400 germanium diodes (so it was partly solid state ). The power consumption

66-781: A new company, Datasaab AB. Allegedly the air traffic control system did support the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979. The smuggling operation was uncovered in October 1980, known as "the Datasaab affair" ( Datasaabaffären ). In early 1981, Datasaab was acquired by Ericsson and became its computing division Ericsson Information Systems. In April 1984 Ericsson was fined US$ 3.12 million for breach of U.S. export controls, and agreed to pay. BESK BESK ( Binär Elektronisk SekvensKalkylator , Swedish for "Binary Electronic Sequence Calculator")

88-820: The Soviet Union in the late 1970s. A 1973 bid for tender for a civilian air traffic control system at the airports in Moscow , Kyiv , and Mineralnye Vody was won by Swedish supplier Stansaab . A contract between Stansaab and Aeroflot was signed in September 1975. However, parts of the delivered system relied on components from the US, for which the Swedes couldn't get the necessary export licenses. So they bought U.S. components, relabeled them and smuggled them to Moscow using Soviet diplomats. Datasaab separated from Saab in 1978 and joined Stansaab in

110-548: The Swedish nuclear weapon program , but most of those calculations were done by SMIL . In 1957 Hans Riesel used BESK to discover a Mersenne prime with 969 digits - the largest prime known at the time. SAAB rented computer time on the BESK to (probably, much was secret) make calculations of the strength of the Saab Lansen attack aircraft. In the fall of 1955 SAAB thought the capacity

132-625: The University of Lund , SAABs räkneautomat SARA , "SAAB's calculating machine", and DASK made in Denmark . BESK was developed by the Swedish Board for Computing Machinery (Matematikmaskinnämnden) a few years after the mechanical relay computer BARK (Binär Aritmetisk Relä-Kalkylator, Swedish for "Binary Arithmetic Relay Calculator"). The team was initially led by Conny Palm , who died in December 1951, after which Stig Comét took over. The hardware

154-665: The 1960s to calculate taxes, an evaluation between Saab's and IBM 's machines proved Saab's better. Later the D5s were used to set up the first and largest bank terminal system for the Nordic banks, a system which was partly in use until the late 1980s. In 1975, the D23 system was seriously delayed and the solution was to spin off the large and medium systems to a joint marketing/services company with Sperry UNIVAC called Saab-Univac. Eventually Sperry would take full ownership of Saab-UNIVAC once it had completed

176-505: The Datasaab division of Saab-Scania to become Datasaab AB. It was later owned by Ericsson , Nokia and ICL . When Intel sued the competitor UMC for patent infringement over technologies including microcode updates of processors and different parts of the processor working asynchronously, UMC could point to an awarded paper describing how these technologies had been used in the D23 already in 1972. Since Intel's patents were from 1978, that paper would prove prior art and imply that

198-664: The car and aeroplane manufacturer and the state-owned Swedish Development Company . The company’s primary focus was systems for real-time data applied to commercial and aviation applications. In 1972, the company purchased the data terminal operations of Facit . In 1978, it was merged with the Data Saab division of Saab to create Datasaab . In 1981, Ericsson , believing that growth in telecoms would be lower than that in IT , purchased Datasaab and integrated it with two of its own divisions to form Ericsson Information Systems (EIS). One of

220-464: The conversion of the Saab Mainframe customerbase to the 1100 series . In 1971, technologies from Standard Radio & Telefon AB (SRT) and Saab were combined to form Stansaab AS, a joint venture that also included the state-owned Swedish Development Company. The company's primary focus was systems for real-time data applied to commercial and aviation applications. In 1978, Stansaab merged with

242-439: The next generation jet fighter Saab 37 Viggen . Intending to develop a navigational computer to place in an airplane , a team led by Viggo Wentzel came up with an all transistorized prototype computer named D2 , completed in 1960, which came to define the company's activities in the following two decades. This development followed two lines. The main purpose was the development of a navigational computer for Viggen. A spinoff

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264-439: The patents never should have been granted at all. The case was later dropped. The academic computer society Lysator at Linköping University was founded in 1973 when a donation of an old used D21 was arranged. The company's history has been documented by members of its veteran society, Datasaabs Vänner ("Friends of Datasaab"), founded in 1993 to document and spread information about the computer history of Sweden, with focus on

286-510: The province of Skåne , in which Lund is located. Reportedly this was an intentional and unnoticed pun after officials denied usage of the name CONIAC ( Conny [Palm] Integrator And Calculator, compare Cognac and ENIAC ) for the predecessor BARK. Stansaab Stansaab AS was a company founded in 1971 in Barkarby , outside Stockholm , Sweden . The company was a joint venture between Standard Radio & Telefon AB (SRT), Saab-Scania ,

308-548: The region of Linköping and Datasaab. The society has documented the Datasaab history in five books, and documents and pictures of computer systems and products developed and produced by Datasaab are presented at the society homepage. Since 2004 many Datasaab computers are exhibited at the IT-ceum computer museum in Linköping. After a series of mergers, the name Datasaab became connected with an incident of illegal technology transfer to

330-496: The telecommunications service provider Televerket , wing profiles for the attack aircraft Saab Lansen , and road profiles for the road authority Vägverket . During the nights Swedish National Defence Radio Establishment (FRA) used BESK for cracking encryption of radio messages (by Per-Erik Persson et al. ). BESK was also used for calculations for the Swedish nuclear energy industry , for example Monte Carlo simulations of neutron spectrum (by Per-Erik Persson et al. ), and for

352-514: Was Sweden 's first electronic computer , using vacuum tubes instead of relays . It was developed by Matematikmaskinnämnden ( Swedish Board for Computing Machinery ) and for a short time it was the fastest computer in the world. The computer was completed in 1953 and in use until 1966. The technology behind BESK was later continued with the transistorized FACIT EDB and FACIT EDB-3 machines, both software compatible with BESK. Non-compatible machines highly inspired by BESK were SMIL made for

374-431: Was 15 kVA . Initially an average runtime of 5 minutes was achieved before hardware problems appeared. In 1954 the system became more stable. Breakpoints were introduced to allow software to restart after hardware failures. Originally BESK had a British Williams tube 512 word x 40 bit memory based on 40 cathode tubes, and eight spare tubes. The memory was from the beginning found to be insufficient and Carl-Ivar Bergman

396-461: Was developed by Erik Stemme . Gösta Neovius and Olle Karlqvist were responsible for architecture and instruction set. It was closely modeled on the IAS machine for which the design team had retrieved drawings during a scholarship to Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) and Massachusetts Institute of Technology , U.S. During the development of the BESK magnetic drum memory , Olle Karlqvist discovered

418-507: Was given just a few weeks to build and install a ferrite core memory in 1956. To complete the work before the deadline they hired housewives with knitting experience to make the memory. One of the new memory bits did not work at first, but it was easily cut out and replaced. BESK was inaugurated on 1 April 1954 and handled weather data for Carl-Gustaf Rossby and the Swedish Meteorological and Hydrological Institute , statistics for

440-838: Was insufficient and started working on SAABs räkneautomat SARA , "SAAB's calculating machine", which was going to be twice as fast as BESK. Some former SARA employees went to Facit and worked with the FACIT EDB . In the spring of 1956, eighteen of the BESK developers were hired by office equipment manufacturer Facit and housed in an office at Karlavägen 62 in Stockholm, where they started to build copies of BESK called Facit EDB (models 1, 2, and 3), led by Carl-Ivar Bergman. A total of nine machines were built, of which four were used internally by Facit Electronics and five were sold to customers. On 1 July 1960 Facit Electronics, then with 135 employees, moved to Solna , just north of Stockholm. In 1960 BESK

462-480: Was the production of a line of civilian mini and mainframe computers for the commercial market. The military navigational computer CK37 was completed in 1971 and used in Viggen. The first civilian model D21 (1962) was sold to several countries and some 30 units were built. After that, several versions with names like D22 (1966), D220, D23, D5, D15, and D16 were developed. When the Swedish government needed 20 computers in

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484-426: Was used to create an animation of a car driving down a planned highway from the driver's perspective. This was one of the earliest computer animations ever made. The short clip was broadcast on Swedish national television on 9 November 1961. "Besk" is Swedish for the taste "bitter". Bäsk is also the name of a traditional bitters made from distilled alcohol seasoned with the herb Artemisia absinthium L. local to

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