Europe Blog
Our views on the Internet and society
Unveiling a potential Internet superpower - Ukraine
Friday, November 15, 2013
Ukraine faces big choices in coming weeks as it debates signing an Association Agreement with the European Union. A large part of the upside from improved EU commerce could come from the Internet. In order to underline this crucial point,
Google Ukraine
and market research group,
GfK Ukraine
, yesterday launched a study titled: “The impact of Internet on the Ukrainian economy.”
Ukraine should be a computer science superpower. Famed Ukrainian computer scientist Sergei Lebedev unveiled
the first Soviet compute
r -- and indeed the first in continental Europe -- on December 25, 1951. Today, Ukraine already provides the world with backend support thanks to its 50,000 computer science university graduates. It enjoys a largely free and open Internet. More than half of Ukrainians are now online and approximately 90% of Ukraine’s businesses use regular broadband or WiFi access.
Last year, Ukraine’s economy expanded by a mere 0.2 percent. If Ukraine’s businesses could increase their Internet use intensity from 25 to 35 percentage points, the GfK study calculated that it could have grown GDP by 1.2%. At the study’s launch event, Vice Prime Minister
Alexandr Vilkul
highlighted the importance of Internet for Ukrainian business and confirmed his and the Ukrainian government’s support for the digital economy.
Individual Ukrainian companies gain by going online, the study show. Businesses with more active Internet navigated turbulent economic conditions in 2012. Their profits decreased only by 0.7% while companies with a weak Internet presence suffered a 7.3% drop.
Amid Ukraine's tough economic climate, the online sector still is seeing tremendous growth. Hopefully, the report will alert Ukrainians - government officials, business leaders and technology leaders - that the Internet could do even more to drive forward a transformation from its agricultural and traditional industrial past to a shining digital future.
Posted by Oleg Yakymchuk, Policy Manager, Ukraine
Highlighting Ukraine’s contributions to computing
Tuesday, September 18, 2012
Computer history is full of stories of intellectual feats and technological leaps. Yet many of Europe’s most fascinating chapters are little known. To help remedy this, Google has been working to highlight and celebrate these forgotten computer pioneers -- from
Tommy Flowers
to
Paul Otlet
, from
Sergey Lebedev
to the team at
J Lyons & Co
.
Today marks the unveiling of another project in the series --
a new website
, developed in partnership with Kyiv-based charity
ICFCST
, to commemorate Ukraine’s rich computing heritage. Our goal is to help make these little known stories of Soviet-era computing accessible to a wider audience.
At the website
you can learn about Ukraine’s surprisingly extensive contributions to the development of computing in the Soviet Union. To name but a few:
Vadim Lashkaryov’s
unheralded contribution to the
development of transistors
Kateryna Yushchenko’s
invention of “
Address language
”, one of the world’s first high-level computer programming languages
Victor Glushkov’s
range of small-sized computers for engineers, which were
predecessors to personal computers
The story of the scientific production association “
Impulse
”, who were a leader in developing automation systems for Soviet industry, as well as the USSR’s first mass ticket booking system for Aeroflot
In putting together the site, we are indebted to
Boris Malinovsky
, an eyewitness to many of these achievements and the first to document the history of Ukraine's IT industry.
While these achievements belong to a distant political and technological era, we hope this website helps their memory to live on.
Posted by Marina Tarasova, Communications Associate, Ukraine
Remembering a remarkable Soviet computing pioneer
Sunday, December 25, 2011
Cross-posted with the
Official Google Blog
In many parts of the world, today is Christmas—but in Russia and Eastern Europe, which use the
Orthodox calendar
, December 25 is just an ordinary day. Little known to most, however, it’s also a day that marks the anniversary of a key development in European computer history.
Sixty years ago today, in the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv, the Soviet Academy of Sciences finally granted formal recognition to
Sergey Lebedev
’s pioneering
MESM project
. MESM, a Russian abbreviation for “Small Electronic Calculating Machine,” is regarded as the earliest, fully operational electronic computer in the Soviet Union—and indeed continental Europe.
Recently we were privileged to get a first-hand account of Lebedev’s achievements from Boris Malinovsky, who worked on MESM and is now a leading expert on Soviet-era computing.
Turn on captions for the English translation.
Described by some as the “Soviet
Alan Turing
,” Sergey Lebedev had been thinking about computing as far back as the 1930’s, until interrupted by war. In 1946 he was made director of Kyiv’s Institute of Electrical Engineering. Soon after, stories of “electronic brains” in the West began to circulate and his interest in computing revived.
Sergey Lebedev*
Initially, Lebedev’s superiors were skeptical, and some in his team felt working on a “calculator”—how they thought of a computer—was a step backward compared to electrical and space systems research. Lebedev pressed on regardless, eventually finding funding from the Rocketry department and space to work in a derelict former monastery in
Feofania
, on the outskirts of Kyiv.
Work on MESM got going properly at the end of 1948 and, considering the challenges, the rate of progress was remarkable. Ukraine was still struggling to recover from the devastation of its occupation during WWII, and many of Kyiv’s buildings lay in ruins. The monastery in Feofania was among the buildings destroyed during the war, so the MESM team had to build their working quarters from scratch—the laboratory, metalworking shop, even the power station that would provide electricity. Although small—
just 20 people
—the team was extraordinarily committed. They worked in shifts 24 hours a day, and many lived in rooms above the laboratory. (You can listen to a lively account of this time in programme 3 of the
BBC’s ”Electronic brains”
series.)
MESM and team members in 1951. From left to right: Lev Dashevsky, Zoya Zorina-Rapota, Lidiya Abalyshnikova, Tamara Petsukh, Evgeniy Dedeshko
MESM ran its first program on November 6, 1950, and went into full-time operation in 1951. In 1952, MESM was used for top-secret calculations relating to rocketry and nuclear bombs, and continued to aid the Institute’s research right up to 1957. By then, Lebedev had moved to Moscow to lead the construction of the next generation of Soviet supercomputers, cementing his place as a giant of European computing. As for MESM, it met a more prosaic fate—broken into parts and studied by engineering students in the labs at Kyiv’s Polytechnic Institute.
*All photos thanks to
ukrainiancomputing.org
.
Posted by Marina Tarasova, Communications Associate, Ukraine
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