Professor Sergey Alexeyevich Lebedev

In 1948 Lebedev learned from foreign magazines that scientists in western countries were working on the design of electronic computers, although the details were secret. In the autumn of the same year he decided to focus the work of his laboratory on computer design. Lebedev's first computer, BESM-1, was completed by the end of 1951. In April 1953 the State commission accepted the BESM-1 as operational , but it did not go into series production because of opposition from the Ministry of Machine and Instrument Building, which had developed its own weaker and less reliable machine. Lebedev then began development of a new, more powerful computer, the M-20, the number denoting its expected processing speed of twenty thousand operations per second. In 1958 the machine was accepted as operational and put into series production. Simultaneously the BESM-2, a development of the BESM-1, went into series production. Though the BESM-2 was slower than the M-20, it was more reliable. It was used to calculate satellite orbits and the trajectory of the first rocket to reach the surface of the Moon. Lebedev and his team developed several more computers, notably the BESM-6, which was in production for 17 years.