BESM-6

Lebedev's masterpiece implements his 'water-pipe principle': pipelining with up to 14 instructions in flight, plus associative memory as an early cache, virtual addressing and multitasking. At about 800 KIPS it is ten times faster than any other series-built Soviet machine.

Lebedev is awarded the Lenin Prize for the computers of the anti-ballistic missile system. The USSR State Prize for the BESM-6 follows in 1969.

While the BESM-6 delivered a million operations per second, Kartsev proposed a machine computing over functions rather than numbers, with a 32-by-32 matrix of arithmetic units, his 'functional bundle.' Component technology of the day could not carry the full project.

As Lebedev's deputy (with Lev Korolev), Melnikov co-designed the million-operations-per-second BESM-6: a pipeline handling up to 14 instructions at once, virtual addressing, memory protection and multiprogramming. His work with the factory meant the machine needed essentially no rework for series production, which ran seventeen years.

355 units are built from 1968 to 1987. It is often called the last domestic machine that was the equal of contemporary Western models, though the CDC 6600 had come four years earlier with roughly three times the performance.

Lebedev receives the State Prize for the BESM-6, the crowning machine of his domestic line, built by his pupils Melnikov and Korolev as deputies.

Melnikov received the USSR State Prize as part of the BESM-6 design team.

As chief designer of the AS-6 system alongside Lebedev and Aleksandr Sokolov, he built computing complexes that worked with BESM-6 machines in flight control for the Soviet-American Soyuz-Apollo mission and later Soviet launches.

During Apollo-Soyuz a BESM-6 complex processes the Soviet telemetry and reportedly finishes the data analysis half an hour before NASA's American IBM computers. Yushchenko's Address language is among the software in use.

The high point of detente: an American and a Soviet spacecraft dock in orbit. On the ground, a BESM-6 complex processes the Soviet telemetry, reportedly finishing half an hour before NASA's IBM machines.

In 1978 development of the three-processor 5E26 family for the S-300 air-defense system was completed and production began, running until 1994: the performance of a BESM-6 on about 3 square meters of floor space instead of 200, with modular hardware checking and sliding redundancy that reconfigured mid-battle. The machines were produced in large series.

One of the last BESM-6 machines, the pinnacle of independent Soviet hardware, ends its career as a museum piece in London.