M-1

As a moonlighting fifth-year student he joined Isaak Bruk's Electrosystems laboratory, one of about ten youngsters building the M-1. Kartsev designed the machine's control unit, the 'main program sensor,' also his diploma topic; the M-1 passed tests in December 1951.

The Academy presidium issues the directive to build the M-1. Bruk assembles a team of very young MEI graduates and students: Matyukhin, Kartsev (still a fifth-year student), Aleksandridi and others, none with an academic degree except Bruk himself. Legend has it he mistook 'Aleksandridi' for a man's name; he did not normally hire women.

Sent to the Energy Institute's Electrosystems laboratory, she joins the handful of MEI graduates building the M-1 under Brook and Matyukhin.

Isaak Bruk's team finishes the M-1 almost simultaneously with the MESM; the two teams knew nothing of each other due to secrecy. Bruk used captured German parts; Tamara Aleksandridi designed the CRT memory. Bruk, who distrusted women, had hired her only because he mistook 'Aleksandridi' for a man's name.

She defends her diploma design: M-1 storage on standard 13LO-37 oscilloscope CRTs instead of costly special potentialoscopes; per the museum, a solution unique in the world.

Built in a semi-basement lab on Kaluzhskaya Street from German war-trophy parts, the M-1 begins trial operation almost simultaneously with Lebedev's MESM in Kiev; neither team knew of the other. Thanks to captured cuprox rectifiers it needs only 730 vacuum tubes and 15 square meters, making it the first machine in the world with all logic circuits on semicon

The Energy Institute's report on the M-1, the first Soviet scientific report on a digital computer, carries her signature among the junior researchers, alongside Kartsev and Matyukhin.

Tamara Aleksandridi, war-veteran radio operator from Sevastopol to Berlin, sole woman among the M-1 engineers and creator of its oscilloscope-tube memory, marries chief engineer Nikolai Matyukhin. 'We were together practically all the time, from eight in the morning until late at night,' she recalled.

In Kartsev's new M-2 group she and Lavrenyuk design a 34-tube, 512-word CRT store with 25-microsecond access; the same year she marries M-1 chief engineer Nikolai Matyukhin.

Lebedev's BESM-1 at the Moscow ITMVT becomes operational (1952/53), reaching about 8,000-10,000 operations per second after a memory upgrade, near parity with the West at the very top. Institute rivalry had initially forced it onto slow mercury delay-line memory while the faster CRT tubes went to the Strela team.

With engineers Melnikov and Seleznev, Kitov patents the 'method of quadruple combination of computer command rate', an early pipeline/parallel-processing idea implemented in the M-100.

As de facto chief designer, Kitov completes the M-100: 100,000 operations per second, used for processing radar signal streams for air defense, and around 1959-60 the fastest computer in the Soviet Union.

The world stands at the brink of nuclear war. Missile defense drives Soviet computing: Kartsev's M-4/M-10 machines and later the Elbrus serve early-warning and ABM systems.

In 1967-73 he directs development of the M-180 mini-computer for automating laboratory experiments; by the mid-70s the Ukrainian Academy runs about 100 such automation systems.

At the founding of Kartsev's NIIVK institute she takes charge of software, later splitting the M-10 supercomputer's functions between hardware and programs with Kartsev and pioneering parallelized radar processing.

After Kartsev presents the M-9 multiprocessor draft in Novosibirsk, a claim of a billion operations per second in an era of million-op machines; her talk on its software strengthens the case. The ideas flow into the M-10.

After Lebedev steps back, Vsevolod Burtsev's Elbrus concept prevails over Melnikov's BESM-10 proposal. Lebedev himself had argued heatedly against a multiprocessor Elbrus; Glushkov backed both. The supercomputer line is named after the mountain Lebedev climbed at 35.

The vector multiprocessor built from the M-9's 'number bundle' entered series production and became the heart of the Soviet missile-attack early-warning system. At 5.1 million operations per second it remained the most powerful Soviet computer until the Elbrus.