BESK
Encyclopedia
BESK was Sweden
Sweden
Sweden , officially the Kingdom of Sweden , is a Nordic country on the Scandinavian Peninsula in Northern Europe. Sweden borders with Norway and Finland and is connected to Denmark by a bridge-tunnel across the Öresund....

's first electronic computer
Computer
A computer is a programmable machine designed to sequentially and automatically carry out a sequence of arithmetic or logical operations. The particular sequence of operations can be changed readily, allowing the computer to solve more than one kind of problem...

, using vacuum tubes instead of relays. It was developed by Matematikmaskinnämnden (Swedish Board for Computing Machinery
Swedish Board for Computing Machinery
The Swedish Board for Computing Machinery, Matematikmaskinnämnden , was a Swedish government agency which built Sweden's first computers, BARK and BESK....

) and during 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
Facit
Facit was an industrial corporation and manufacturer of office products. It was based in Åtvidaberg, Sweden, and founded in 1922 as AB Åtvidabergs Industrier. Facit AB, a manufacturer of mechanical calculators, was incorporated into the corporation the same year...

 EDB and FACIT EDB-3 machines, both software compatible with BESK. Non-compatible machines highly inspired by BESK were SMIL made for the University of Lund, and DASK
DASK
The DASK was the first computer in Denmark. It was commissioned in 1955, designed and constructed by Regnecentralen, and began operation in September 1957. DASK is an acronym for Dansk Algoritmisk Sekvens Kalkulator or Danish Algorithmic Sequence Calculator. Regnecentralen almost didn't allow the...

 made in Denmark
Denmark
Denmark is a Scandinavian country in Northern Europe. The countries of Denmark and Greenland, as well as the Faroe Islands, constitute the Kingdom of Denmark . It is the southernmost of the Nordic countries, southwest of Sweden and south of Norway, and bordered to the south by Germany. Denmark...

.

BESK was developed by the Swedish Board for Computing Machinery
Swedish Board for Computing Machinery
The Swedish Board for Computing Machinery, Matematikmaskinnämnden , was a Swedish government agency which built Sweden's first computers, BARK and BESK....

 (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
Conny Palm
Conrad "Conny" Palm was a Swedish electrical engineer and statistician, known for several contributions to teletraffic engineering and queueing theory....

, who died in December 1951, after which Stig Comét took over. The hardware 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
IAS machine
The IAS machine was the first electronic computer built by the Institute for Advanced Study , in Princeton, New Jersey, USA. It is sometimes called the von Neuman machine, since the paper describing its design was edited by John von Neumann, a mathematics professor at both Princeton University...

 for which the design team had retrieved drawings during a scholarship to Institute for Advanced Study (IAS)
Institute for Advanced Study
The Institute for Advanced Study, located in Princeton, New Jersey, United States, is an independent postgraduate center for theoretical research and intellectual inquiry. It was founded in 1930 by Abraham Flexner...

 and Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology is a private research university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts. MIT has five schools and one college, containing a total of 32 academic departments, with a strong emphasis on scientific and technological education and research.Founded in 1861 in...

, U.S.

One spin off effect from the BESK works is still the design of the magnetic Drum memory. At this time Olle Karlqvist discover a magnetic phenomenon, which has been called Karlqvist gap
Karlqvist gap
In 1953 Olle Karlqvist discovered a fundamental magnetic phenomenon when he was designing a magnetic storage and the ferromagnetic surface layer to the magnetic drum memory for the BESK computer...

.

Performance

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 tube
Vacuum tube
In electronics, a vacuum tube, electron tube , or thermionic valve , reduced to simply "tube" or "valve" in everyday parlance, is a device that relies on the flow of electric current through a vacuum...

s) and 400 germanium diodes (so it was partly solid state
Solid state (electronics)
Solid-state electronics are those circuits or devices built entirely from solid materials and in which the electrons, or other charge carriers, are confined entirely within the solid material...

). The power consumption 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 restart after hardware failures.

Originally BESK had a British Williams tube
Williams tube
The Williams tube or the Williams-Kilburn tube , developed in about 1946 or 1947, was a cathode ray tube used to electronically store binary data....

 40 bit memory with 40 cathode tubes, and 8 spare tubes. The memory was from the beginning found to be insufficient and Carl-Ivar Bergman was given just a few weeks to build and install a ferrite core memory in 1956. To get finished 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.

Usage

The first calculations were done on April 1, 1954 and BESK handled weather data for Carl-Gustaf Rossby
Carl-Gustaf Rossby
Carl-Gustaf Arvid Rossby was a Swedish-U.S. meteorologist who first explained the large-scale motions of the atmosphere in terms of fluid mechanics....

 and the SMHI
SMHI
SMHI is an abbreviation for Sveriges Meteorologiska och Hydrologiska Institut, . SMHI is a government agency in Sweden and operates under the Ministry of Sustainable Development...

 meteorological agency, statistics for the telecommunications service provider Televerket
Televerket
Televerket is the name of two government telecommunications agencies:*Televerket , former name of Swedish company Telia, later merged to TeliaSonera.*Televerket, former name of Norwegian company Telenor...

, wing profiles for the attack aircraft Saab Lansen
Saab Lansen
|-See also:-References:NotesBibliography* Erichs, Rolph et al. The Saab-Scania Story. Stockholm: Streiffert & Co., 1988. ISBN 91-7886-014-8....

, and road profiles for the road authority Vägverket. During the nights Swedish National Defence Radio Establishment
Swedish National Defence Radio Establishment
The National Defence Radio Establishment is a civilian establishment subordinate to the Ministry of Defence. The two main tasks of FRA are signals intelligence and support to government authorities and state owned companies regarding IT security.Interception of signals is done from fixed sites on...

 (FRA) used BESK for decryption of radio messages. BESK was also used for calculations for the Swedish nuclear energy industry
Studsvik
Studsvik is a supplier of nuclear analysis software and specialised services to the international nuclear industry, with 60 years of experience. The company is headquartered in Nyköping, Sweden and has five divisions: Sweden, United Kingdom, Germany, the United States, and Global Services. There...

, for example Monte Carlo simulations of neutron spectrum, and for the Swedish nuclear weapon program
Swedish nuclear weapon program
During the 20th century Sweden had programs for both Nuclear and Chemical weapons. During the first decades of the Cold War a nuclear weapon program was active...

, but most of those calculations were done by SMIL. In 1957 Hans Riesel
Hans Riesel
Hans Ivar Riesel is a Swedish mathematician who discovered the 18th known Mersenne prime in 1957, using the computer BESK. This prime is 23217-1, which consists of 969 digits. He held the record for the largest known prime from 1957 to 1961, when Alexander Hurwitz discovered a larger one. Riesel...

 used BESK to discover a Mersenne prime
Mersenne prime
In mathematics, a Mersenne number, named after Marin Mersenne , is a positive integer that is one less than a power of two: M_p=2^p-1.\,...

 with 969 digits - the largest prime known at the time.

SAAB
Saab
Saab AB is a Swedish aerospace and defence company, founded in 1937. From 1947 to 1990 it was the parent company of automobile manufacturer Saab Automobile, and between 1968 and 1995 the company was in a merger with commercial vehicle manufacturer Scania, known as Saab-Scania.-History:"Svenska...

 rented computer time on the BESK to (probably, much was secret) make calculations of the strength of the Saab Lansen
Saab Lansen
|-See also:-References:NotesBibliography* Erichs, Rolph et al. The Saab-Scania Story. Stockholm: Streiffert & Co., 1988. ISBN 91-7886-014-8....

 attack aircraft. In the fall of 1955 SAAB thought the capacity was insufficient and started working on SAABs räkneautomat SARA
SARA (computer)
SARA was developed by SAAB when the capacity of BESK was insufficient for their needs. The project was started the fall of 1955 and became operational in 1956...

, "SAAB's calculating machine", which was going to be twice as fast as BESK. Some former SARA employees went to Facit
Facit
Facit was an industrial corporation and manufacturer of office products. It was based in Åtvidaberg, Sweden, and founded in 1922 as AB Åtvidabergs Industrier. Facit AB, a manufacturer of mechanical calculators, was incorporated into the corporation the same year...

 and worked with the Facit EDB.

Trivia

"Besk" is Swedish for the taste "bitter". It is also the name of a traditional bitter made from distilled alcohol seasoned with the herb Artemisia absinthium
Artemisia absinthium
Artemisia absinthium is a species of wormwood, native to temperate regions of Eurasia and northern Africa....

 L.
local to 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
Conny Palm
Conrad "Conny" Palm was a Swedish electrical engineer and statistician, known for several contributions to teletraffic engineering and queueing theory....

] Integrator And Calculator, compare Cognac
Cognac (drink)
Cognac , named after the town of Cognac in France, is a variety of brandy. It is produced in the wine-growing region surrounding the town from which it takes its name, in the French Departements of Charente and Charente-Maritime....

 and ENIAC
ENIAC
ENIAC was the first general-purpose electronic computer. It was a Turing-complete digital computer capable of being reprogrammed to solve a full range of computing problems....

) for the predecessor BARK
BARK
BARK was an early electromechanical computer. BARK was built using standard phone relays, implementing a 32-bit binary machine. It could perform addition in 150 ms and multiplication in 250 ms. It had a memory with 50 registers and 100 constants. It was later expanded to double the memory...

.

External links

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