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was build 1936 in Germany (Zuse Z1) and not 1951 in Ukraine as BusinessWeek claimed.

Business Week should have said "stored program computer", or "Von Neumann computer", as per the timeline on this page. (Emphasis on "continental Europe"; the first Von Neumann machine ever, as far as I know, was built at the University of Manchester.)

Sergey Alekseyevich Lebedev, the head of the group that developed that machine (MESM), was born in Russia; that group also created the Big-Ass Computer series (OK, that's not an exact translation of "Bolshaja Elektronno-Schetnaja Mashina" :-)). There's a BESM-6 Nostalgia page about the sixth series of BESM machines. (It's a bit tricky to do the usual sort of buffer overflow tricks on those machines:

Each memory word had two parity bits - one for each half, the combined parity for the whole word must have been odd. Thus, the distinction between code and data was achieved: one had the halfword parities even-odd, the other - odd-even, so code overwriting or branches to data got caught as soon as an offending instruction was executed. (The program had to ask the kernel to switch the mode of the store instruction to "code" before generating executable code, or to use a special system call, so using self-modifying code was discouraged.);

Looks like it, here's experimental model pic

oh, and the name comes from name of small river that runs next to Moscow State University. Well, next to my parents place too :)

From the article i can find on that site, it seems that they were trying to build reliable low cost computer for their labs. They couldn't use transistors (which were just invented 5 years before), and couldn't use lamps, so they used magnetic elements. That's why trinary system was used, as mentioned by other posters, magnets have those three states :)

They actualy made a whole series, 50 of them, used in different institutions in USSR.

That would be Setun. (I'm not up on Russian, so that may well be Russian for "trinity.")

Didn't the Soviets already do this? I don't remember it catching on very splendidly, though I guess than can be chalked up to the limitations of the times.

Well obviously you have never heard of Sergei Alexeevich Lebedev and the complex systems he developed for the USSR during the cold war...

But why would the capitalists ever tell the stories of these scientists? Since the exploiters won the cold war you will only hear of the glory of microsoft and ibm and never hear how the people can advance technology without the drive of capitalist greed.

They want you to believe that without big profit hungry corporate beasts exploiting the workers there will be no technological progress...

• photo at the European Museum on CS and Technology
• article (including bibliography) at the Virtual Computer Museum
• discussion of ternary computing at American Scientist

You also may want to do a google search on the comp.arch newsgroup. I think the topic has been discussed there.

The Soviets reverse engineered a number of American designs (IBM 360, PDP-11). They also did some original designs for special applications.

Some of the work was farmed out to other Warsaw Pact countries, such as the GDR.

• "Computing in the Former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe"
• "Where did Soviet scientists go?"
• "Creator of the first stored program computer in continental Europe"