The Temple (1982)

The last time this blog visited Sweden was with Stuga a full 15 years ago; one day, I will go back to that game and toss in the history of Swedish mainframes and academic computing alongside. A 1963 photo of the BESK, via Stelios Kessanidis on Facebook. The BEST (1950) and follow-up BASK (1953) were the earliest Swedish computers. However, we’ve got a complicated story with enough threads as-is. The threads will eventually unite in the late 70s. Let’s start in Italy– I graduated in 1953, precisely the year the first transistor was presented by my old professor under a showcase in a display case. Those were truly different times, there was everything to do, everything to invent, everything to build. — Massimo Rinaldi, via a 1992 interview with M&P Computer One way to arrive at the mini-computer, the computer small enough for a regular business, was to start with the design of giant mainframes and work down; that’s how Data General worked, as told in my story on Thissala. Another way…