On June 21, 1941, Nikolai "Kolya" Petrovich Brusentsov was an eighth-grade schoolboy living in Dnepropetrovsk, Ukraine. The next day, along with millions of other Soviet citizens, he heard Vyacheslav Molotov's radio proclamation that Germany had invaded the Soviet Union: Molotov's famous words, "Victory will be ours!" accompanied by Borodin's Bogatyrskaya Symphony,[10] marked the last day of Brusentsov's childhood.
He was born on February 7, 1925 in the village of Kamenskoe, Ukraine. His father died in 1939 at the age of 37. Kolya's mother was left to care for him and his two younger brothers. When the war began they dug holes in the ground near the house and hid there during the bombings. Eventually they were evacuated to the Orenburg region of Russia. The Urals greeted them with -40°C temperatures. At first, the evacuees lived in tents and later on made crude barracks out of straw and mud; most of them were part of the construction crew that built the Orsko-Khalilovsky metal manufacturing plant. Kolya worked as an apprentice for a cabinet-maker. In spring 1942 the Ural River flooded, submerging the straw and mud barracks where the Brusentsov family lived, destroying all of their remaining property.
Nevertheless, Kolya did not leave school. He attended night school in Novotroitsk during the winter of 1941–1942, and in the summer moved to Sverdlovsk (now Ekaterinburg). He had already been accepted at the Kiev Music Conservatory – which had also been evacuated to Sverdlovsk – in the Folk Music Instruments Department.
In February 1943, at the age of 18, Brusentsov was drafted into the Army and sent to radio classes in Sverdlovsk. Six months later he was dispatched to serve with a rifle division near Tula. Two weeks later they were mobilized to Nevel where our troops were partially surrounded by the Germans. He memorized the words from a German propaganda leaflet: "You are in a ring; we are in the ring; lets see what the end will bring." Up until December 1943, the division was on the defensive; then after regrouping with other troops, took the offensive and advanced to Vitebsk. In one of the battles, a mine fell at Brusentsov's feet but fortunately did not explode. "According to my mother I was born with a silver spoon in my mouth" – he recalled. The difficult conditions at the front slowly improved after several successful offensives in Belarus, the Baltic Republics, and East Prussia. Brusentsov was awarded a medal for bravery and the Red Star Order in 1945. Out of the twenty-five 18-year-old soldiers, who were initially drafted to form his division in August 1943, only five remained.
In 1946 Brusentsov's entire family moved to Tver, Russia, where his stepfather had been transferred to work. Brusentsov began studying simultaneously at a conservatory and at a school for young workers. He graduated from the 10th grade in 1948 with excellent marks, and on the advice of a friend from Moscow, applied to the Radio Department at the Moscow Energy Institute.
During his first year at the Energy Institute he battled tuberculosis, but managed to overcome it and stayed in school. His room in the dormitory was next to Mikhail Kartsev's room and the two often studied together. Neglectful of his own health, Kartsev also came down with tuberculosis, which was a very common disease among the MEI students at that time.
Radio technology captivated Brusentsov. While preparing his diploma project during his last year at the Institute, Brusentsov came up against the problem of calculating complex tables. After investigating a number of calculation methods, he put together diffraction tables on an elliptical cylinder, now known as Brusentsov's tables.
After graduating from the Institute in 1953, Brusentsov was sent to Moscow University's SKB, where they promised to help him find an apartment. At that time, the Bureau was just established and projects were assigned randomly. At first, they asked Brusentsov to build a new type of vacuum tube amplifier. Even though he handled the job well and completed the task, he received little satisfaction from it, and moreover, could not see himself doing such work in the future. He casually complained about this to his friend Kartsev, who by now was working in Brook's laboratory. Kartsev invited him to see the M-2 computer, which was already operational. It was the first time Brusentsov had seen such a modern and promising device, and he immediately fell in love with it. As luck would have it, the computer also caught Sobolev's eye; he arranged to have it moved to the University, and Brusentsov was sent to Brook's laboratory to familiarize himself with the machine prior to its transfer. Unfortunately, at the Soviet Academy of Sciences elections, Sobolev voted for Lebedev to be nominated as an Academician instead of Brook. Isaak Brook was offended and canceled the transfer of the M-2 to the University.
Brusentsov recalled what Sobolev said upon hearing the news, "Maybe it's for the best. We need to create our own laboratory at the Moscow University computer center to develop computers for use in our schools." So he decided to transfer Brusentsov to the Mechanics-Mathematics Department at the University.
Brusentsov recalled his first meeting with Sobolev:
When I first came to Sergei Sobolev's office, it seemed as if I was enveloped in sunlight – his face looked that kind and open. We hit it off immediately and I will be forever grateful to providence for leading me to this remarkable man, a bright mathematician and knowledgeable scientist, one of the first people who understood the significance of computers.
Sobolev wanted to develop a small computer suitable for use in university laboratories. He organized a seminar in which he, Shura-Bura, Konstantin Adolfovich Semendaev, and Zhogolev participated. They analyzed the disadvantages of existing computers, looked at instruction systems and architecture, and considered various plans for technical implementation – they were leaning towards using magnetic components because there were no transistors yet, but magnetic rods and diodes were available. They had excluded vacuum tubes right away because they could not be integrated into a small computer. The tasks for designing a small computer and its fundamental technical requirements were assigned at Sobolev's seminar on April 23, 1956. Brusentsov was appointed as the supervisor and executive designer of this machine, which would be based on magnetic elements and have a binary system.
Sobolev had agreed with Gutenmakher to send Brusentsov to his laboratory at the Institute for Precision Mechanics to gain experience with this sort of technology. Sobolev's clout opened doors for Brusentsov that were closed to everybody else. "They showed me their computer and supporting documentation, but to me it seemed technically weak," recalled Brusentsov.
That is when Brusentsov decided to use a trinary number system. It allowed him to create very simple and reliable elements, plus he needed seven times fewer elements than Gutenmakher. The power source requirements were significantly reduced as well because a smaller amount of magnetic rods and diodes was used. However, the main advantage was in using a natural number-coding system instead of direct, reciprocal and supplementary number coding.
Sobolev strongly supported the project and brought in many young assistants to help. By 1958, Brusentsov's 20-person team assembled by hand the first model of the computer. They named the computer Setun, after a river near Moscow University.
Brusentsov discussed the roles of the participants in the Setun project:
Sobolev was the heart and soul of this project. Unfortunately, his participation in our creative work ended in the early 1960s when he moved to Novosibirsk. All of his later involvement revolved around perpetual fighting with bureaucrats for the right to do the work we believed in.
Zhogolev was our main programmer and together with him I developed what we later called "computer architecture." He would come up with what he wanted the computer to do and I estimated how much it would cost and offered alternatives. When we settled on the trinary system, all of the architectural problems were simplified. It was important not to complicate our design, and we used to troubleshoot our ideas during the seminars with Sobolev, Semendaev and Shura-Bura.
A small team completed the project in a very short period of time. In autumn 1956 – when the idea of the trinary code emerged – the lab had four engineers and five technicians plus me. The mechanical manufacturing work on the units, frames, and the circuit boards where the elements were mounted, was done partly in the computer center workshop and partly in the workshops of the Physics Department. In addition, this was the first version of memory storage on a magnetic drum, where initially a gyroscope was employed with tube electronics. It was later replaced by a magnetic-semiconductor unit with a drum from the Ural computer.
The whole team worked inside one 60 square-meter room, filled with laboratory tables. We designed and assembled all of the devices ourselves – put together the research stands, sorted the ferrite elements and diodes, tested the cells and blocks. The work day began with "morning exercises:" everybody, including the chief, started with five ferrite cores and made preliminary tests on a stand. Using an ordinary sewing needle, they wound fifty-two coils of wire onto each core. Then the cores were passed to the assistants and technicians, who wound power-supply and control cables with five to twelve coils onto them, mounted the cells on printed cards, soldered the diodes, and provided a personal inspection mark. Then, the cells were mounted on the blocks; the signal and power-supply cables were produced next, according to the assembly schemata. After this, the testing of the block logic functions (adder, decoder, control pulse distributor, etc.) was carried out on a stand. Smaller blocks were installed on the larger blocks, and then their functions were tested. Finally, the blocks were installed onto a frame that we made and connected with an inter-block mounting cable. As a rule, everything worked fine after that. If something did go wrong, it was easy to detect and correct.
In accordance with a decree from the Soviet Cabinet of Ministers, the Kazan Mathematical Machines Factory was put in charge of mass-producing the Setun computer. The first model built at the factory was displayed at the National Exhibition in Moscow, but the second one was sent back because plant managers and officials from the Radio Ministry Industry maintained that the computer was not yet reliable and therefore not ready for mass-manufacturing.
"We were forced to manually adjust the second model of the computer made at the Kazan factory in accordance with our original documentation," Brusentsov recalled. "During testing it demonstrated 98% operational effectiveness. The only registered failure was the breakdown of a teletype diode. It also performed well in climate testing and supply-line voltage variations. On November 30, 1961, the director of the Kazan factory was forced to sign an act which ended his attempts to thwart the production of the computer."
Still, the leadership at the Kazan plant was not interested in large-scale computer production and they made only about fifteen to twenty computers annually. Soon they refused to do even that: since the Setun sold for 27,500 Rubles, they did not have sufficient financial incentive to continue. Setun's reliability spoke for itself, operating in different climatic zones: from Kaliningrad to Magadan; from Odessa and Ashkhabad to Novosibirsk and Yakutsk. It worked without any support and essentially, without spare parts. The Kazan plant issued fifty Setun computers, thirty of which worked in higher education establishments in the Soviet Union.
Setun attracted significant interest from abroad. The Ministry of Foreign Trade received many orders from East and West European customers, but none of them were filled, an anathema for the "supply and demand" oriented western minds.[11]
Between 1961 and 1968 based on their experience with Setun, Brusentsov and Zhogolev developed the architecture of another new computer, at that time called the Setun-70. Its functioning algorithm was comprehensively described in expanded Algol-60. The first model was operating by April of 1970. Brusentsov recalled:
A year later, the modernized Setun-70 had been transformed into a structured programming computer, designed for very effective software development in which the trinary system played a key role. It had no instructions in the traditional sense, but consisted primarily of syllables: syllable-addresses, syllable-operations. The syllable's length is equal to 6 trits, or one tryte – a trinary analog of the binary byte. The command length and addresses vary according to need, beginning with the zero-address instruction. In fact, the programmer does not think about instructions but simply writes the expressions that describe the calculations as a stack of operands. These algebraic expressions are program-ready for the processor, but the algebra is supplemented by testing, control and input-output operations. The user can add his own operations to the set of syllables by inputting his own procedures, which do not reduce the computer's performance, but instead provide the ideal conditions for structured programming. As a result, the programming time is reduced by five to tenfold, with unprecedented reliability, clarity, modification possibilities, compactness, speed, etc. It is clearly the most progressive architecture, and eventually will be developed.
Unfortunately, after the Setun-70 project, Brusentsov's lab was relocated from the Computer Center at Moscow University to a windowless attic in a student dormitory and was deprived of any serious support. The new university rector considered computer design a pseudo-science. Brusentsov's original Setun computer, an experimental prototype that had faithfully worked for seventeen years, was barbarically destroyed and carted off to the dump. Brusentsov's laboratory coworkers took the Setun-70 to their attic laboratory and used it as a basis for developing the Master Work Station – an educational computer system.
To this day, Brusentsov maintains that the trinary system is superior to binary, but only time will be able to tell whether or not he is correct. Today, Brusentsov manages the computer laboratory of the Computing Mathematics and Cybernetics Department at Moscow State University. Brusentsov runs several projects connected with microcomputer education systems and programming systems. He has published over 100 scientific works, received 11 invention certificates and was awarded the Sign of Honor Order and the Large Gold Medal of the Soviet Union National Exhibition. He is also an award-winning Laureate of the USSR Council of Ministries.
[10] Vyacheslav M. Molotov was the Soviet Union's foreign minister at that time. In 1939 he had signed the Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact with Hitler.
[11] Translator's NoteNeither the development nor future sales of Setun were part of the Soviet State economic plan: first, Setun was a university-initiated project, and second, all employees at the Foreign Trade Ministry had fixed salaries and could not receive pay increases or bonuses for such sales. On top of this, the Soviet government discouraged the sharing of technology during the Cold War.