In 1939, Isaak Semyonovich Brook, a 37-year old Doctor of Technical Sciences, presented a paper at a session of the Presidium of the Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union, in which he described a mechanical integrator capable of solving differential equations up to the sixth order. The integrator was built under Brook's supervision at the Electric Systems Laboratory of the Academy of Sciences Power Engineering Institute. Brook's report aroused great interest because there were no other such machines in the Soviet Union at that time. Only the US and Great Britain had one model each.

Brook achieved a remarkable feat – the integrator contained more than one thousand gear wheels. The integrator's racks, with its numerous bars and holes for gear wheel axles, took up an entire room of 60 square meters. Using it to solve a problem meant having to set gear wheels in specific positions – a task requiring anywhere from several days to several weeks. By modern standards, Brook's mechanical integrator was in fact an analog computer.

During the same year, Brook was elected a Corresponding Member of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, most likely due to his earlier report at the Presidium. Brook's main research focus at that time was electric power engineering. Because of his interest in that field, Brook, like Lebedev, understood the need for creating computational means capable of supporting research that required complex calculations.

Brook's and Lebedev's life stories were surprisingly similar. Both were born in the same year, educated at the same institute, and became scientists in the same scientific organization. Both started out in the field of power engineering and from it migrated to the computing technology. Both became directors of leading scientific schools in the area of digital computers. And both were pioneers in this field.

In August 1948, Brook and Bashir Rameev became the first scientists in the Soviet Union to design an electronic computer with micro program control. At that time, the only other machine of this kind was the American ENIAC, completed in 1946. Brook and Rameev also received the first Soviet Union patent for a digital computer with a common bus in December 1948. Unfortunately, these projects and inventions were not implemented in a timely or practical manner because Rameev was drafted into the Army.

Brook was also the first Soviet scientist to propose and implement the idea of using small computers in scientific laboratories. Under Brook's supervision in 1950–51, the first Russian small electronic digital stored program computer, M-1, was built. This machine contained 730 electronic vacuum tubes (instead of the 6000 in the MESM computer). After test operations in 1952, it became the only fully operational computer in the Russian Soviet Republic.

In the M-1, for the first time, Brook and his team utilized copper-oxide semiconductor rectifiers instead of electronic vacuum tubes with diodes, a teletype roll of paper for printing long numbers instead of the narrow teletype tape with only one number printed on each line, and a two-address computer instruction system.

Brook's desire to be ahead of everyone else and his constant need for the latest innovations often prevented him from completing his projects. Only one-third of the computers developed under his management went into industrial mass production. Brook's research on these computers originated more from his desire to show off his abilities in an emerging branch of science and technology than from his actual research interests. According to one of Brook's former colleagues, Alexander Borisovich Zalkind, "The work on the M-1 computer at the Power Engineering Institute was conducted in a semi-legal manner. Today they would say that it was just a hobby of the director." During this period, Brook also continued his research in power engineering. He pushed for computer implementation in electric power stations and was keenly interested in economic management issues.

Brook's passion for computer development was carried throughout the work of his most promising students – Nikolai Yakovlevich Matyuhin and Mikhail Alexandrovich Kartsev. At the scientific schools led by Brook and his students, many significant contributions in computer manufacturing were made. There was even an unofficial creative rivalry between the two leading computing schools – Lebedev's and Brook's – that continually motivated their respective staff to innovate. It is impossible to compare the results of these two teams and determine a "winner." Only one thing is clear: the victory of the scientific-technical progress.

Brook was born in Minsk, Belarus on November 8, 1902 into the impoverished Jewish family of a tobacco factory worker. He finished secondary school in 1920 and in 1925 graduated, as did Lebedev, from the Baumann Institute in Moscow. While still a student, he took a great interest in science, and completed a diploma project on new methods of asynchronous electric motor regulation. After completing the Baumann Institute, Brook was sent to the Lenin State Electrical Engineering Institute, where he gained a great deal of practical experience, participating in the development of a new range of asynchronous electric motors and making trips to the Donbas region for related work at several electric power stations.

"He inherited the abilities and interest in technology from his father," remembered Brook's sister, Mira Brook, herself a Doctor of Science in Art Education. While attending a secondary school in Minsk, he was fond of mathematics, physics, and technology. Sometimes, his school laboratory instructors gave him old mechanical devices to play with. He often visited the Minsk Energiya power plant and spoke to the technicians who worked there. Recognizing his extraordinary interest in technology, the foremen took the time to explain to him the working principles of the machinery and even gave him some old spare parts.

His sister recalled, "My brother read a lot and liked books by Jules Verne, Jack London, and James Fennimore Cooper. He was fascinated by astronomy and gave me Camille Flammarion's Stella to read. He enjoyed drawing and collected art reproductions. From my repertory - I studied at music school – he loved listening to compositions by Beethoven, Tchaikovsky and Grieg."

In 1930 Brook moved to Kharkov, Ukraine, to work at a factory designing and building several innovative electric machines, including an explosion-proof asynchronous electric motor. In 1935, he moved back to Moscow and began work at the Power Engineering Institute of the Soviet Academy of Sciences [in Russian it is called today: Krzhizhanovsky Energeticheskii Nauchno-Isledovat'elskii Institute, or ENIN]. His dossier there contained a letter of recommendation to the Institute's Director, academician Gleb Maksimilianovich Krzhizhanovsky, from academician Klavdii Ippolitovich Shenfer, the Soviet Union's most renowned specialist in electric machinery. Knowing Brook from the Lenin Electrical Engineering Institute, Shenfer referred to him as a "bright and talented scientific researcher and engineer." In his application for a job at the Power Engineering Institute, Brook wrote that he would like to work on problems of compensation of reactive power in long-distance transmission lines. At the Lenin Institute laboratory he initiated the research to compute the modes of high power engineering systems. In order to simulate the complex electric networks in the laboratory conditions, he designed a calculating stand using alternating current. In fact, it was a crude computing device.

Brook was awarded the Candidate of Technical Science degree in May 1936, without submitting a dissertation. In October of that same year he presented and successfully defended a doctoral thesis on the subject of "Longitudinal Compensation of Electric Transmission Lines."

During the pre-war years, Brook became focused on developing a mechanical integrator, which led him to become a corresponding member of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, as I mentioned earlier. During the Second World War, Brook worked on the fire control systems for anti-aircraft defense. He invented an aircraft gun synchronizer that allowed shots to be fired through the rotating propellers of an aircraft. In 1947, he was elected to be a member of the Artillery Academy of Science of the Soviet Union. Soon after the war he managed the research on the statistical stability of power systems, developing equipment for the frequency regulation for the biggest electric power stations in the Soviet Union. At the same time, he continued the work on analog computing devices and oversaw construction of the Electronic Differential Analyzer [in Russian: Elektronii Differenstialnii Analizator, or EDA] led by senior designer Nikolai N. Lenov; this machine was intended for integration of 20th order differential equations.^[1]

In the late 1940s, Brook became interested in the digital electronic computers, largely due to the availability of foreign publications on the topic, and became an active participant in a scientific seminar on the problems of automating calculation. The seminar took place in 1947, under the Presidium of the Academy of Sciences, and was organized by the Academy's scientific secretary, Nikolai Bruevich. At the seminar, participants considered a proposal for the establishment of a special institute for computing technology. In July 1948, with strong support from the Academy's president at the time, Sergei I. Vavilov, the Institute for Precision Mechanics was created. Bruevich became the Executive Director of the Institute. It seemed logical that Brook, and his innovative laboratory of computer technology, would have joined the new institute's staff. But by then, he was already in charge of the digital computer project with Rameev. They had even come up with "A Project Proposal for the Establishment of an Electronic Digital Computer Laboratory at the Institute of Precision Mechanics and Computer Technology."

It is still not clear why this proposal was not accepted. There were several possible reasons. First, the institute had neither the buildings nor the equipment at that time. Second, Bruevich, the Institute's director, was not a supporter of electronic digital computers; having been a mechanic, he could better envision the development of mechanical computing devices. Third, Brook grossly underestimated the complexity of creating a digital computer. Considering the project already developed by him and Rameev as a significant step toward this objective, Brook probably hoped to build the computer with his laboratory staff exclusively. Unfortunately, he had gravely miscalculated.

In 1949, Rameev was called to military service and Brook lost his only collaborator. His plans for this digital electronic computer stayed on the drawing board forever. But Brook did not abandon his ambitions and was no doubt excited by news of Lebedev's work on a computer at the Institute for Precision Mechanics. After succeeding Bruevich as director of the Institute, Lavrentiev created Laboratory No. 1 and invited Lebedev to manage it. Simultaneously, computer construction was going on at the SKB-245, where Rameev suddenly reappeared after only a few months of military service.

In January 1950, Brook asked the personnel department at the Moscow Energy Institute to find some capable young specialists graduating from its Radio-Electronics Department that could work for him. Highly qualified specialists with clean personnel records were in great demand during that period because most of them were sent to work in top secret organizations, which were filling classified government orders. Brook did not have, nor did he want any such specialists, because they could tie his hands and hinder fulfillment of his research agenda. Instead, Brook needed talented but blacklisted specialists, who were not eligible to work on classified projects because of the "spots" in their personnel files.^[2]

Brook ended up with some talented specialists. In early March 1950, the Moscow Energy Institute sent Nikolai Matyuhin – the "son of an enemy of the people." He had received a diploma with excellence for brilliant academic work and participation in scientific research while still a student. However, Matyuhin could not pass a staff commission examination required to enter graduate school because of the blemishes in his personnel file.

Matyuhin's appearance was extremely fortunate for the laboratory. In April, only two months later, Brook submitted a resolution for the Presidium of the Soviet Academy of Sciences about the development of a digital electronic computer, later called the M-1.

Initially, Matyuhin, a young specialist in radio-technology, did not grasp the concept of an electronic computer. Nor did he understand his first assignment to design a decoder – an important unit in a computer – especially one without any vacuum tubes. Brook personally selected the relevant literature for Matyuhin to read and explained in great detail the working principles of a computer, the binary notation system, and numerical calculation methods. It was Brook who suggested for Matyuhin to use copper-oxide rectifiers, which had been acquired as war reparations from Germany, along with Soviet-made electronic vacuum tubes, to construct the computer's logical elements.

Today, since both Brook and his favorite pupil, Matyuhin, have passed away, it is uncertain who was ultimately responsible for the final design structure and architecture of the M-1 computer. One can only conclude, from the recollections of the remaining participants in the project, that Matyuhin was in fact M-1's chief engineer, whereas Brook acted more as the scientific director of the project.

^[1] Editor's note: Readers will note that the USSR was still actively producing differential analyzers at this time, whereas the Americans were already rapidly moving towards developing electronic digital computers.

^[2] Editor's note: "Spots" referred to suspicions about a person whose parents were repressed by Stalin's regime.