The history of science, technology and culture chronicled in scientific annals would not be as bright, interesting or complete without the recollections of many outstanding individuals who helped define the events of their era.

Unfortunately, very few of these people have been able to write about their experiences. Some lack the time, others are far too modest, while the rest believe that the results of their work will speak for themselves. Far too often, a lot of time has had to pass before they could speak out about their participation in secret work.

In the former Soviet Union, not one of the founders of computer science and technology has ever published memoirs. The recollections of their contemporaries are scanty and inaccessible for the majority of readers; their labs, once popular one room museums, have been steadily loosing public interest. Only one such exhibit, dedicated to the creators of the first electronic computers, remains at the State Polytechnic Museum in Moscow.

It is still possible to recover and preserve for future generations the many images of the distinguished founders of digital computer technology in the Soviet Union and to learn about the renowned achievements of the scientific teams they directed. This is not just a possibility, but a duty and a necessity. "Wretched are the people without a past," Pushkin once noted.

The heroic era of the formation of digital computer technology in the difficult postwar years belongs to all of the countries of the former Soviet Union. Those years witnessed the appearance of a truly unique collection of scientists of different nationalities who successfully mastered and developed space travel, atomic energy, missile technology, and digital electronic computers. It is important to emphasize that the fulfillment of the Soviet nuclear weapons and space programs would not have been possible without the timely development of electronic computers.

Such accomplishments in the difficult postwar years are heroic examples of service to science and our nation. It is an inalienable part of the postwar renaissance that unfortunately has not been reflected in historical literature. This book Pioneers of Soviet Computing (original title in Russian - ‘The History of Computer Technology in Personalities’) fills part of this void. The author, Boris Nikolayevich Malinovsky, is famous in the field of computer technology; he was a witness and a participant in the first steps of its formation and development. He was also fortunate to meet and personally speak with the distinguished scientists about whom he writes.

This is an anthology of the establishment and development of digital electronic computers, embracing the period from the 1940s through the 1960s and, as far as I know, is the first thorough and serious effort to detail the lives and creative work of the former USSR’s computer pioneers.

The first electronic computer in continental Europe was created in Kiev at the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine under the supervision of Academician Sergei Alexeevich Lebedev. Even at that time, Lebedev suggested that his students prepare and publish materials about the formation and development of computer technology in the Soviet Union. "In the West, they consider us to be worse than we really are. We have to change their opinion of us", he said. Unfortunately, his idea was not properly implemented at that time and only now has been embodied in this book.

It is a pleasure to note that this book has been prepared within the walls of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine and with the scientists who were present at the birth of the digital electronic computer technology.

- B.E. Paton
President, Ukraine Academy of Sciences