Corresponding member of the Russian Academy of Sciences – George Pavlovich Lopato – made the greatest contribution in the field of computer development in Minsk. Lopato was born on August 23, 1924 in Ozershina village in the Gomel region of Belarus. His father, the son of a peasant, graduated in 1916 from the Goretska Agricultural Academy and served in the Russian Civil War as a soldier in the First Red Army Cavalry. After the war he worked as a land surveyor. In 1924, he was admitted to the Leningrad Polytechnic Institute, graduating in 1929. He worked as a Chief Engineer at a Moscow factory and later became a lecturer at the Moscow Institute of Agricultural Mechanization and Electrification.

George Lopato started elementary school in 1931. In the summer of 1941, after graduating from high school, he helped build defense fortifications near Moscow to protect against the invading Germans. In October of that year he was drafted into the Red Army and became a Private in the 314th Squad Battalion of Moscow's Air Defense District. In 1946, he was demobilized and entered the Electro-Physics Department of the Moscow Energy Institute. He graduated in 1952 with a degree in Electro-mechanics. Subsequently, Lopato began working at the Gosplan's Electro-mechanic Scientific Research Institute [in Russian: Nauchno-Isledovat'elskii Institut Electropromishlenosti Gosplana] in Moscow, where he designed electro-mechanical devices. In 1954, he was sent to work at the Control Machines and Systems Laboratory for several months. There, under Matyuhin's management, Lopato became involved with the development of the M-3 computer.

Lopato participated in the calibration of the M-3 after it was assembled at the Institute of Electro-mechanics. At the end of 1957, the Soviet government sent the M-3's technical specs to both the Hungarian and Chinese Academies of Science. Using those specs, the Chinese assembled a model of the M-3 computer in a telephone factory in Peking, and Lopato was sent to China to help put the machine into operation. It was a difficult job, but Lopato handled it successfully. After returning to the Soviet Union, he was invited to become a Senior Engineer at the Special Construction Bureau at the Minsk computer factory, and started working there in April of 1959. Five years later he was appointed as the manager of the Special Construction Bureau and in 1969, as the manager of the Minsk branch of NISEVT. In 1972, when the branch was modernized and renamed the Scientific Research Institute for Computing, Lopato became its director.

Under Lopato's twenty-eight years of management, the Institute created fifteen models of first and second-generation Minsk computers; eleven models were mass-produced and four models were special orders. Lopato's Institute also produced five ES series models, several personal computers, six special computing complexes, a series of operating and software systems, and more than fifty types of peripheral devices.

Lopato was the chief designer of the Minsk-1, the multi-computer system of homogeneous machines including Minsk-222, and the Naroch dual-use system, which combined 12 ES computers and was employed at the Schetmash to design hardware and software systems. Lopato was the Deputy Senior Designer of the 70K1 system, and later the Senior Designer of several transportable computers for the military.

Lopato was one of the founders of the Minsk school of computer design. It emphasized practicality, placing special importance on cost reduction, reliability, and compatibility of computer technology resources. The work at the Minsk school was time tested; their computers were rapidly placed into mass-production. For example: the Minsk-32 and IBM clone ES-1020 were rolling off the assembly line only two months after the completion of their designs.

Over the course of his engineering career, Lopato emphasized personnel education and training programs. He founded the Computers and Systems Department at the Minsk Radio-Technology Institute and managed it for ten years. He defended his Ph.D. thesis in 1969 and became a Doctor of Technical Sciences in 1975. In 1979 he was elected Corresponding Member of the Soviet Academy of Sciences. He published more than one hundred and twenty scientific works and received forty-five invention certificates. George Lopato received the Order of the October Revolution in 1972, the Red Banner of Labor in 1976, the Soviet Union State Prize and the Order of Lenin in 1983, the Sign of Honor, nine other medals, and four Certificates of Honor from the Belarusian Parliament. He died in 2003.