Computer history is full of stories of intellectual feats and technological leaps. Yet many of Europe’s most fascinating chapters are little known. To help remedy this, Google has been working to highlight and celebrate these forgotten computer pioneers -- from Tommy Flowers to Paul Otlet, from Sergey Lebedev to the team at J Lyons & Co.
Today marks the unveiling of another project in the series -- a new website, developed in partnership with Kyiv-based charity ICFCST, to commemorate Ukraine’s rich computing heritage. Our goal is to help make these little known stories of Soviet-era computing accessible to a wider audience.
At the website you can learn about Ukraine’s surprisingly extensive contributions to the development of computing in the Soviet Union. To name but a few:
- Vadim Lashkaryov’s unheralded contribution to the development of transistors
- Kateryna Yushchenko’s invention of “Address language”, one of the world’s first high-level computer programming languages
- Victor Glushkov’s range of small-sized computers for engineers, which were predecessors to personal computers
- The story of the scientific production association “Impulse”, who were a leader in developing automation systems for Soviet industry, as well as the USSR’s first mass ticket booking system for Aeroflot
In putting together the site, we are indebted to Boris Malinovsky, an eyewitness to many of these achievements and the first to document the history of Ukraine's IT industry.
While these achievements belong to a distant political and technological era, we hope this website helps their memory to live on.