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BESK (Binär Elektronisk SekvensKalkylator,Swedish for "Binary Electronic Sequence Calculator") wasSweden's first electroniccomputer, usingvacuum tubes instead ofrelays. It was developed byMatematikmaskinnämnden (Swedish Board for Computing Machinery) and for a short time it was the fastest computer in the world. The computer was completed in 1953[1][2][3] and was in use until 1966. The technology behind BESK was later continued with theFACIT EDB and FACIT EDB-3 machines, both software compatible with BESK. Non-compatible machines highly inspired by BESK wereSMIL made for theUniversity of Lund,SAABs räkneautomatSARA, "SAAB's calculating machine", andDASK made inDenmark.
BESK was developed by theSwedish Board for Computing Machinery (Matematikmaskinnämnden) a few years after the mechanical relay computerBARK (Binär Aritmetisk Relä-Kalkylator, Swedish for "Binary Arithmetic Relay Calculator"). The team was initially led byConny Palm, who died in December 1951, after whichStig Comét took over. The hardware was developed byErik Stemme.Gösta Neovius andOlle Karlqvist were responsible for architecture and instruction set. It was closely modeled on theIAS machine for which the design team had retrieved drawings during a scholarship toInstitute for Advanced Study (IAS) andMassachusetts Institute of Technology, U.S.
During the development of the BESK magneticdrum memory,Olle Karlqvist discovered a magnetic phenomenon, which has been called theKarlqvist gap.
BESK was a 40-bit machine; it could perform an addition in 56 μs and a multiplication took 350 μs. Theelectrostatic memory could store 512 words. The instruction length was 20 bits, so each word could store two instructions. BESK contained 2400 "radio tubes" (vacuum tubes) and 400germaniumdiodes (so it was partlysolid state). The power consumption was 15kVA.
Initially an average runtime of 5 minutes was achieved before hardware problems appeared. In 1954 the system became more stable. Breakpoints were introduced to allow software to restart after hardware failures.
Originally BESK had a BritishWilliams tube 512 word x 40 bit memory based on 40 cathode tubes, and eight spare tubes. The memory was from the beginning found to be insufficient andCarl-Ivar Bergman was given just a few weeks to build and install aferrite core memory in 1956. To complete the work before the deadline they hired housewives with knitting experience to make the memory. One of the new memory bits did not work at first, but it was easily cut out and replaced.
BESK was inaugurated on 1 April 1954 and handled weather data forCarl-Gustaf Rossby and theSwedish Meteorological and Hydrological Institute, statistics for the telecommunications service providerTeleverket, wing profiles for the attack aircraftSaab Lansen, and road profiles for the road authorityVägverket. During the nightsSwedish National Defence Radio Establishment (FRA) used BESK for cracking encryption of radio messages (by Per-Erik Perssonet al.). BESK was also used forcalculations for theSwedish nuclear energy industry, for exampleMonte Carlo simulations ofneutron spectrum (by Per-Erik Perssonet al.), and for theSwedish nuclear weapon program[citation needed], but most of those calculations were done bySMIL. In 1957Hans Riesel used BESK to discover aMersenne prime with 969 digits - the largest prime known at the time.
SAAB rented computer time on the BESK to (probably, much was secret) make calculations of the strength of theSaab Lansen attack aircraft. In the fall of 1955 SAAB thought the capacity was insufficient and started working onSAABs räkneautomatSARA, "SAAB's calculating machine", which was going to be twice as fast as BESK. Some former SARA employees went toFacit and worked with theFACIT EDB.
In the spring of 1956, eighteen of the BESK developers were hired by office equipment manufacturerFacit and housed in an office at Karlavägen 62 in Stockholm, where they started to build copies of BESK called Facit EDB (models 1, 2, and 3), led by Carl-Ivar Bergman. A total of nine machines were built, of which four were used internally by Facit Electronics and five were sold to customers. On 1 July 1960 Facit Electronics, then with 135 employees, moved toSolna, just north of Stockholm.
In 1960 BESK was used to create an animation of a car driving down a planned highway from the driver's perspective. This was one of the earliest computer animations ever made. The short clip was broadcast on Swedish national television on 9 November 1961.[4]
"Besk" is Swedish for the taste "bitter".Bäsk is also the name of a traditionalbitters made from distilled alcohol seasoned with the herbArtemisia absinthium L. local to the province ofSkåne, in which Lund is located. Reportedly this was an intentional and unnoticed pun after officials denied usage of the nameCONIAC (Conny [Palm] Integrator And Calculator, compareCognac andENIAC) for the predecessor BARK.
