The Kerala State Science and Technology Museum (KSSTM) here has become the proud owner of a handful of components of a USSR-make Minsk computer.
Used in the early days of the Indian space programme at Thumba, the Minsk was perhaps the first computer to make its way into the State capital in the 1960s.
A ferrite core memory plane and the logic circuits from a second generation Minsk were among the parts donated by John T. George, who headed the Computer Division at the Thumba Equatorial Rocket Launching Station (TERLS) in the 1960s. Mr. George, now 85, had retired as head, Quality Assessment Division, Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre (VSSC), in 1996.
KSSTM director G. P. Padmakumar accepted the components from Mr. George on Monday evening. They will be put on display at the Computer Gallery of the museum, he said. The transfer was facilitated by the Computer Society of India (CSI), Thiruvananthapuram chapter.
Back then, the Minsk, a gift from the Soviets, was used for 'wind weighting' - determining the azimuth and elevation settings of the sounding rocket based on wind measurements taken before the launch, Mr. George told The Hindu.
“The 'Minsk' was so named because the computer was built in Minsk, the capital of Belarus which was then a part of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). A necessary attribute of computers is the random access capability, and the ferrite core memory was the first to possess this capability,” he says.
The Minsk took up a lot of space. There were seven full-size cupboard-like structures, a console, a teleprinter input system and a printer. For cooling, there were five 1.5 tonne air conditioners.
“The Soviets gave us the Minsk-2 version. Later on, we augmented the capability of the computer to the Minsk-22 version,” recalls Mr. George.
Subsequently, replaced by the more powerful IBM-360/44, the Minsk was donated to a government-run educational institution.
Prof. Achuthsankar S. Nair, head, Department of Computational Biology and Bioinformatics, University of Kerala; and also chairman, CSI Thiruvananthapuram chapter, and senior officials of KSSTM and CSI were present.
