"Ukrainian specialists have created new supercomputer", “Kiev “Silicon Valley” made a breakthrough in the field of high technologies”.

These could be today’s headlines of the world press, if history would go in a different direction.

It all started many years ago. Few people know that the first computer in continental Europe was created over 65 years ago, in 1951, in Ukraine. This machine was called the Small electronic computing machine - SECM

Despite the modest word "Small", it consisted of 6,000 vacuum lamps and barely fit into the left wing of The Computer lab at Institute of Electrical Sciences (former USSR) headed by Sergei Lebedev.

Project started after the war, in 1948, and by 1950 the machine was installed in the building of former monastery, near Kiev. By 25 December 1951, the Academy of Science commission approved SECM and officially put it into operation. At that time, only UK and US had similar machines. The machine was operated until 1957, and used in creation of hydrogen bomb. Because of the war, works on the first computer could not be completed earlier.

SECM worked with unprecedented speed for those days - 3000 operations per minute, producing subtraction, addition, multiplication, division, shift, comparison, including comparison in absolute values, transfer control, transfer of numbers from magnetic drum and adding the commands.

In 1952, the SECM was practically the only computer in the country which could solved various scientific and technical tasks in the field of thermonuclear processes, space flight and rocketry, long-distance power lines, mechanics, statistical quality control. During machine construction engineers used 6000 vacuum lamps with a total capacity of 25 kW: when all the lamps were switched on simultaneously, the laboratory turned into tropics. Technicians had to dismantle the ceiling of the room urgently to divert at least part of the heat.

Almost at the same time, in 1955, Israeli computer WEIZAC created in Weizmann Institute conducted its first calculations.

Computer was created by three Jews: John von Neumann, Albert Einstein and Chaim Leib Pekeris. When it was decided to create Israeli computer, Einstein skeptically wondered why you need a computer in such small country. He was objected by brilliant mathematician von Neumann, who developed his computer in Princeton, USA. At the same institute Pekeris Haim worked - scientist in the field of geophysics and mathematics. He held a Head of Department position of Mathematics at the Research Institute in Rehovot.

For eight years WEIZAC calculated the ebbs and flows, atomic spectroscopy, earthquakes probabilities, X-ray crystallography, and more.

At that moment several major research projects were developed in Israel, and WEIZAC was the only computer in whole country, so there were many scantiest who wanted to use it, and they had to wait. So a classic situation of "demand creates supply" has become an impulse for the rapid development of information technologies, which in a few decades later led Israel to the top position in the global IT market.