Sweden’s first full-blown electronic computer BESK (Binary Electronic Sequence Calculator) was put into service in 1953. It was designed by a team of the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm and was made up of some 2,500 vacuum tubes. It became the world’s fastest computer and outperformed the widely known ENIAC by some 50x in computing power (and consumed "just" 15 kilowatts instead of 175!!). The world record was kept over several periods in the mid-1950's. BESK could execute some 24,000 basic math operations per second (an addition had execution time of 42 microseconds), which was considered a blazing speed (the IBM 701 could do just 14, 000). BESK was also capable of more efficient calculations with its 40 bit operand size. What was further considered revolutionary was that BESK had a magnetic core memory of 1024 words (by 40 bits) which by today's lingo equals 5 kilobytes. The secondary memory was a drum memory with a capacity of 8192 word (by 40 bits) which equals 40 kilobytes. Imagine storing a Word document on that "hard disk"... Or let's put it this way - 40 kBytes is typically less than the storage capacity of a cell phone's SIM card...
However, just as BESK made its relay-based predecessor BARK hopelessly obsolete, BESK itself soon became obsolete. Where transistors started to come commercially available in the end of the 1950’s, it became evident that the future of computers was to be built on semiconductors rather than tubes. Several Swedish transistor based designs were launched in the early 1960’s, and BESK was finally taken out of service in 1966 and was then scrapped. Presumably, the relative shortage of computing power available at that time allowed it to survive that long. In 1966 it must have been seen as an hopelessly outdated piece of antiquity.
The pictures are from a part of BESK, which I found in the remains of an old friend who worked as service engineer at BESK in the late 1950's. The circuit board was taken out of the scrapped machine some 40 years ago the dust seems to have its own life… I assume it is a part of an operand register (with 2 x 10 bits). The equivalent circuit with today’s technology would be just a few square micrometers of silicon estate and - a typical TV remote of today has more processing power than the entire BESK...
Some pictures of the computer can be found at http://www.treinno.se/pers/okq/besk.htm - the vacuum tubes of the circuit board below can be seen on the first picture...
It's kind of fascinating to read the preface to the manual and see the first paragraph stating:
"At the time when the electronic numerical machine BESK was planned, there were many that meant that such a fast machine would solve all of Sweden's numerical problems within its first fourteen days and after that, it would just be occasionally used."
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