History of computing in Romania

With the development of CIFA-1 in 1957, Romania became one of the earliest countries to design and build an electronic digital computer, being widely regarded as the eight country in the world to achieve this milestone.

The construction of CET-500, the first fully transistorized Romanian computer, represented another major milestone in Romanian computing. With its completion, Romania became the 11th country in the world to build a fully transistorized computer.

Other first and second-generation electronic computers were made in Timişoara, under the name MECIPT (Electronic Computing Machine of the Timişoara Polytechnic Institute) – MECIPT-1 in 1961, MECIPT-2 in 1965 and MECIPT-3 in 1967–1974 (unfinished), being built by a team including Wilhelm Löwenfeld, Iosif Kaufmann, Vasile Baltac, Dan Farcaş, Gavril Gavrilescu and Ştefan Măruşter.

This was followed in Cluj by the DACICC series (an acronym for Dispozitiv Automat de Calcul al Institutului de Calcul din Cluj, “Automatic Computing Device of the Institute of Computing in Cluj”): the DACICC-1, completed in 1963, and the DACICC-200, completed in 1968. The machines were developed under the direction of academician Tiberiu Popoviciu by engineers M. Bocu, Gh. Farkas, B. Azzolla, I. Juhasz, M. Rosmann, T. Mureșan, D. Beloiu, M. Mușteanu, and M. Pătru, together with mathematicians E. Muntean, L. Negrescu, T. Rus, S. Hannes, V. Costea, St. Nițchi, W. Schuster, S. Laslău-Popescu, and M. Mitrov. DACICC-1 was the first Romanian computer using transistors (although it was not fully transistorized) and the first Romanian computer to use ferrite-core internal memory. DACICC-200 was the first Romanian computer to feature an operating system and compiler, as well as hardwired arithmetic instructions.

Timeline

• CIFA-1 (1954–1957) (1st generation) (Bucharest) "The Atomic Physics Institute Computer", the first electronic computer in Romania, built under the guidance of Victor Toma. It features: 1,500 electronic tubes; 50 operations per second.
• MARICA (1959) (electromagnetic relays) (Cluj-Napoca) “Automatic Relay Machine of the Computing Institute of the Academy”, an experimental relay computer built by M. Rossman at the Computing Institute of the Romanian Academy.
• In the same year, CIFA2 (generation 1) (Bucharest) was built at the Institute of Atomic Physics, under the guidance of Victor Toma.
• MECIPT-1 (1957-1961) (1st generation) (Timișoara) "Electronic Computing Machine of the Timișoara Polytechnic Institute", built at the Timișoara Polytechnic by a team consisting of Wilhelm Löwenfeld and Iosif Kaufmann. It is considered the second electronic computer built in Romania, and the first electronic computer built at a Romanian university. Features: 2,000 electronic tubes; magnetic drum memory with 1,024 31-bit words (approximately 4 KB); 50-70 operations per second.
• CIFA3 (1961) (generation 1) (Bucharest), built at the Institute of Atomic Physics under the direction of Victor Toma.
• CIFA-101 (1962) (1st generation) (Bucharest), built at the Institute of Atomic Physics under the guidance of Armand Segal. Features: 50-2,000 operations per second; internal memory: 4k words of 4 bits each.
• Also in 1962, CIFA4 (1st generation) (Bucharest), built at the Institute of Atomic Physics under the guidance of Victor Toma.
• DACICC-1 (1959-1963) (1st generation) (Cluj-Napoca) (Automatic Computing Device of the Cluj Computing Institute). Considered the third electronic computer built in Romania, it was developed under the leadership of academician Tiberiu Popoviciu by a team consisting of engineers Gh. Farkas , M. Bocu , B. Azzolla, I. Juhasz and M. Rossmann, and mathematicians E. Muntean, L. Negrescu and T. Rus. DACICC-1 had two notable features:
  • it was the first electronic computer in the country to have transistors (but not completely transistorized)
  • it was the first electronic computer in the country to have ferrite-based internal memory.

Other features: a 100 kHz clock frequency, allowing up to 2,000 additions per second. It remained in operation for nearly a decade and was used to solve numerous practical problems. Its use also contributed to the emergence of the so-called Cluj School of Numerical Analysis and Approximation Theory.

• CET500 (1964) (2nd generation) (Bucharest), "Transistorized Electronic Computer": built at the Institute of Atomic Physics under the guidance of Victor Toma. Features:
  • the first fully transistorized computer built in Romania.
  • with CET500, Romania became the 11th country in the world to build a fully transistorized computer.
  • 5,000 operations per second.
• CIFA102 (1964) (1st generation) (Bucharest) built at the Institute of Atomic Physics, under the guidance of Armand Segal. Features: 50-2,000 operations per second; internal memory: 4k words, 4 bits.
• MECIPT-2 (1963-1965) (2nd generation) (Timișoara) ("Electronic Computing Machine of the Timișoara Polytechnic Institute"), built at the Timișoara Polytechnic by a team lead of Wilhelm Löwenfeld , Iosif Kaufmann and Vasile Baltac . Characteristics: 10000 operations per second.
• CET501 (2nd generation) (Bucharest) (“Transistorized Electronic Computer”): built at the Institute of Atomic Physics, under the direction of Victor Toma. Features: 12,000 operations per second.
• DACICC-200 (1963–1968) (2nd generation) (Cluj-Napoca) ("Automatic Computing Device of the Cluj Computing Institute"). It was built under the leadership of Tiberiu Popoviciu by a team of engineers consisting of M. Bocu, Gh. Farkas, I. Juhasz, T. Mureșan, D. Beloiu, M. Mușteanu, and M. Pătru, with software developed by the mathematicians E. Muntean, Șt. Nițchi, L. Negrescu, T. Rus, S. Hannes, V. Costea, W. Schuster, S. Laslău Popescu, and M. Mircu. DACICC-200 was the first Romanian computer to feature an operating system and a compiler (DACICC-FORTRAN). Before the production of licensed computers in Romania, it had the country's most advanced capabilities, and some of its features even surpassed those of the first licensed computers, including a performance of 200,000 operations per second and 24-bit floating-point numbers, compared with 16-bit floating-point numbers on the IRIS computers. It also featured advanced capabilities for its time, including hard-wired floating-point arithmetic (providing direct floating-point instructions rather than slower emulated ones), modular memory, instruction overlap (overlapping the preparation of one instruction with the execution of the previous one), and functional parallelism between memory modules, a feature comparable to techniques later used in multiprocessor parallel computers.
• MECIPT-3 (1967–1974) (2nd generation) (Timișoara), built at the Timișoara Polytechnic Institute but never completed. It was intended to be equipped with 4 Ki words of 38-bit ferrite-core memory.