Odra was a line of
computer
A computer is a machine that can be Computer programming, programmed to automatically Execution (computing), carry out sequences of arithmetic or logical operations (''computation''). Modern digital electronic computers can perform generic set ...
s manufactured in
Wrocław
Wrocław is a city in southwestern Poland, and the capital of the Lower Silesian Voivodeship. It is the largest city and historical capital of the region of Silesia. It lies on the banks of the Oder River in the Silesian Lowlands of Central Eu ...
,
Poland
Poland, officially the Republic of Poland, is a country in Central Europe. It extends from the Baltic Sea in the north to the Sudetes and Carpathian Mountains in the south, bordered by Lithuania and Russia to the northeast, Belarus and Ukrai ...
. The name comes from the
Odra river that flows through the city of Wrocław.
Overview
The production started in 1959–1960. Models 1001, 1002, 1003, 1013, 1103, 1204 were of original Polish construction. Models 1304 and 1305 were functional counterparts of
ICL 1905 and 1906 due to software agreement. The last model was 1325 based on two models by ICL.
The computers were built at the
Elwro
Elwro was a Polish company that manufactured mainframe and microcomputers from 1959 until 1989. Its plant was in Wrocław. Computer models included Odra (computer), Odra mainframe systems, and the List of ZX Spectrum clones#Elwro 800 Junior, Elwro ...
manufacturing plant, which was closed in 1993.
Odra 1002 was capable of only 100–400 operations per second.
In 1962, Witold Podgórski, an employee of Elwro, created computer game
Marienbad on a prototype of Odra 1003; it was an adaptation of a variant of
Nim, as depicted in the film ''
Last Year at Marienbad''. The computer could play a perfect game and was guaranteed to win. The game was never distributed outside of the Elwro company, but its versions appeared elsewhere. It was probably the first Polish computer game in history.
The operating system used by the Odra 1204 is called SODA. It was designed to work on a small computer without magnetic storage and
can run simultaneous loading and execution of programs.
An Odra 1204 computer was used by a team in
Leningrad
Saint Petersburg, formerly known as Petrograd and later Leningrad, is the List of cities and towns in Russia by population, second-largest city in Russia after Moscow. It is situated on the Neva, River Neva, at the head of the Gulf of Finland ...
developing an
ALGOL 68
ALGOL 68 (short for ''Algorithmic Language 1968'') is an imperative programming language member of the ALGOL family that was conceived as a successor to the ALGOL 60 language, designed with the goal of a much wider scope of application and ...
compiler in 1976. The Odra 1204 ran the syntax analysis, code generation ran on an
IBM
International Business Machines Corporation (using the trademark IBM), nicknamed Big Blue, is an American Multinational corporation, multinational technology company headquartered in Armonk, New York, and present in over 175 countries. It is ...
System/360
The IBM System/360 (S/360) is a family of mainframe computer systems announced by IBM on April 7, 1964, and delivered between 1965 and 1978. System/360 was the first family of computers designed to cover both commercial and scientific applicati ...
.
Up until 30 April 2010 there was still one Odra 1305 working at the railway station in Wrocław Brochów. The system was shut down at 22:00 CEST and replaced with a contemporary computer system.
The Museum of the History of Computers and Information Technology (''Muzeum Historii Komputerów i Informatyki'') in
Katowice
Katowice (, ) is the capital city of the Silesian Voivodeship in southern Poland and the central city of the Katowice urban area. As of 2021, Katowice has an official population of 286,960, and a resident population estimate of around 315,000. K ...
, Poland started a project to recommission an Odra 1305 in 2017.
Literature
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See also
*
History of computing in Poland
The history of Polish computing (informatics) began during the Second World War with breaking the Enigma machine code by Polish mathematicians. After World War II, work on Polish computers began. Poles made a significant contribution to both the t ...
*
History of computer hardware in Eastern Bloc countries
References
{{Reflist
Early computers
Science and technology in Poland