Odra was a line of
computers manufactured in
Wrocław
Wrocław (; , . german: Breslau, , also known by other names) is a city in southwestern Poland and the largest city in the historical region of Silesia. It lies on the banks of the Oder in the Silesian Lowlands of Central Europe, roughly ...
,
Poland
Poland, officially the Republic of Poland, , is a country in Central Europe. Poland is divided into Voivodeships of Poland, sixteen voivodeships and is the fifth most populous member state of the European Union (EU), with over 38 mill ...
. 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 ICL may refer to:
Companies and organizations
* Idaho Conservation League
* Imperial College London, a UK university
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* Indian Cricket League
* Inorganic Chemistry Laboratory of the University of Oxford
* Israel Ch ...
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 manufacturing plant, which was closed in 1989.
Odra 1002 was capable of only 100–400 operations per second.
In 1962, Witold Podgórski, an employee of Elwro, managed to create a computer game on a prototype of Odra 1003; it was an adaptation of a variant of
Nim
Nim is a mathematical two player game.
Nim or NIM may also refer to:
* Nim (programming language)
* Nim Chimpsky, a signing chimpanzee Acronyms
* Network Installation Manager, an IBM framework
* Nuclear Instrumentation Module
* Negative index met ...
, 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 ( rus, links=no, Санкт-Петербург, a=Ru-Sankt Peterburg Leningrad Petrograd Piter.ogg, r=Sankt-Peterburg, p=ˈsankt pʲɪtʲɪrˈburk), formerly known as Petrograd (1914–1924) and later Leningrad (1924–1991), i ...
developing an
ALGOL 68
ALGOL 68 (short for ''Algorithmic Language 1968'') is an imperative programming language that was conceived as a successor to the ALGOL 60 programming language, designed with the goal of a much wider scope of application and more rigorously ...
compiler in 1976. The Odra 1204 ran the syntax analysis, code generation ran on an
IBM System/360
The IBM System/360 (S/360) is a family of mainframe computer systems that was announced by IBM on April 7, 1964, and delivered between 1965 and 1978. It was the first family of computers designed to cover both commercial and scientific applic ...
.
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 ( , , ; szl, Katowicy; german: Kattowitz, yi, קאַטעוויץ, Kattevitz) is the capital city of the Silesian Voivodeship in southern Poland and the central city of the Upper Silesian metropolitan area. It is the 11th most populo ...
, Poland started a project to recommission an Odra 1305 in 2017.
Literature
*
See also
*
History of computing in Poland
*
History of computer hardware in Eastern Bloc countries
References
{{Reflist
Early computers
Science and technology in Poland