The M-3 could have also remained a one-of-a-kind machine (its development was not officially sanctioned by the government), had it not been for the academician Viktor Amazaspovich Ambartsumian. Upon his arrival in Moscow in 1954, he asked his friend Andronick Gevondovich Iosifian, Director of the All-Union Soviet Scientific Research Institute of Electro-mechanics [today the Vserossiskii nauchno-isledovatel’skii institut elektromekhaniki, or VNIIEM], to help him obtain a computer for the Armenian Academy of Sciences. Iosifian turned to Brook, and the two of them agreed to manufacture three M-3s at the Institute of Electro-mechanics, which had its own manufacturing facility. One computer was to be built for the Institute of Electro Mechanics, one for the Yerevan Institute of Mathematics of the Armenian Academy of Sciences, and another for Korolev’s space program. They formed a joint group of specialists: Matyuhin (from Brook’s laboratory), Boris Moiseevich Kagan, George Petrovich Lopato (from Iosifian’s Institute), and others. In 1956, the first of the M-3’s was fine-tuned and presented to the State Commission, together with technical documentation required for industrial mass- production.
…Because the M-3 was actually a self-initiated project, independent of any state plans, the State Commission headed by Bruevich and assisted by Shura-Bura showed its true character by not wanting to acknowledge this computer, claiming that it was “born illegitimately.” Although they did eventually accept it, two years went by without it’s going into mass production. During this time, the Yerevan Institute of Mathematical Machines was founded and began producing its own computers using our documentation for the M-3. 27 At the same time, the first industrial computer factory in Minsk, Belarus, was built, but had nothing to produce. The factory managers learned that Iosifian had a model of a computer but nobody had given him permission to make it. Only then were the M-3’s documents transferred from the Institute of Electro Mechanics to the factory in Minsk and the M-3 computer became the basis for computer manufacturing in Yerevan and Minsk.
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