History of computing in Poland

This article describes the history of computing in Poland.

Polish computer scientists

• Grzegorz Rozenberg - resreacher in fields of natural computing, formal language and automata theory, graph transformations, and concurrent systems.
• Janusz Brzozowski - known for his contributions to mathematical logic, circuit theory, and automata theory, focused on regular expressions and on syntactic semigroups of formal languages.
• Andrew Targowski - contributed to the areas of enterprise computing, societal computing, information technology impact upon civilization, information theory, wisdom theory, and civilization theory.
• Jacek Karpiński - main creator of K-202, contributed to areas of machine learning algorithms, techniques for character and image recognition.
• Jan Węglarz - one of creators of Elwro 800 Junior, currently specializing in operations research.
• Zenon Kulpa - known for his work on diagrammatic representation and diagrammatic reasoning.

Polish computer games with global popularity

• Witcher 3 - a 2015 action role-playing game developed and published by Polish developer CD Projekt Red and is based on The Witcher series of fantasy novels written by Andrzej Sapkowski
• Dying Light - a 2015 survival horror video game developed by Techland and published by Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment.
• Painkiller - a first-person shooter video game developed by Polish game studio People Can Fly and published by DreamCatcher Interactive in 2004.

The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, a polish computer game.

Polish computer hardware designs in 1958-1986

Odra

Some of the earliest computers created in Poland were the first Odra computers. They were manufactured at the Elwro manufacturing plant in Wrocław, (the brand name comes from the Odra River that flows through the city of Wrocław) and exported to other communist countries. The production started in 1959–1960. The last series of Odra computers—the Odra 1300—consisted of three models: the Odra 1304, 1305, and the 1325. Although the hardware was developed by Polish teams, the software for the above machines was provided by the British company ICL. The Odra was ICL 1900 compatible.

K-202

K-202 was 16-bit minicomputer built by Jacek Karpiński in 1971. It was faster and cheaper than most of the world's production at this time, and more advanced than IBM PC released decade later, but the production was never started because of political reasons and dependence on western parts; it was not compatible with the ES EVM standard.

Meritum

Produced by Mera-Elzab, Meritum I and II models were created in 1983 and 1985 respectively. Based on U880DA CPU (Zilog Z80 clone), with 16 and 48KB RAM, were based on the TRS-80 computer. They were intended primarily for scientific, engineering and office applications.

Elwro Junior

Elwro 800 Junior (1986) and Elwro 804 Junior PC (1990) were ZX Spectrum clones intended for schools, and for home use respectively. The 804 model had a 3.5" disk drive built in; the drive was available as an accessory for 800 (the alternative mass storage being a tape recorder). The computers used the Z80A CPU, 64KB RAM and 24KB ROM. The ROM contained either CP/J (a variant of CP/M) operating system, or Spectrum-compatible BASIC.

Mazovia

Mazovia was a Polish clone of IBM PC/XT.

• 
  XYZ, 1958
• 
  K-202, 1971
• 
  Odra No. 1305, 1974
• 
  MERA 302, 1974

See also

• History of computer hardware in Yugoslavia
• Computer systems in the Soviet Union
• History of computing in Romania
• History of computer hardware in Bulgaria

External links

• [1] - Main Movie by Polish Information Processing Society for 70th anniversary of Polish informatics (2019)
• [2] - Polish school of algorithmics and programming, a video by Polish Information Processing Society (2019)