Interview given by Mr. PROF Vasile Baltac to the journalist Bogdan Radulescu and published in “Gandul”, 08.02.2023
The history of the Romanian computer industry is linked to the name of university professor Dr. Vasile Baltac, one of the pioneers of computer science in Romania. He and the team he was assigned to coordinate in the 60s, at the Institute for Computing Technology in Bucharest, built the first Romanian computers. But the story that put Romania on the world map of major producers is linked to the French president Charles de Gaulle, whose words during a visit in 1968 remained famous: “Give the Romanians everything they need!”. From that moment the rise of the Romanian computer industry began. With the very advanced technology at that time offered by the French, the Romanian specialists produced the first computer – named Felix and inspired by the French IRIS computer. It was, at the time, a huge advance from the “stone age” of Romanian informatics, which had produced computers with 2,000 electronic tubes, over 20,000 capacitors and resistors, over 30 total kilometers of wires and over 100,000 letcon solders.
The components of these computers ended up occupying entire halls, and if they had been designed for the functions of a smartphone today, a space as large as the People’s House would have been needed.
Professor Vasile Baltac reveals in an exclusive interview for Gândul how Romania came to build the first computer in Eastern Europe, with French technology, but also the Independent-100 minicomputer, with an American license, which ended up being desired in the 70s by East Germany, China, Czechoslovakia, Iraq or Syria.
Vasile Baltac is a computer engineer, university professor, PhD, pioneer of computer science in Romania. He graduated from the Polytechnic University of Timișoara in 1962, as head of promotion, with a diploma of merit. He became a pioneer of electronic computers in 1961, when he was a student in his fourth year, being co-opted in the team that built the first Romanian electronic computer MECIPT-1, in the endowment of higher education.
In 1972, he became a doctor-engineer in the specialty of electronic computers. In 1966-1967, he benefited from research stages through the British Council, at the Computer Laboratory of the University of Cambridge, under the guidance of Professor Sir M. V. Wilkes, Fellow of the Royal Society of Sciences, a well-known pioneer of computers worldwide.
With the beginning of the industrial stage of computers in Romania, in 1968 he was appointed scientific director and then general director of the Institute for Computing Technology in Bucharest (ITC). He coordinated the development of the Independent I – 100 minicomputer family and created the first software engineering school in Romania.
He has more than 15 books and 100 articles published or communicated in the fields of: electronic computers, operating systems and programming; programming engineering; computers and society, information society, eGovernment, management, industrial restructuring.
Since 1994, he has become a co-founder and private sector shareholder of SoftNet, a group of companies specializing in software research, production and services, Internet and high-tech consulting.
The start of the development of the computer industry in Romania is given by the technological dispute between the United States and France led in the 60s by General Charles de Gaulle. The French president wanted his country to have an ambitious information technology program to support French nuclear ambitions.
However, the US administration at the time refused to grant export licenses for IBM computers to help strengthen the French nuclear industry. Then, President Charles de Gaulle launched the “Plan Calcule” operation in September 1966, in response to the American refusal. Paris decided to create, through its own scientific powers, a computer and computing technology that would allow it to rival that of Washington.
The vision of a France returning to its cultural and scientific greatness through research and innovation will not last long. The domestic computer industry created autonomously by the French will collapse, and the French Government will have to buy licenses from American computer manufacturers. What General Charles de Gaulle was able to do then was to create French computers inspired by American ones.The story of the Romanian computers Felix, with a French licenseIn this context, Ceaușescu’s Romania, playing the card of independence, but also that of opening an industrial and commercial cooperation with Paris, managed to persuade Charles de Gaulle to offer the French computer license as a gift to Romanian specialists in information technology IRIS-50, copied from the American one Sigma 7, created at the time by Scientific Data System (later Xerox Data System).
Starting from the license offered by the French, the Romanian specialists will develop the Felix family of Romanian computers. The name given by the communist authorities was related to the protochronist propaganda of the time and referred to the name of the ancient Roman province Dacia Felix (the nationalist Ceausist ideology had projected the Socialist Republic of Romania as a direct descendant of “Burebista’s first independent centralized Dacian state”).
University professor Dr. Vasile Baltac was only 29 years old when he was appointed by the regime authorities to coordinate the Institute for Computing Technology in Bucharest. This institution, which would become the main laboratory of Romania’s informatization in the 70s and 80s, had combined in a single institution the efforts of research teams in the field of informatics from university centers in Bucharest, Timișoara, Cluj and Iași.
Vasile Baltac remembers that the ingenuity of the Romanians determined the maximum exploitation of the license from the French:
“I argued that there is a basic rule: a license is really useful for Romania, if and only if it is accompanied by its own research both before and after its purchase. It was the period 1965-1975, when licenses were purchased in Romania on a conveyor belt. Many fields, including that of automobile manufacturing, did not respect this rule and the consequences showed themselves over time. The products became obsolete and new licenses were needed, which in the period of sad memory, of scarcity in the 80s, they could no longer be purchased”.
Aware that huge technological leaps in the IT field were made practically every two years, the Romanian researchers led by Vasile Baltac hastened the creation of the first platform Felix C-256. It was also then that the foundations were laid, under his coordination, of a core of the future software industry in Romania. Thus, in Timișoara, electronic memories began to be manufactured on an industrial scale.“Charles de Gaulle offered Romania a very advanced technology”Vasile Baltac remembers the scientific efforts made by Romanian engineers and computer scientists from that era and Romania’s chance to benefit from French scientific aid in the 60s.
“There is a Romanian saying: for a crow stork, God makes a nest. Our God at that time, for the field of informatics and computers, was the French president Charles de Gaulle. He was totally dissatisfied with the fact that, because of his position of independence from the United States, the Americans refused him the purchase of a supercomputer to serve the French atomic program. This supercomputer was called at that time Data Control 6600, created by a famous American company. She created at that time the most powerful supercomputer in the world.
At that time, this entire computer industry was concentrated in the United States. De Gaulle then decided to launch a plan to develop the IT field in France. It was called “Plan Calcul” and was actually a French government plan launched in 1966, at the suggestion of a group of high-ranking French officials and industrialists, with the aim of ensuring France’s independence in the field of large computers. They bought a computer license from an American firm and began manufacturing a series of computers called IRIS. They were developed and far ahead of other computers in various European countries. We are talking about the period 1966-1968.
“In 1968, French President Charles de Gaulle paid a state visit to Romania, a famous visit, during which, hearing that the Romanians wanted to develop their own computer industry, he allegedly said to the delegation accompanying him: “Donnez aux Roumains tout ce dont ils ont besoin!” (“Give the Romanians everything they need!”). This meant that he had decided not to take into account the American embargo and that of the other Western countries in NATO.”
It offered us a highly developed technology which, at the time, meant integrated circuits (we also built an integrated circuit factory in Băneasa – IPRS based on it), printed circuits at the Computer Factory and, of course, the technology and architecture of the French IRIS computers. The license was for the IRIS-50 computer.
“In Romania, this computer was renamed Felix C-256, due to the fact that it had a staggering 256 kilobits of memory. This memory seems slightly funny today, but this was the level of technology at the time“, explained Professor Baltac.
The first Romanian computers had components that occupied entire roomsUntil the Felix family of computers, inspired by the French IRIS computer, independent Romanian research in the field of informatics had led to the creation of prehistoric computers, whose components occupied entire rooms or were the size of a few classical cabinets. In them there were dozens or thousands of lamp modules.
One of these computers based on such modules was called MECIPT-1 and was put into operation in 1961. It can be considered a first generation computer. Its specificity consisted in the electronic tubes used in its creation. It was the first electronic computer built in a university in Romania and the second in the country, after the one named CIFA-1, with which the Institute of Atomic Physics from Măgurele was endowed.
MECIPT-1 was used both in the didactic process and for the calculations necessary for the construction of some energy objectives such as the dam on the Vidraru river.
To give us an idea of what such a computer looked like from the “stone age” of informatics, it must be said that MECIPT-1 had 2,000 electronic tubes (triodes), over 20,000 capacitors and resistors, over 30 total kilometers of wires and over 100,000 letcon solders (a hammer-shaped tool for heating metal parts, in order to solder them with tin). The power consumed by MECIPT-1 was about ten kilowatts.“With the technology of the 60s, a smartphone would have needed modules with tubes that would have occupied a building the size of the People’s House”Professor Vasile Baltac remembers the second computer created in Romania, a module with lamps dating back to the creation of the MECIPT-1 computer.
“The lamp module in the MECIPT-1 computer was created in the period 1960-1961, at the Polytechnic Institute of Timișoara, the second computer created in Romania. This computer had about 2,000 such modules with electronic tubes. This module can show us, compared to today’s computers, the fantastic evolution of technology in this field during a single human generation. I was 21 years old at that time and I participated in the construction of the MECIPT-1 tube computer, which occupied a room.
The evolution was fantastically fast: from electronic tubes to transistors, which made a computer no longer occupy an entire room, but only a few cabinets. After that it was moved to integrated circuits, which miniaturized computers extremely much, in parallel with the increase in computing speed.
“If I were to compare a modern iPhone or a modern smartphone with these tubes, I could say that such phones – if they had been made with the electronic tube technology of that time – would have needed 14 billion such modules with tubes, which would have occupied the space of a building the size of our House of the People. The operating time would be zero for such electronic tubes, because at that time they burned out very frequently”, says Vasile Baltac.
The first Romanian minicomputer, Independent-100, manufactured with an American licenseThe world age of miniaturization in the field of electronics and computers has meant an enormous leap in scientific and world progress. The world has evolved towards minicomputers.
Vasile Baltac says that he had the initiative – eventually accepted by the communist authorities – to launch a version of a Romanian minicomputer called Independent-100.
The university professor recalls with amusement the origin of the name “minicomputer”. He says that, in that era, the American technical name Small Computer was not popularized, but that of minicomputer or minicomputer, because it was an analogy with the fashion of women in the 60s and 70s to wear short skirts (mini skirts), called in English “mini-skirt” and in French “mini-skirt”.
In communist Romania, the authorities decided that such a Romanian minicomputer would be compatible with a company from the family of computer manufacturers that had gained notoriety worldwide (IBM, Control Data, Honeywell, Siemens or DEC). The manufacturer DEC was preferred the PDP calculator, the one that served as a model for the domestic minicomputer.
It was completed in record time in 1977 and benefited from all the political propaganda restarts since then, because its launch coincided with the Centenary of Romania’s State Independence. That is why it was named Independent-100, being approved nationally and internationally.
The Independent-100 was produced in impressive quantities and exported to the German Democratic Republic, Czechoslovakia, China, Iraq and Syria.
“His software, which I had made entirely within the Institute for Computing Technology in Bucharest, had gained more and more importance. The idea was to establish compatibility with other computers worldwide, compatibility that we failed to have through the French computer. The IRIS-50 was not compatible with IBM systems. The IRIS programs could not be run on the computers made by IBM and not vice versa.
Then we decided to go for world famous computer compatibility and we chose computer compatibility PDP-1, created by the American company Digital Equipment Corporation. At that time, the issue of obtaining licenses was not like today. The American company that created this PDP-1 computer would have said, at one point, even that for 1% sales in Eastern Europe, they are not going to have unnecessary problems with licenses.
“For us it meant an amazing progress. The Independent-100 computer was manufactured in hundreds of copies. It equipped hundreds of enterprises in Romania and abroad. It was successfully sold in East Germany, which was probably the most technologically advanced country in the socialist camp of that time, and yet they wanted to buy the Romanian computer. The Independent-100 was also exported to Czechoslovakia, Poland, China, but also to the East Close. It was a great success.”
Another research team from Romania, mainly from the Politehnica in Bucharest, with the support of the Computer Factory, carried out in parallel the well-known Coral calculator.
Meanwhile, technology was advancing and in 1985, IBM released the computer called the personal computer. It produced the first big shock in the world evolution of computers”, said professor Vasile Baltac.
The Romanian researchers involved in the expansion of the computerization process of the Romanian society belonged, in the opinion of Professor Vasile Baltac, to an extremely rigorously selected elite. The graduates who had the best results in the profile faculties – mathematics, electronics, automation – were assigned to the Institute for Computing Technology in Bucharest.
Professor Vasile Baltac believes that an advantage for the development of this leading industrial branch was the fact that the Ceaușescu family did not get involved in the field of computers, because they did not understand it.
“We have foreseen the future. We predicted that miniaturization would be reached and all the time we built equipment and software that was needed.
One of my co-workers at ITC definitely had the ambition to immigrate to the United States. He finally managed to settle there with the whole family around 1984-1985. After 1990, he came to me and told me that he had managed to get a job one day. He had had three job interviews at three companies and they all wanted to hire him. Moreover, they also gave him a team to work with.
He told me, when he came to the country after the fall of the communist regime, something that I liked very much: “I was not inferior to my colleagues in the United States.” That’s how it was. I had reached the highest levels of research in the field of computers, and in the field of manufacturing, at a world-class level, because I had benefited from that French technology of the 70s. We mastered it very well, but we also developed it”, Vasile Baltac also said.