Polish PC protoplast, IT visionary Jacek Karpinski born 90 years ago
April 9 marks the 90th birth anniversary of Polish computer genius Jacek Karpinski, said to have been able to make Poland an IT power if the communist regime had not obstructed his career. His K-202 minicomputer preceded future PCs in performance by over a decade.
By some called a "Polish Bill Gates" - Jacek Karpinski - was born on April 9 1927 in Turin, Italy into a family of Polish intellectuals and alpinists. His father, Adam "Akar" Karpinski, was a prominent aeronautic constructor who co-designed the SL-1 Akar, the first entirely Polish-built glider, and an inventor credited with developing innovative mountaineering gear. His mother, Wanda Czarnocka-Karpinska, was a respected physician and later head of the University of Physical Education in Warsaw. Both were pioneers of winter mountaineering in the south-Polish Tatra Mountains, Karpinski's father was also on a Polish expedition into the Andes which was the first to climb the Mercedario peak (6720 m.).
Karpinski himself was due to be born in a winter hut near Mont Blanc, but extreme weather forced his parents to retreat to Turin, where he was born as their first child. Karpinski's father died in September 1939 during a Himalayan expedition.
After the outbreak of World War Two Karpinski, then 14, pretended to be 17 to join the Gray Ranks, a Polish underground paramilitary boy scouts organization, where he served in assault groups. In 1943 he was severely injured when a homemade bomb he was building for an underground sabotage operation exploded in the basement of his house. He lost his sight and faced the threat of hand amputation. He regained his sight fully thanks to his mother’s efforts and the help of her fellow physicians, and the hand was saved but he never regained total control over it. After recovering Karpiński resumed his resistance activities in the Home Army (AK).
With his mother and brother, both also active in the anti-German resistance, he established a secret outpost in their family home, used as a base for Home Army units and a hideout for its soldiers. Subsequently Karpinski joined the Home Army’s famous Zoska battalion (see the Note 1 - PAP).
Karpinski also participated in the 1944 Warsaw Uprising (see NOTE 2 - PAP). On the first day of the insurgency he found himself trapped weaponless with around 30 other soldiers in a hospital building on Koszykowa street after their weapon supply had been mistakenly directed elsewhere. While evacuating, Karpinski’s group came under heavy fire which killed most of his companions. Karpiński himself was shot in the backbone but survived. Found next day by the hospital’s nursing staff, he received treatment but remained paralysed. Released from hospital after the Uprising’s collapse, he rejoined his family but remained unable to stand or walk. The family moved through Cracow and Zakopane to a small village in the Tatra Mountains, where they remained through the rest of the war. During the course of the war Karpiński was thrice awarded the Cross of Valour.
After the war Karpinski attended grammar school in Radomsko, where he learnt how to walk again during mountain hikes with his brother. After completing the entire school curriculum in a single year, he moved to Lodz to study electro-mechanics. Two years later he transferred to the Warsaw University of Technology, from which he graduated in 1951. In his first years of work he experienced some vexations from communist security services due to his past in the Home Army. Unlike many former Home Army fighters he was spared imprisonment but forced to change his workplace several times, eventually directed by a work warrant to the T-12 factory of electrical components in Warsaw Zeran suburb. At the time Karpinski was planning to flee Poland and was even working on a mini-submarine to take him to the Danish island of Bornholm.
However, after the first signs of the Polish thaw, he decided to stay. In 1955 he was offered a job at the Polish Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Basic Problems, which he accepted. There he worked under Leszek Filipkowski on the design of a prototype ultrasonograph.
The breakthrough in Karpinski’s career came with the 1959 construction of the AKAT-1, the world's first transistor-based differential equations analyser. The innovative device found acknowledgement by historians of computer science - some claiming it preceded any other similar construction.
Karpinski's second major development was the K-202 computer, with a then record virtual memory of 8 MB and unprecedented as well as long-unparalleled performance of 100 million operations per second (PCs introduced more than a decade after Polish K-202 were still not able to keep pace with Karpinski's machine -PAP).
In addition, the K-202 is considered the first mini-computer to use segmentation memory based on paging technology. The Polish invention was also known for its resilience to damage and wear, easily surviving hazards like spilt coffee, shocks, etc. This was also a cause of concern for the Soviets, who feared the Polish engineer's inventiveness would overshadow their own achievements in computer technology.
Both machines AKAT-1 and K-202 are on display at the Museum of Technology in Warsaw.
Highly underestimated, plagued by jealousy of superiors and workmates, sentenced to "civic death" as editor in chief of IT mag "CRN" Adrian Markowski termed his life, and shadowed by commendable, patriotic past as much as socially stalled by his lack of interest in politics and the Communist Party, in 1980 Karpinski decides to move to Masuria region to set up a pig and chicken farm. Hence the title of his biography - "Genius and the pigs" (2014). In 1980s popular at that time cinema chronicles played back before movie screenings in Poland would feature a story of a brilliant computer constructor that became a pig farmer.
Later Jacek Karpinski emigrates to Switzerland where he vainly attempts to continue work on his K-202.
Karpinski is also credited with creation of only world-second self-taught machine called Perceptron and a 'Pen Reader' - a hand-held text-scanner he invented while in Switzerland.
Jacek Karpinski died much forgotten on 2 February 2010 in Wroclaw, southwest Poland, where he had lived since 1996. (PAP)
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NOTE 1: Formed in late August 1943, the Zoska battalion was part of the Polish Home Army (AK) resistance movement during World War Two. Mainly formed by members of the Szare Szeregi (Gray Ranks) paramilitary scouting organisation, it played an instrumental role in the Warsaw Uprising and won fame for liberating prisoners of the Warsaw concentration camp Gesiowka in August 1944. Zoska scouts freed 383 prisoners (including 348 Jews) from the Gesiowka camp, most joined the battalion and fought in its ranks during the Warsaw Uprising.
Zoska was named after the nom-de-guerre of Polish scoutmaster and AK resistance fighter Tadeusz Zawadzki, who was killed in a 1943 attack on a German border police checkpoint near Wyszkow, central Poland. The Zoska unit was formed soon after Zawadzki's death, adopting his codename.
Ryszard Bialous (April 4 1914 in Warsaw - March 24 1992 in Neuquen, Argentina) was a Polish scoutmaster and a captain in the Gray Ranks organisation. He commanded the Zoska battalion before and during the Warsaw Uprising. Before the unit adopted the name Zoska it took part in the famous March 1943 Operation Arsenal, the first major operation by the Gray Ranks, under Bialous's and Zawadzki's leadership. Its name deriving from the Warsaw Arsenal in front of which it took place, the operation aimed to free scoutmaster and resistance fighter Jan Bytnar "Rudy" (ginger), who was arrested with his father by the Gestapo. The operation was carried out by 28 scouts, the attack group was led by Zawadzki.
Founded in 1942, the Home Army (AK) was the largest underground resistance force in German-occupied Europe, with up to half a million soldiers fighting in its ranks. In his book 'God's Playground. A History of Poland', historian Norman Davies said that "the Home Army could fairly claim to be the largest of European resistance [organisations]".
Along with various combat activities, the AK was also widely involved in rescuing Jews, among others through the famous 1942-founded Council to Aid Jews (Rada Pomocy Zydom) codenamed 'Zegota' - the only organisation in Europe and the world established to defend and provide help to Jews in ghettos and outside.
After the war many Home Army soldiers refused to lay down their arms and continued fighting against Poland's Soviet-imposed communist regime, winning the name "Enduring Soldiers". They are also sometimes called the "Cursed Soldiers" for being treated as outlaws and forced into oblivion by the communist state.
NOTE 2: The Warsaw Uprising broke out on August 1, 1944 as the biggest resistance operation in Nazi-occupied Europe. Initially intended to last several days, it continued for over two months before being suppressed by the Germans. The uprising claimed the lives of 18,000 insurgents and around 180,000 civilians.
After the insurgents surrendered and the remaining 500,000 residents were expelled, the Germans methodically burned down and blew up Warsaw house by house. By January 1945, 85 percent of the buildings had been destroyed. (PAP)
