AntonÃn Svoboda
Antonin Svoboda (* 1907 in Prague; † 18 May 1980, Portland, Oregon) was a Czech computer pioneer.
Svoboda graduated from the Technical University in Prague in 1931 and was first engaged in X-ray spectroscopy. He was an assistant at the Faculty of Electrical Engineering and in 1935 received his doctorate. In 1936 he worked for the Czechoslovak Ministry of Defense, among others, target devices for flak. After the German occupation he went through France and Lisbon in 1941 to New York. He worked at the Radiation Laboratory of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and continued his development of flak for Americans continues (Mark 56 air defense system for the U.S. Navy ). After he had worked before his flight on designs for a computer, he came to the U.S. in touch with developments by John von Neumann, Vannevar Bush and others. On returning to Prague in 1946, he first went back to the University and in 1950 at the invitation of Eduard Cech at the Central Institute of Mathematics of the Academy of Sciences and founded his own Institute of Mathematical Machines. There, the first Czechoslovakian computer, the SAPO created. He was also an early attempt to develop fault-tolerant computers, and had three parallel working arithmetic logic units. It was developed from 1950 to 1956 and was in operation until 1960 when the computer was burnt down due to a short circuit. The SAPO had around 400 tubes and 7,000 relays and a magnetic drum memory.
Since he (EPOS ) saw hampered by official bodies in the work to follow-up computers, he left Czechoslovakia in 1964. He became a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, where he retired in 1977.
In 1996 he received the computer with other Pioneer Award.