László Kozma

László Kozma ( born November 28, 1902 in Miskolc, † November 9, 1983 in Budapest) was a Hungarian computer pioneer.

Life

Kozma could not study electrical engineering in Budapest and worked as an electrician at first due to a numerus clausus. From 1925 he studied at the Masaryk University with the degree 1930. He worked for ATT in Antwerp telephone circuits and returned in 1942 to Hungary. In 1944, he came into the Mauthausen concentration camp. Back in Hungary in 1945, he worked as an engineer for an electrical company, but was arrested in 1949 by the Communist government, was sentenced to 15 years and in 1954 released and rehabilitated. 1955 to 1972 he was a professor at the Technical University in Budapest.

From the study of the automation of telephone connections his interest in computers was born. 1955 to 1957 he developed the first digital computer in Hungary, the CEST -1. The BST - 1 was a relay computer, the Kozma had designed during the captivity. He served at the University of the teaching of the relay switching technology and was completed in 1958. He had 2000 relays and was based on the decimal system. Kozma constructed the input and output units ( a teletype as output and perforated film strip as input). At the Hungarian Academy of Sciences was built ( under Sandor Varga and Rezsö Tarjan ) from 1957, the first tube computer Hungary, based on the Soviet M -3 ( Isaac Semenovich Bruk ), but with slight modifications (such as at the same time in Armenia, China and Estonia). He was finished in 1959.

In 1996 he received the Computer Pioneer Award. He was from 1961 and from 1976 corresponding full member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences.