Before you go complaining about your job, take a moment to remember the MESM project, which just marked the 60th anniversary of its formal recognition by the Soviet Academy of Sciences. The project, headed by Institute of Electrical Engineering director Sergey Lebedev, was born in a laboratory built from scratch amongst the post-World War II ruins of Ukrainian capital city, Kyiv, by a team of 20 people, many of whom took up residence above the lab. Work on MESM — that’s from the Russian for Small Electronic Calculating Machine — began toward the end of 1948. By November 1950, the computer was running its first program. The following year, it was up and running full-time. via engadget

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