SMIL (, "The Number Machine in Lund") was a

first-generation First generation, Generation I, or variants of this, may refer to: History * 1G, the first generation of wireless telephone technology * First generation of video game consoles, 1972–1983 * First generation computer, a vacuum-tube computer M ...

computer A computer is a machine that can be Computer programming, programmed to automatically Execution (computing), carry out sequences of arithmetic or logical operations (''computation''). Modern digital electronic computers can perform generic set ...

built at

Lund University Lund University () is a Public university, public research university in Sweden and one of Northern Europe's oldest universities. The university is located in the city of Lund in the Swedish province of Scania. The university was officially foun ...

Lund Lund (, ;"Lund"
(US) and ) is a city in the provinces of Sweden, province of Scania, southern Swed ...

Sweden Sweden, formally the Kingdom of Sweden, is a Nordic countries, Nordic country located on the Scandinavian Peninsula in Northern Europe. It borders Norway to the west and north, and Finland to the east. At , Sweden is the largest Nordic count ...

. SMIL was based on the IAS architecture developed by

John von Neumann John von Neumann ( ; ; December 28, 1903 – February 8, 1957) was a Hungarian and American mathematician, physicist, computer scientist and engineer. Von Neumann had perhaps the widest coverage of any mathematician of his time, in ...

. Carl-Erik Fröberg belonged to the group of five young Swedish scientists 1947–48 that IVA sent to the U.S. to gather information about the early computer development, and then came to strongly influence the development in Sweden. Fröberg visited with Erik Stemme the

Institute for Advanced Study The Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) is an independent center for theoretical research and intellectual inquiry located in Princeton, New Jersey. It has served as the academic home of internationally preeminent scholars, including Albert Ein ...

, and John von Neumann's research group. Back in Lund, he played a leading role in the creation of SMIL, which was the first computer developed in Lund and among the first in Sweden. SMIL was introduced in 1956 and then was in operation until 1970. In February 1962 SMIL was fitted with a compiler for

ALGOL 60 ALGOL 60 (short for ''Algorithmic Language 1960'') is a member of the ALGOL family of computer programming languages. It followed on from ALGOL 58 which had introduced code blocks and the begin and end pairs for delimiting them, representing a ...

. The compiler was constructed by Torgil Ekman and Leif Robertson. Carl-Erik Fröberg was also behind the early emergence of

numerical analysis Numerical analysis is the study of algorithms that use numerical approximation (as opposed to symbolic computation, symbolic manipulations) for the problems of mathematical analysis (as distinguished from discrete mathematics). It is the study of ...

as a separate university subject. In this context, he wrote himself and collaborated with others on several textbooks in computer education, for example, ''Textbook on Numerical Analysis'' (1962) and ''Textbook of Algol'' (1964). These books were widely distributed and translated into several languages. Parts of SMIL are exhibited at

Malmö Malmö is the List of urban areas in Sweden by population, third-largest city in Sweden, after Stockholm and Gothenburg, and the List of urban areas in the Nordic countries, sixth-largest city in Nordic countries, the Nordic region. Located on ...

Technical Museum. On January 4, 2006, an

emulator In computing, an emulator is Computer hardware, hardware or software that enables one computer system (called the ''host'') to behave like another computer system (called the ''guest''). An emulator typically enables the host system to run sof ...

of SMIL named SMILemu was released with a Java and version.

References

IAS architecture computers Lund University {{compu-hardware-stub

See also

References