Calling computers names in Swedish

Fleming replies: I thank Johan Carlsson for his comments . My statement about “an era in which there was no Swedish word for digital computer” was based on a 1946 report by Stig Ekelöf, a technician at Chalmers Institute of Technology. ¹ I could have said there was no widely used term in any language for the new machines.

According to the digital archives of Sweden’s two leading newspapers, Dagens Nyheter and Svenska Dagbladet, the term elektronhjärna appeared as early as 1946. Matematikmaskin became established in 1947. Siffermaskin was mentioned in 1907 and reappeared in 1948. Datamaskin was in frequent use by 1956.

By the early 1950s, BESK (Binary Electronic Sequence Calculator) was the best machine of its kind in the world. Sweden used it to issue the world’s first real-time operational numerical forecast on 23–24 March 1953; it beat the actual weather events by some 90 minutes. In 1955 Joanne Malkus and Georg Witt used BESK to generate the first digital cloud models.

When Carl-Gustaf Rossby entered meteorological service in 1922, the Swedish Meteorological and Hydrological Institute was called Statens Meteorologisk-Hydrografiska Anstalt. The name change occurred in 1945. The confusion of the abbreviations SMHA and SMHI on page 53 of my article is an editorial glitch.