Jacek Karpiński

Jacek Rafal Karpinski (April 9, 1927 - February 21, 2010) was a Polish computer scientist and engineer born in Turin, Italy, who served in the Polish Home Army's Batalion Zoska during World War Two, was wounded in the Warsaw Uprising, and received the Cross of Valour three times. In Poland he built the AAH vacuum tube computer for calculating Fourier integrals in 1957, the AKAT-1 transistor based differential equation analyzer in 1959, an early machine learning device called the Polish Perceptron in 1964, the KAR-65 computer performing 100,000 operations per second in 1968, and the K-202 minicomputer in 1973, a machine with memory segmentation and paging that performed close to one million operations per second but was never mass produced, with only about 30 units built. He emigrated to Switzerland in 1981, returned to Poland in 1990, and died in Wroclaw in 2010.