Datasaab

~ the last words ~

Datasaab was finished three years before i was born, in a country i had no reason to think about, in an industry that by the time i studied it had four names left in it worldwide. There is no distance to be honest about here beyond the obvious one. This is a grave for a thing i can only read about.

It begins in December 1954, when Saab bought a license to build its own copy of BESK. BESK was the Swedish state's own vacuum tube computer, and the license mattered because the machine Saab actually needed was one that could do the arithmetic behind an airframe. The clone was finished in 1957 and named SARA, and it was put to work on the calculations for the Viggen fighter.

The turn from an aircraft company's arithmetic department into a computer manufacturer happened around 1960 with the D2, a fully transistorized prototype led by Viggo Wentzel that sat on a table rather than filling a room. Two years later the D21 was on sale to anyone, and about thirty of them were built and shipped abroad. For a country of seven million with no computer industry of its own five years earlier, that is a real number.

The Swedish government then did the thing that decides whether a national computer industry exists at all. It bought the domestic machines for the tax rolls instead of IBM's. Datasaab was not competing on price against the biggest company on earth, it was being kept alive on purpose by the state that had helped design its ancestor.

~ the record ~

~ the early days ~

The civilian line ran through the D22, the D23 and the smaller D5 and D15 machines, and the interesting business turned out to be terminals rather than mainframes. Datasaab's D5 systems went into the Nordic banks and became the first and largest bank terminal network in the region, parts of which stayed in service into the late 1980s. If you took cash out of a machine in Scandinavia in that decade you were probably touching this company's work without knowing the name.

The military side never stopped. The CK37, finished in 1971, was the navigation computer carried inside the Viggen, and it is one of the earliest airborne computers of its kind anywhere. Twenty years separate the borrowed BESK design from a machine small enough to fly. That is the whole arc of the company in one comparison.

~ the fall ~

The restructuring started before the trouble did. In 1975 the large and medium systems went into Saab-Univac, a joint venture with Sperry, because building general purpose mainframes against IBM was not a fight a Swedish aircraft company could keep funding. In 1978 what remained merged with Stansaab to form Datasaab AB, jointly owned by Saab-Scania and the Swedish state.

Then there is the smuggling. Datasaab had won a contract to build air traffic control systems for the Soviet Union, signed in September 1975, and the systems needed American components that American export rules would not release to Moscow. Company staff moved them anyway. The operation was uncovered in October 1980, and the fine landed in April 1984 on Ericsson, which by then owned the company and had inherited a criminal case along with the engineering.

~ what it became ~

Ericsson took control in 1980 and completed the purchase in 1981, folding Datasaab together with two of its own divisions into Ericsson Information Systems. The reasoning was that telecommunications would grow slower than office automation, which was one of the more expensive wrong guesses of the era. Ericsson spent the first half of the 1980s trying to sell workstations and office systems into the American market and then retreated back to the network business that eventually made it enormous.

So the name stopped being a company and became a division, and then it stopped being that as well. What survives is a D2 and a D22 in a museum collection in Linköping, plus a long-running Swedish argument about whether the country gave its computer industry away or simply ran out of the money to keep it. Both readings fit the dates.

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