VIENNA: Heinz Zemanek, who briefly put Austria in the vanguard of European computing in the 1950s with his “May Breeze” computer, has died in Vienna at the age of 94, his old university said.

Zemanek designed and built the “May Breeze”, the first computer on mainland Europe to run purely on transistors instead of vacuum tubes, with the help of a group of students he enlisted at the Vienna University of Technology (TUV).

Transistor computers generated less heat than vacuum-tube computers and were a fraction of the size — although the “May Breeze” — or “Mailuefterl” in German — was still around 4 metres wide, 2.5 metres tall and half a metre deep.

Zemanek got the 3,000 transistors needed as a donation from Philips, but they were slow transistors intended for hearing aids. The “May Breeze” name was a nod to the much faster US computers named after types of storm that were being built.

Published in Dawn, July 18th, 2014