Computer: Siemens 2002

The Siemens System 2002, introduced in 1957, was the world’s first mass-produced fully transistorized computer and the first unit was delivered in 1959 to the Technical University of Aachen. Developed to expand electronic data processing in Europe, the 2002 was designed as a medium-scale decimal machine for scientific, administrative, and industrial applications. Early input and output relied on Siemens teletype machines, later supplemented with punched tape and cards, fast printers, and magnetic tape. Hybrid technology introduced in 1962 increased its speed from about 1,300 to 160,000 instructions per second, and its advanced design kept it in production for nearly a decade. At a time when the market in data processing was almost entirely controlled by IBM, the 2002 established Siemens as the first European producer of a mass-market transistorized computer.

The system’s significance extended into art history. In the 1960s, German pioneers Georg Nees and Frieder Nake used the Siemens 2002 together with the Zuse Graphomat plotter to generate some of the earliest computer-produced graphics. At the first public exhibition of computer art in Stuttgart in 1965, Nees presented works created on the device, with programs and images published in Max Bense’s rot 19 under the title computer-grafik. Nees’s Schotter of 1968, created in ALGOL on the Siemens System 2002 and plotted on a Z64, became an emblem of generative art’s exploration of order and disorder. He and architect Ludwig Rase also relied on the machine for structural drawings of the Siemens Pavilion at the 1970 Hannover Fair. These works, later exhibited internationally and published in his 1969 book Generative Computergraphik, anchor the 2002 as a milestone of European computing and as one of the first computers directly tied to the development of computer art.