BESK

It was closely modeled on the IAS machine for which the design team had retrieved drawings during a scholarship to Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) and Massachusetts Institute of Technology, U.S. During the development of the BESK magnetic drum memory, Olle Karlqvist discovered a magnetic phenomenon, which has been called the Karlqvist gap.

BESK was inaugurated on 1 April 1954 and handled weather data for Carl-Gustaf Rossby and the Swedish Meteorological and Hydrological Institute, statistics for the telecommunications service provider Televerket, wing profiles for the attack aircraft Saab Lansen, and road profiles for the road authority Vägverket.

BESK was also used for calculations for the Swedish nuclear energy industry, for example Monte Carlo simulations of neutron spectrum (by Per-Erik Persson et al.), and for the Swedish nuclear weapon program[citation needed], but most of those calculations were done by SMIL.

In the spring of 1956, eighteen of the BESK developers were hired by office equipment manufacturer Facit and housed in an office at Karlavägen 62 in Stockholm, where they started to build copies of BESK called Facit EDB (models 1, 2, and 3), led by Carl-Ivar Bergman.

In 1960 BESK was used to create an animation of a car driving down a planned highway from the driver's perspective.

Bäsk is also the name of a traditional bitters made from distilled alcohol seasoned with the herb Artemisia absinthium L. local to the province of Skåne, in which Lund is located.

Reportedly this was an intentional and unnoticed pun after officials denied usage of the name CONIAC (Conny [Palm] Integrator And Calculator, compare Cognac and ENIAC) for the predecessor BARK.