Ivan Plander

Developer of the analog computer around 1958, Plander is a Slovak computer scientist who received his Ph.D. at the Technical University in Prague and his Habilitation (Dr.Sc.) in Computer Science at the Slovak Technical University in Bratislava, Slovakia. In 1966, he joined the Institute for Technical Cybernetics as Professor.

In 1969, he developed the 16-bit processor RPP-16, which was produced from 1974. It was designed as a real-time control system and was based on integrated circuits by Texas Instruments. He and colleagues received the Czechoslovak State Award for 1976 for technology. The system was widely used—for example, in the control of nuclear power plants and coal mines—under CSSR official policy, though others developed calculators within the framework of COMECON that were mostly IBM or DEC clones.

In 1978 he co-founded the Institute of Cybernetics of the Slovak Academy of Sciences and has served as its Director until 1989. Cybernetics was a then popular description of computer science. In the 1990s, Plander established the University of Trenčín, a center of the central Váh river valley in Western Slovakia close to the border with the Czech Republic, and served as its first Rector.

Later he turned to parallel computer architectures for image and signal processing, as well as database technology. In 1996, he received the Computer Pioneer Award, and in 1998, he received the Order of the Ľudovít Štúr. He wrote three books and more than 100 scientific papers.