Datasaab and Swedish computer art (D2, D21, D22)

Datasaab was the computer branch of the Swedish aircraft maker Saab in Linköping. It built the transistorised D2 in 1960 and its first mainframe, the D21, in 1962; 32 D21s were sold to companies and government agencies.¹ In the published sources, Swedish artists used Datasaab machines in the 1960s only through one engineer, Göran Sundqvist, and one customer's computers in Stockholm. This note covers what is documented.

The D2: a demonstration

At SAAB around 1960–61, Sundqvist was asked to impress visiting air force officers. On the D2, a prototype for an aircraft computer, he drew the path of a cannonball on an oscilloscope, with dials for the gun, and went on for years making pictures with it that he photographed off the screen.² More in Computer Art in Sweden.

SEVED: a power company's D21

In spring 1962 a D21 was delivered to the power company Skandinaviska Elverk in Stockholm, and Sundqvist came with it as its technician: "I was part of the purchase." It was called SEVED, for Skandinaviska Elverks Elektroniska Datamaskin. Its real job, Morthenson says, was to regulate the gates of hydroelectric dams by the demand for power.^2, 3

The D21 could make sound. A loudspeaker was connected to a register, so that switching it 440 times a second gave the note A. Sundqvist programmed the musical dice game attributed to Mozart, with a random generator in place of the dice.² Composers from the music society Fylkingen came to him:

• Jan W. Morthenson, Neutron Star (1967): short pulses from a random generator, written in assembler on the D21.^2, 3 See Jan W. Morthenson.
• Morthenson, Supersonics (1969) for West German television: figures that Morthenson drew, built up on a Tektronix 611 storage oscilloscope driven by the D21, filmed from an outside-broadcast bus parked outside the office.²
• Lars-Gunnar Bodin, the 1968 Lund picture: cells with random numbers of elements, printed on the line printer and painted by hand. Sundqvist remembers that the printed text said it was made possible "through the courtesy of Datasaab".² See Lars-Gunnar Bodin.

The D22 and the pictures of 1970

From 1969 the company, now Kraftdata, had a D22. Between 7 and 8 in the morning, during maintenance, Sundqvist could use the processor with a Tektronix 611, and photographed what he drew.² In August 1970 Computers and Automation printed three of the pictures, Fossil II, Spirals and Fire Bird, "taken from a Tektronix 611 display terminal connected to a SAAB D22 computer", made "from a simple program to produce a circle".⁴ It ended in 1972, when terminals came in and the computer had to run around the clock.²

What is not documented

Anna Orrghen's survey of where Swedish artists met computers names SAAB among eight places.⁵ We found no artist who worked with Datasaab directly, and no work made on its computers after 1972. Sundqvist's later plotter work for Bodin was on a Swedish microcomputer from Luxor, an ABC 80, with an XY plotter; he was unsure whether that was before 1980.² The other route to a computer, through IBM, is in The IBM 1130 and Swedish computer art.