Pingdom being Swedish in origin, we had to include this Swedish computer from 1953. BESK stands for Binär Elektronisk SekvensKalkylator, which is Swedish for Binary Electronic Sequence Calculator. The main memory was 512 40-bit words, the equivalent of 2,560 byte. An addition could be performed in 56 microseconds, and a multiplication in 350 microseconds. For a short time, it was the world’s fastest computer. Small aside, “besk” means “bitter” (as in taste) in Swedish, but besk is also an alcoholic beverage from the south of Sweden. The name was a pun sneaked in by the computer’s creator, who had previously had the computer name COGNAC rejected by officials.