There's also a Soviet unheralded hero: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergey_Alexeyevich_Lebedev http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergey_Alexeyevich_Lebedev He acted

There's also a Soviet unheralded hero: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergey_Alexeyevich_Lebedev http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergey_Alexeyevich_Lebedev He acted a bit later, but the same pattern: making his first computer in an estate using commodity hardware, then producing a quite few interesting machines some of which were the best in continental Europe at the time. Sadly, it seems that all european computers are essentially evolutionary dead ends - so nobody remembers them and their creators.