Béla Frajka

He was a demonstrator at the Department of Wireless Communications of the Faculty of Electrical Engineering (VIK) of BME during his last two semesters. In 1957, he started working at the Siófok Petroleum Pipeline Company, and in 1958, he worked as an assistant professor at the Department of Wired Communications (VHT) of BME VIK. His areas of expertise were logic switching technology and telephone technology, and later also modern areas of telecommunications, such as telecommunications protocols.

During his university work, he came into contact with the famous electrical engineering professor László Kozma, who designed and built a relay binary computer for educational purposes between 1957 and 1958 to illustrate the design method of logic circuits. This machine, named MESZ-1 (University Computer 1), was programmed and operated for nearly ten years by, among others, Béla Frajka.
From the early 1960s, he worked again with László Kozma, and between 1960 and 1964, they built a relay and vacuum tube automaton for the Institute of Linguistics, which served the purposes of statistical language analysis and which - by today's standards - can be considered a purpose-built computer.

When the Institute of Telecommunications Electronics (HEI) was established in 1972 by the merger of the BME Department of Wired Telecommunications and the Department of Wireless Telecommunications, he headed its Telecommunications Department from its inception until the Institute's closure in 1991.

In 1974, he obtained the scientific degree of Candidate of Technical Sciences with his dissertation entitled "Practical decentralization of logical functions of electronically controlled telephone exchanges".

Between 1976 and 1978, he worked as an expert at the Algerian postal company at the request of BUDAVOX. After returning home, he went back to university, but until 1981, he was the director of the Telecommunication Development Institute of the Beloiannisz Telecommunication Factory (BHG).

From 1984 to 1990, he was the Deputy Dean of Education at the Faculty of Information Technology of the Hungarian University of Technology. Professor László Schnell, the Dean of the Faculty of Information Technology, launched the Informatics program in 1985 with the assistance of Béla Frajka, entrusting him with the development of the new Study and Examination Regulations.

He retired as an associate professor at the end of 1998. After that, he worked as a contract expert at the Research and Development Department of Ericsson Hungary Ltd. from 1999 to 2004.

From 1984, he was the secretary of the Telecommunications Systems Committee of the Technical Department of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, the scientific editor of the switching technology section of the journal Híradástechnika, and a member of the board of the Telecommunication and Informatics Scientific Association (HTE).

Awards: Tivadar Puskás Award (HTE, 1985, 1993); HTE Silver Badge Award (1991); HTE Gold Badge Award (2000).