Soviet PCs | Hacker News Reader

Soviet PCs

rbth.co.uk

280 pointsgrhmc145 comments

In 1985-87 I worked on plant that manufactured personal computers with russian-translated DOS in Minsk, Belarus.

The cost of this computer was close to the cost of car so blue collar workers established multiple schemes to steal either parts of computers or the whole computers.

The best plan by far was to throw computers out of the windows of factory so it would land on the soft grass right outside of the secure perimeter fence. Then whatever was thrown - would be picked up by co-conspirators and drove away immediately. Usually during the night shifts.

Clever, simple and working scheme that took a while to discover and crack for local security and law enforcement.

Lol, classic Soviet Union story. It worked well in soviet-influenced countries, too. Widespread corruption was inevitable with everyone doing this stuff (I still blame the shit government) :-)

Reminds me of a terrible old Cold War era joke:

Russian worker sees a queue to buy sewing machines at the local GUM (department store) and joins it. Eventually he gets to the front, and the sales clerk has run out of the machines, but offers to take down his name for when more come in. After he takes his name, he asks for his address and workplace.

When the man gives his workplace, the sales clerk stops him. "You work at the sewing machine factory. Why are you here? Just smuggle out parts and make your own at home."

The man shrugs. "I tried that, but each time I end up with a submachinegun."

Similar to another communist joke from ex Yugoslavia:

A worker is waiting in a huge line at 4am to buy cooking oil. Discouraged by how long the line is, he whispers to the guy ahead, "Hey, I heard the general store got a shipment of detergent!" People overhear this and everybody scrambles to the general store, leaving him at the head of the line.

He thinks, "wait, what if the general store did get detergent?" and heads over himself.

Here's a similar joke I found in Viktor Suvorov's faschinating Kuzkina Mat [1] :

A man is walking down the street carrying a 12-roll pack of toilet paper. People surround him, all excited: "Where'd you get that?" The man answers, "I just got it back from the dry cleaner's!"

[1] http://www.andrewnurnberg.com/books/kuzkina-mat/

Actually, this joke is more about Soviet economy fixation on (covert in this case) military production instead of producing sufficient amount of so much awaited home appliances.

And this joke actually is interlinked to the main story.

Namely many of Soviet PC projects were motivated by the late requirement for the military factories to also produce a civil product.

Of course in the end all of it ended in the doom as these factories were not prepare to compete in high competitive open market environment and the market was flooded by cheap Taiwanese PC clones.

Sometimes it turns out ok. Wasn't the Internet built for US military at first.

In a normal country, yes. In a state capitalism (aka communism as we got to know it) it is either used for military/state applications or is completely discarded.

At least any DARPA/NASA/etc projects had a chance in the private sector...

We could thank nuclear arms for the Internet. I am wondering how much of the current state of Internet holds to the initial promise.

While the Internet as we know it was derived by Darpa, I'm not convinced we wouldn't have one without it. Large scale networks already existed. INTERconnected NETworks don't forget. I had access to Janet, FidoNet & Compuserve prior to the current network.

ARPANet funding started in 1967 or 1968 and brought up the first links in 1969, CompuServe in 1969, FidoNet started in 1982, JANET in 1983, so I don't think you had access to Janet, FidoNet, and CompuServe prior to the ARPANet, or even prior to TCP/IP in 1978 or so.

Some kind of network was going to happen — but remember that Telenet, Tymnet, and PC-Pursuit (aside from CompuServe, The Source, Minitel, and of course the PSTN itself) were already generally available in the 1980s. The issue is that the existing networks were either too tightly controlled and inflexible (Minitel, CompuServe, the PSTN) or too slow (FidoNet) to support a lot of the applications to which we put the internet today.

I'm from the UK. I had access to Janet in 1989 at Uni, and then Compuserve and then FidoNet. Internet access here was about 1994. I personally had it when Windows 95 arrived and I bought the Plus Pack which included Internet Explorer and dial-up software.

Though I must admit, I had an Internet email address I collected via FidoNet using Bluewave.

DARPA barely counts as military.

Yes but the main motivation was to have a network that would sustain nuclear strike.

That's supposedly an urban myth...

From Wikipedia:

In A Brief History of the Internet, the Internet Society denies that ARPANET was designed to survive a nuclear attack:

It was from the RAND study that the false rumor started, claiming that the ARPANET was somehow related to building a network resistant to nuclear war. This was never true of the ARPANET; only the unrelated RAND study on secure voice considered nuclear war. However, the later work on Internetting did emphasize robustness and survivability, including the capability to withstand losses of large portions of the underlying networks.

Bullshit, DARPA/ARPA is as much military as a freaking nuclear warhead. In his speach introducing ARPA, Eisenhower made it extremely clear that its purpose was to cary out research that maintained technological superiority over enemies of the United States ("enemies" is his word). The "Defence" part was only added later for political reasons.

You don't even have to try hard to see the evidence: DARPA is unique among ALL OTHER government agencies because it is military backed and at the cutting edge of defense research.

DARPA has at most 300 employees overlooking a budget of $3 billion (an order of magnitude more "revenue" per employee than Apple) because 90+% of employees are project managers who have a maximum term limit of four years. The only DARPA employee that I know of that worked for the agency twice did so 25 years after his first term. Each of these managers oversees one or more projects worth anywhere between $1 million and $25 million and are advised by an individual scientific board (whose members can stay longer than four years to maintain some continuity).

Dnot get me wrong, I am a firm believer that DARPA is one of the greatest examples of what humans can achieve when they are given the ability to create, rebel, and dream beyond the current capabilities of engineering, but let's not kid ourselves. DARPA primary purpose has always been death and destruction. (Case in point: DARPA's currently most funded project is a scram jet based nuclear warhead that can hit any spot in the world within an hour of launching from the continental United States)

We're just lucky that cooperation is so much more profitable than mutually assured destruction.

Lol, classic Soviet Union story.

I have been thinking about this.

In general people tend to work on greed and fear.

Could we build a system that is based on peoples goodwill or it would be doomed?

I still blame the shit government

Quote: "The cadres determine everything."

People work for all kinds of reasons. The more you can accommodate, the better.

Open source software still fascinates me, and it's interesting to see how people just build stuff just to have others use it for free.

This would not be possible at all in a "communist" country - you either work for the state or you don't.

Anything you do is either benefiting the state or it doesn't exist. Citizens don't even get to know about the stuff.

Absolutes are bad either way, but people need at least a bit of freedom to get informed about the latest developments and work on their ideas without someone watching over their shoulder and dictating their every move...

If you convert "greed and fear" to "rational self-interest, tempered for risk", there's a field of study called mechanism design that looks at how to set up systems and incentives so that everyone's rational self-interest yields a desirable overall result.

I suspect one of the biggest problems with adapting an algorithmic result to the real world is that the resulting system has to be self-sustaining and resilient: you have to provide enough incentive not to change the incentives. Leaving aside its internal merits or lack thereof, it certainly did the Soviet Union no favors to be opposed by a roughly equally-powerful nation that was constantly threatening military action if they didn't change their mechanism. The mechanism itself has to solve that, or it will require benevolent people to keep it in place who have zero incentive to remain benevolent. (See also, the Soviet Union.)

In most other cases you don't have this problem because people actually are benevolent enough. If you're designing a congestion-control protocol like TCP, you just have to make it incentivize nodes to behave; you don't also need TCP to incentivize sysadmins to keep running TCP instead of replacing it with something else.

> I suspect one of the biggest problems with adapting an algorithmic result to the real world is that the resulting system has to be self-sustaining and resilient: you have to provide enough incentive not to change the incentives.

An analogous situation within a different optimizing system: it's pretty easy to create a GMO tweak to improve crop yields for the indivdiual seeds you created. It's a much harder problem to create a tweak that's actually advantageous to the plant, such that will be kept in the next generation and spread to fixation.

>In general people tend to work on greed and fear.

People are pretty flexible depending on their environment. Paulgraham.com/good.html is not totally naive but depends on an environment where evil doesn't prosper too much.

> In general people tend to work on greed and fear. Could we build a system that is based on peoples goodwill or it would be doomed?

Some people work on greed and fear, while some others do work on wanting to improve the world.

In my experiences and observations, the ones who work because they want to improve things were the ones who grew up in stable and loving households and were taught to be nice.

There has actually been a great deal of work trying to find the best predictors of generosity and trust; people who have grown up in free markets have more of both than do those who grew up in more socialist countries. Interestingly, the first people to make this finding were socialists who thought the games (such as 'the dictator game' and 'the ultimatum game') would show how socialism improved fellow-feeling, kindness, and understanding.

That's very interesting, any suggested reading? Were the socialist researchers able to publish their results in their own countries?

I tend to believe that many (likely most) of the people related to the parents anecdote where indeed ones who grew up in stable and loving households and were taught to be nice as the Soviet social system was relatively stable.

As long as you worked within said system. Try anything outside it and you'll quickly find yourself in big trouble.

I guess it's the same everywhere, but at least a capitalist system gives you more leeway to do what you want, just enough to make it possible to grow big enough that the main system sees you as an equal (or at least a necessity) instead of a mortal enemy that needs to be shut down...

> In general people tend to work on greed and fear.

I don't think that's an accurate depiction of humans. People work either: (1) they want money, and/or (2) they want something to do during their waking hours.

Even if I had enough money that I never had to work the rest of my life, I still would definitely work, because I enjoy work, and want to do something meaningful (from my perspective) with my life. I would most likely be a pro bono computer science researcher, and might maybe join a PhD program -- if I get to pick what I research on, which might be possible since I don't need grant money, and would cost the school zilch.

But basically, my point is that what motivates me (and most people) to work is either: (1) the love of work, or (2) the need for money.

Absolutely not greed and fear, as you say.

Now with regard to communist societies, I think the biggest problem is the utter lack of freedom. Maybe I'm wrong, but I have a strong feeling that the epic failure of communist economies like the Soviet Union or pre-1990 India could be directly attributable to heavy regulation of businesses. They made it hard to start and run a business.

Now I'm sure over 90% people will never start register a company in their lives (maybe that percentage is reducing now), but making it hard for 10% that do start & run businesses could be the direct cause for the failure of these large economies. For example, India, until 1990 followed Soviet Union-inspired policies, and one of the biggest consequences of this was insane red tape know as "License Raj"[1] wherein you couldn't start a business without approval from a dozen corrupt government agencies, and even if you did succeed in starting one, you were subject to an overwhelming number of regulations that made it insanely hard for you to run your business.

Why do I think making it hard for 10% to run business is the cause of their economic failure? Because it prevented any sort of free market capitalistic competition. Everything was run by a bunch of non-business-minded bureaucrats who predictably did a bad job at it. Restricting private businesses and especially competition prevented an increase in production efficiency, and made the economy as a whole less efficient. A lot of these factors and other factors rolled in to one, led to the hour long lines for milk and butter.

More fundamentally, regulations erodes away your freedom. If you want to do something -- and starting a business or selling something is doing something -- if the government steps in and says "no you can't do that without my approval" that is an insane Mafia-protection-racket-esque interference in your personal freedom. You're just trying to make something and sell it! Nothing wrong with that! People have been doing this for millennia! Why do I need to listen to you, follow your little rules, or pay you a fee, to exercise my personal freedom?

Regulations take away freedom. And enough of it destroys economies. End of story.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Licence_Raj

> Regulations take away freedom.

The freedom to employ children, the freedom to lock the fire doors, the freedom to drive your truck for 36hours straight, the freedom to pollute the environment.......

Online debate of 'regulation' seems to rapidly, if not instantaneously, settle into this false ping-pong between "regulation is evil" and "regulation is required to save the children".

If you have ever run a business, you would understand that the problem isn't the type of constraints you list here but instead is the endless number of ill-conceived, ill-defined, and just plain dumb regulations that are more often about protecting a special interest than in protecting individuals.

The net effect of the monotonically increasing complexity of regulation is that the government has more and more power to control our economic activity. Is it any wonder that special interests spend enormous amounts of money to influence this process?

I have run my own business so it is rather impertinent for you to take some higher "I know better than you" ground.

The purpose of government and therefore regulation is to control externalities.

That some regulations are bad is not the fault of the concept of regulation; it is the failure of your government structure.

I apologize for my impertinence, it seems to have distracted you such that you missed the point that I was making that regulations are neither an absolute good nor an absolute evil (despite what you read on the Internet). Using extreme examples in either direction to argue in favor of the other extreme doesn't convince anyone of any thing.

There are lots of theories of government. Controlling externalities is really a special case of protecting individual rights, which is the role of government from my point of view.

I'm not sure what is or isn't in your definition of 'government structure'. I was trying to point out that to the extent that we support an expansive scope of government regulation we create a situation where it is completely rational for people and organizations to expend considerable amounts of time and money to influence that process. If instead we support a limited scope of government regulation that diminishes the pressure to influence regulations.

Cool. Next time I steal a TV from a shop I'll blame the shit government. Widespread corruption, you see.

The difference is you can legally buy a TV with your legally earned money. The grandparent's "shit government", on the other hand, payed you an amount of money it figured you deserved regardless of the actual demand for your skills, and then with that money you could buy very little on the legal market because few things were sold on the legal market, while the black market prices were likely out of reach for you, even if your skills were tremendously important to the economy. In this situation stealing parts from your factory (not from a shop where little was to be found) and selling them on the black market is more compelling and IMO more excusable than under some other form of government.

Some Americans went rioting and looting and blamed the cops for killing someone. Fuck the police, you see.

That is a fascinating story, If you don't mind would you expand on it?

We're you stealing computers yourself as well? How dangerous was it?

Where would you normally go to sell a computer like that in the soviet union?

Not OP, but I would guess the components were not to sell, but to use.

No, you could easily sell or barter them, too. We stole car parts and fuel this way, too.

Because, you know, at the end of that unholy union, they were struggling to produce stuff for themselves (military, politicians and their relatives), much less for the citizens...

I didn't steal anything, but wanted to assemble my first computer following radio schematics in Radio magazine (that article mentioned). Collected slowly bunch of parts frmo electronics store but never got into completing the project due to lack of parts.

For comparison:

About 1988/89 we got our first PS/2 workstations [1]. With some upgrades (RAM, 60MB HD, network card) these were about the price of an entry level Mercedes S-Class - in today's money about US$100k each.

[1] IBM PS/ 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Personal_System/2

So this post was original posted this morning, but after HN requested I repost it got to #1:

http://s.gsc.io/hn-repost-request.png

Wow that's quite interesting. I've never gotten one if those so I don't know if it's new or I just never post anything interesting?!

We've only recently built software support for this. Before that we did it manually for several months to test the idea.

More on this at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10395389 and the links from there.

As cool as it is you guys are giving good stories a better chance of hitting the front page. I can't help but wonder: 1. How a post is determined to be "good"? - Is it just if any of the moderators like it? - Is there a voting system for mods to determine this? - Would these not require a lot more work for the mods for possibly little benefit? 2. How do you ensure that feature isn't abused by a "bad" mod to promote their own content or views?

In the linked comment, dang writes:

>> We use a combination of software filters and human review to find good-but-overlooked stories. "Good" here means by HN's definition of "gratifying intellectual curiosity".

Hopefully that answers your first point. Second, HN mods are hired to work full-time on improving and polishing HN. This requires that they be professional, and professionalism in this sense requires ignoring your personal views. Having any kind of motive not based on improving HN would be unprofessional.

This is a way in which HN is distinguished from Reddit: YC puts money into guaranteeing that HN works well. Only well-known people can be mods, not everyone on the Internet. These people have reputations for being "good," being fair and impartial.

Mods have something at stake (jobs, reputation). So does YC. They're not going to make a mistake.

And in my experience, (although I realize that the plural of "anecdote" is not "data") dang et al. have been nothing but totally neutral in every action (that I've seen, so far) on HN.

Just curious if you guys have also tried seeing what happens when you run the meritocracy approach to articles? Ie, let the upvotes decide.

I think most of the inmates here would be surprised that they're not running the asylum :)

Taking a sorting algorithm that cares about absolute vote displacement, and then using it on a site where more people are exposed to higher-ranked things, and more "voters" are online at particular times of day, is not a recipe for meritocracy.

Just putting it like that (while also in election season) gives me an idea, though: a site where members must either give a vote to everything that has touched the front/new page within the last 24 hours, or nothing. (Maybe even having them sort the page to provide IRV rankings rather than a sign vector.) Way fewer people would bother, but as long as it was still a representative sampling...

The upvotes do decide here, though. Mods rarely manually pull posts that aren't spam. Most are flagged by users, which either kills them or pushes them into the bottom of the rankings.

And at least HN is clear about where the moderators stand. Meritocracy doesn't function. Either you have reddit, where users circlejerk into oblivion in smaller communities because votes don't matter (and larger communities don't work either, because their bigger mod teams do things like [1,2,3]) or you have StackOverflow, where upvotes and downvotes are extremely powerful and either allow you a lot of power or allow you to zap others and keep them in line.

HN allows you to easily amass some karma so you can say something that isn't in line with others' opinions. Sometimes people will even upvote you and make your minority opinion prominent. Downvoting requires at least 500 karma, making sure you have the lay of the land down (and prevents spam accounts from taking down comments immediately).

HN has a lot of transparency. Try enabling "showdead" in your profile. Forget uneddit, that's built in on HN.

We're not inmates. We're here for the conversation. We like cool stuff and we like to talk about it.

[1]: https://archive.is/CFKgq [2]: https://i.imgur.com/EWVH9RW.jpg [3]: https://www.reddit.com/r/KotakuInAction/comments/3hewwm/misc...

HN mods have had this tool at their disposal for quite a while, but they've used it rarely until now.

Source: I got one of these for https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9083672 / https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9086223

"HN mods have had this tool at their disposal for quite a while, but they've used it rarely until now."

Not as rarely as you think.

There was another IBM PC soviet-made clone, somewhat similar to Iskra 1030 mentioned in the post. It was designed and manufactured in Kiev, Ukraine in mid to late 80s and was called Нейрон (neuron).

I was a part of that software team, porting IBM PC/XT BIOS code, so if you have any questions do not hesitate to ask.

There is a Russian language wikipedia article dedicated to it: https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%9D%D0%B5%D0%B9%D1%80%D0%BE...

Do tell more! How behind was the Soviet Union in computing (if indeed it was behind) compared to other countries at the time?

It was hopelessly behind in hardware. The processors were cloned by thinly slicing them and making pictures. This is how i8086 was "designed" anyway. http://www.cpushack.com/soviet-cpus.html

There was very little original software written at the time, multiple teams were tasked with reverse-engineering popular software tools and programs and translating them into Russian for internal consumption.

The gap in software development is somewhat harder to quantify. Overall the software was rather decent in those rare cases when it was original.

I assume you've seen this. http://micro.magnet.fsu.edu/creatures/pages/russians.html

Neat, though that phrase makes no sense in Russian. It's not even a properly formed sentence.

I think it's good enough for the target audience to have gotten the message if they ever saw it though.

Speaking of things that the soviets reverse-engineered, I think the B-29 Superfortress is worth mentioning: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tupolev_Tu-4

Did they use a microtome with a diamond knife? Floating slices on water, to grids or slides?

Might grinding yield better resolution?

Such technology might be useful in the process of developing open-source hardware.

As far as I understand, common practice was lapping. Yield was always acceptable.

It is still being done now, for open-source hardware too, like here : http://zeptobars.ru/en/read/KR580VM80A-intel-i8080-verilog-r...

Were they so far behind in VLSI design that decapping and reverse engineering was a better option than re-implementing the processor from a published spec?

They were much less behind than it is now (1-2-5 years max). The problem is that leadership of USSR wanted to take advantage of using existing software - hence demanded 100% exact copy of hardware (starting from IBM-360). By many these actions were considered a treason, especially in retrospective.

There were independent developments, they worked but never went widespread (because they needed an "order" from the state).

I suspect yes, that was one of the reasons. They were likely lacking CAD tools for VLSI design.

Thanks! How compatible were these computers with IBM PCs? Aside from the different codepage, would any DOS software run properly on them? I wonder whether, for example, the CPUs were 100% copies of Intel/etc chips or had minor differences in behaviour.

They were clones of 8088, so fully compatible. I got one at the scrapyard in early 90s and used it till 1996 or so when my family could afford a 386, also plenty pre-loved.

Please post a copy of source code (maybe a masm listing) if you still have it, along with any technical docs. Even though it's 'just another' clone, it's still worth preserving for history.

It never occurred to us at the time that the stuff was worth saving and I left USSR soon after.

I wrote a blog post about a soviet start-up from 1989 that used SM-4, mainframe type computer.

http://yansh.github.io/articles/rhythm/

A lot of the architecture was cloned from Western or nearby countries.

In any case, it was a fascinating period that in my mind produced some of the best programmers in the world. They did amazing things with little resources they had.

SM-4 was very much like PDP-11, running a lot of compatible software "appropriated" fromthe West.

This is the first I hear about the Robotron 1715 being developed in Russia. All other sources I can find say that it was developed and built in Eastern Germany (Robotron was an Eastern German company that developed a number of computers in the 80s). Even the russian wikipedia say so. Wikipedia says that even the U880 processor, a Z80 clone, was produced in East Germany.

https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robotron_1715

http://www.old-computers.com/MUSEUM/computer.asp?c=864&s...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U880

The article doesn't say it was developed in Russia, it says "The computer itself was developed at a research institute outside Moscow, and production was transferred to the German Democratic Republic"

How do you read "The computer itself was developed at a research institute outside Moscow" to mean anything other than that the computer was developed in Russia?

Yep, the U880 was made at the VEB Mikroelektronik „Karl Marx“ in Erfurt. After the reunification parts of the VEB were converted to a company that still runs a semiconductor fab there (X-Fab).

For anyone interested in more info about this topic, my father and his friend run a fan site for the BESM-6 (including an emulator!), a Soviet-era mainframe computer:

http://www.mailcom.com/besm6/

Relatedly, the German Democratic Republic had an arcade machine:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poly_Play

They also had full VAX 11/780 clones! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robotron_K_1840

Oh and wonderful art ( http://imgur.com/GPPI56E ) but that's another topic.

I still think Robotron is about the coolest name of any computer manufacturer EVER. Imagine how cool it would be to own a laptop or smartphone or whatever with that name on it.

Since there were jokes further up, this reminded me of another one:

A delegation of Japanese visits the GDR and of course is shown many important companies and places. At the end, they are asked "What did you enjoy the most?"

"The three great museums: Pergamon, Pentacon and Robotron"

Hehe, that is a good one!

Earlier this year, I visited the Heinz-Nixdorf museum, not far from where I live, which actually has a mainframe built by Robotron on display (a clone of an IBM S/370, I think).

TIMTronic - (ticket issuing machine, electronic) is my favourite name for any bit of hardware.

I used to fix them. Real keyswitches, 7 segment displays, ink ribbons. Really retro now.

БК family is missing, the bestselling Soviet computers. CISC architecture. https://ru.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/БК_(семейство_компьютеров). I wrote my first programmes on that Bulgarian made ISKRA 1030, that was nice but very poor performing comparing to ЕС mainframe with PRIMUS OS. Also ЕС desktops family is missing in this article. The latter sibling of that had a cast iron mouse, I kid you not.

BK0010-01 is there. ES series was a line of IBM clones (from System/360 to XTs) and were really meant for enterprise use.

Some original developments, like Vector-06c are missing though: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vector-06C

ZX Spectrum clones (the big hit at the time) aren't on the list as well.

And Russians develop a lot the ZX Spectrum architecture (and keep doing)

there days it's mostly demos, though.

see f.e. http://media.assembly.org/vod/2011/Seminars/1203_arttech_sem...

... and some Bulgarian ones: http://www.pravetz.info/

A broader overview: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_computer_hardware_i...

UNIX-UNAS realy reads as a very funny joke for russian speakers

ROFL. Thanks for pointing that out.

Feel like these in no small part explain why Russians seem to have a disproportionate amount of programmers compared to all other countries outside the US.

I don't think so because nobody could afford these. It was the education system. Standard curriculum for everybody. By the time you finished 10th (last) grade you had studied pretty advanced math, physics, chemistry, etc. Even if it's not your thing, even if you could only get the lowest passing grade, you still had to do it or fail school. It was kind of rough, but I'm still reaping rewards from what it gave me.

Also may have to do with the prestige of being an engineer in USSR. That was a popular profession.

I feel like I can only dream about such a time, such a place. Engineer? Prestige?

Eh, don't know about the place. You'd be respected, but stuck with working for a shitty government and shitty people with their own agendas for all of your life.

That doesn't sound unique to the USSR lol

I guess so, but at least you'd have the choice to leave :-)

Well, I think, being a software engineer is still pretty cool in Silicon Valley :)

I think it's the inverse. Disregard for engineers seems like an anglo-saxon phenomenon to me. The Germanic countries are, of course, famed for holding engineers in high regard, but so do most third-world countries, and China.

I think the anglo-saxon opinion of engineers is caused by blurring the line between engineer and technician.

I think its caused by the inappropriate elevation of the marketing classes, who don't have a job unless someone else does the work of building something...

Not in the late 1980s certainly.

If only they did this in the UK.

Although when I went through school, A level mathematics didn't even touch anything past polynomials and physics didn't go much past classical mechanics and energy. Now they're all over calculus and quantum mechanics!

Some of those were initially. But by early 90's you could by cheap ZX Spectrum clones. I had one and we were more on the poor side than on the rich side.

Yap, agree 100%. That is why I am a programmer.

Story time:

Growing up in the late 80's, early 90's I liked to take apart electronics. Biggest treat for me was finding an old TV or radio to disassemble.

Then I found out about computers. We got them at school for an "Informatics" course -- which is what they called "Computer Science". I thought those were great. The teacher let us play logic games on it for grades even -- Sokoban, Lemmings and others.

My mom saw that I liked computers and started saving money, even though we were pretty poor. She saved for a year, but didn't tell me then, on March 8, 1993 she bought me a Soviet ZX Spectrum clone. That was the best gift I ever received in terms on impact on my life since. The clone was pretty crappy with rubber buttons and it loaded everything from tape recorder. We connected it to our old black and white TV that still had vacuum tubes in it.

That computer helped me learn programming (had a C compiler, Pascal, assembly, lots of games) and English (since documentation, games and programs were all in English).

Fast forward many years later and programming is my day job and I still like it.

Just out of curiosity, what languages do you use today?

Erlang, Python, C, C++, wrote some Android apps in Java, looking at Rust next probably.

> The clone was pretty crappy with rubber buttons and it loaded everything from tape recorder.

Well the original was not much better...

There's another former Communist country with a "disproportionate amount of programmers": Romania.

It even had its own PC clone: https://ro.wikipedia.org/wiki/Felix_PC (in Romanian, sorry, but you can probably figure things out just from the dates and numbers :) ).

Edit: How cute! At the bottom there are links to all the Romanian-made computers. There are at least 20 models I didn't even know of.

I'd wager a guess that most of the countries in the Eastern Block did have their own computers.

In Poland, for example, there were the 8-bit Meritums [1], the Elwro 800 Juniors [2], the Bosman 8s [3], the Mazovia PC clones [4] complete with their own Polish characters encoding that has the peculiarity of containing one character that had never existed in Unicode [5], to name but a few, not to mention the Odra mainframes [6].

[1]: https://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meritum_(komputer)#/media/File... [2]: https://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elwro_800_Junior#/media/File:E... [3]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=79YSyyV9f2Y [4]: https://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mazovia_(komputer)#/media/File... [5]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mazovia_encoding [6]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Odra_(computer)

> I'd wager a guess that most of the countries in the Eastern Block did have their own computers.

There's this beauty from Sweden:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ABC80

I'm guessing a lot of countries overall had their own computers, not just eastern block. We don't usually hear much about them because we base our computer history mostly on the canon of the US.

I was surprised to read in "The Architecture of Open Source Applications" that my former university's computer science department made a very prominent sendmail version back in the day (IDA sendmail) and that this was noteworthy in that context.

This field has been international for a very long time.

You are aware that Sweden was not a member of the "Eastern Block"?

That was exactly my point. Most likely every country (overall) had their own computer. It wasn't an "Eastern block thing". The degree of separation was obviously higher, but not all "western" manufacturers were American.

(Also: danskjävel...)

I get it now. The context was ambiguous, though, so I don't quite get the downvote.

Yes, we danskjävels made som as well. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regnecentralen

> I get it now. The context was ambiguous, though, so I don't quite get the downvote.

I can't even downvote, so it wasn't me. I edited my original post to be less ambiguous. Sorry.

> Yes, we danskjävels made som as well. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regnecentralen

There's something really beautiful about that setup. I like the splash of color in select areas and the keyboard looks amazing.

Acorn Electron, BBC Micro, Archimedes ...

Polish semiconductor company CEMI also made 8080 clone, MCY7880. die shot: http://obrazki.elektroda.pl/9525059000_1368820494.jpg

Amazingly there is a TV program from 1983 showing manufacturing process of this very CPU :o

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KHl6m93Hay0#t=24 From die shots and this program (showing different masks) it appears Polish version was almost a straight copy of the Intel, with small modifications (different feature sizes, additional debug pads).

Elwro, Polish calculator manufacturer, designed accounting system (Elwro 500/513/523) based on MCY7880, with 8-512KB ram, two 8 inch floppies, printer and a monitor made out of modified 12 inch _camping TV_ (Neptun 150) :))), all running CP/M 2.2 (pirated and translated to Polish).

http://www.elwro.zafriko.pl/kat/mikrokomputery/elwro_500

google translated journal of one of the engineers: http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=pl&u=http://w...

Yields were terrible, not surprising when you watch this clip and see chemical baths done manually by flipping wafers in liquids like fries at a fast food restaurant :) Popularity of this computer system forced CEMI to import KR580VM80A from USSR, and encapsulate them with CEMI logo (to save face I guess). Few people decapped MCY7880, and you mostly find russian dies inside.

Communists had 1 positive obsession: exact sciences. See all that focus on math, physics, etc.

They probably thought they could solve all the world's problems as equations, with the head of state as the "master variable manipulator".

This was a necessary instrument for the arms race.

Of course. Someone in the Politburo read 1984.

Here's one build-it-yourself from Yugoslavia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galaksija_%28computer%29

I heard it said that this was because of Ceausescu's regime's fixation on surveillance and intelligence. So they allocated top resources to information technology, resulting in an unusually IT-capable population.

Yep, we're one of the top countries when it comes to engineers per capita, must've gotten that from the soviets :-).

Too bad there's not enough resources to do much in the country, so everyone is fleeing it (not for long though, I hope)...

I'd say that retention is a lot better in the IT sector, definitely a lot better than in the 90s or early 00s.

Plus what I understand a good mathematics school. That helps as well.

From elsewhere i got the impression that there was less pre-compiled software to be had, so unless you wanted an expensive paper weight you basically had to learn to code.

It's also very cold outside. Forever.

Yup, I wrote my first Basic programs on the Korvet. And it was 1994.

Curiously the only PC in my school in Moscow in 1988 was an IBM PC (the 5150?). Actually, that may have been 1987 or 86 even... Then we moved to the US. I've never seen or knew of existence of any of the machines in this article.

It's too bad that no one is taking a risk on developing an entirely new desktop computer anymore.

Funny comment.

Precisely what is the incentive? With smartphones coming to the fore as the main platform of computing in recent times?

The professor that taught my compilers course used to tell us crazy stories about working in the Soviet Union before he immigrated as a reverse engineer, essentially copying western operating systems. He gave us by far the best explanations of real-world applications for the hardcore theory we learned in automata class.

I just sitting @ the c3d2 hackerspace in dresden germany which is located in the old robotron building ^^ - but never saw one of those machines in person. No idea if here are still some in the building, guess not.

I believe I heard that the soviets experimented in the early days with ternary computers, and took it further than anyone else did. Does anyone have more information on that?

One popular is missing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UKNC

These are actually pretty cool. Need to add this to my list for when I visit Europe next. Maybe find some in a junk/antique/thrift shop?

Ahhh the memories. Pravetz 8d (with a cassete tape storage), Pravetz 16. The black green monitors.

I still keep some around here for sentimental value.

Fellow Oric/Atmos user checking in.. those Pravetz machines are cool!

I'm not sure I know how to feel about the fact that the author had to explain what a Light Pen was. Why am I so old?!

Is the red color scheme an homage to the Soviet flag?

I worked with the second one for ~3 years

One thinq for sure, God were they dirty!

Never touch the red keys.

>It could be had for 440 rubles - two average monthly salaries at that time.

Which is .88 Euros today.

How are you comparing two currencies that have never existed at the same time?

If apples were ever compared to oranges, this is it :)

Here's an alternative comparison - 440 rubles was the annual rent for a 2 bed room state apartment in Moscow. Today the same is rented for 40 000 EUR.

Soviet Rubles are different than today's Rubles, no?

You can compare Soviet Ruble to Sterling Pound of the 60-ies. A nice cottage in St. Albans was £500 back then, now its £250000 more like.

They were backed with more tanks back then ...

Let's start with the fact that it's 6,3 euros, not 0,88.

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