Interesting look at the history of Soviet personal computers | Hacker News Reader

Interesting look at the history of Soviet personal computers

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34 pointscanada_dry7 comments

>It is no longer a secret that in 1950–70 the USSR was one of the world leaders in the race called “development and production of computer equipment”.

it is still a secret to me. First time i used computer while at high school in 1987 (ES-1033, a clone of System/360, installed at the University) and judging by the state of the industry at the time it took "the leader" less than 10 years for all the traces of the "leadership" to disappear.

Few years later, my professors at the University on several occasions explained motivations behind various strong theoretical results in the USSR Math from the preceding decades as "Americans have had computers and thus could just compute it while the only option we had was to obtain the results analytically".

>The end of the 70s was marked by mass production and production of PCs: Iskra-1256, Iskra-226, Iskra-555, VEF-Micro, Micro-80, Electronics NTs-8010, Electronics BK-0010, Microsha, Krista, Apogee BK-01, Partner 01.01, Spectrum-001, etc.

For a very USSR specific definition of "mass production". And not the end of 70s, more like middle of 80s for example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronika_BK , https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%90%D0%BF%D0%BE%D0%B3%D0%B5....

This reflects the American adoption of personal computers pretty well. Most High Schools did not have personal computers until well into the 90s, but some had them in the late 80s. Similarly, universities in the early 90s did not have availability of personal computers to the degree math professors were all able to do calculations on them (to say nothing of the state of mathematical software at that point).

A number of personal computers in the Soviet Union were created, such as the MIR series were developed in the early 70s and late 90s, but commodity hardware didn't really kick in until the early 80s.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIR_(computer)

Commodity hardware in the sense of “it is made but impossible to get hold of outside the place its made or Leningrad or Moscow and half what you get is wildly out if spec” as Soviet reality tended to be. Only aluminum plates were really a commodity where I grew up in the 80s.

I would recommend this article about impressions and facts to you: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/02/27/why-facts-dont...

It's super good, carefully studied, and overall a well written read.

It is also quite interesting that the article (such as you can comprehend from the butchered translation) talks about all of those "computers" (that until the 90's almost nobody had actually seen) being based on some other Soviet computer, but never on what the real originals were PCs, Apple II's, DEC Rainbows, etc., etc.

Slightly OT, but I find the quality of this automated translation mind blowing.

In parts, but there are gems like this:

> From the memories of Christ: "my first comp with him on the tape was a" musical sequencer "as a music demo was a polonaise of Oginsky, no worse than a synthesizer poured, and programs from the micros approached," and the program for a light pen - it was a screen filled with dots like this ... ... (pseudographic).

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