Elektronika MK-61 | Hacker News Reader

Elektronika MK-61

elektronika.su

64 pointsauvi23 comments

Heh. Had one. I overclocked my calculator by installing lower resistor (like 1MOhm to 250k, don't remember actual values). It sure was brilliant back then. Numbers were expressed in scientific notation and despite there were only 2 digits for order, actually calculator was capable to calculate up to 10^999. Number greater 10^99 were displayed as "ERROR" (in 7 segment it was 'ЕГГОГ'), but if you lower order you can get correct mantissa. In fact, the situation was more complex, some numbers were '3ГГОГ'. It was very fun to discover hidden secrets.

3ГГ0Г!! Oh this brings back memories from my MK-52 :-)

The title reminds me of an interesting article about old Soviet and eastern block computers in a Finnish computer magazine Skrolli a few years ago. They have done couple of international editions in English, and this article happens to be included in 2016.1E [1]

[1] https://skrolli.fi/en/international/

Also have a look at the MK-90 (1988), its processor is a PDP-11 on a chip and it runs DEC BASIC.

https://elektronika.su/en/calculators/elektronika-mk-90/

Wow, that's amazing overkill. I'd love to play with it.

It's arguably a continuation of MK-85, which if you go mad with soldering could be upgraded with enough RAM and disk to run UNIX V6 or V7 - as the pocket "programmable calculator" had essentially MicroPDP-11/73 or MicroPDP-11/83 on a chip, including the MMU.

And the CPUs weren't clones, they were in-house design by Elektronika that had to adapt by decree to supporting PDP-11 instruction set and Q-bus.

Loved my MK-85, did a lot of BASIC programming on it as a kid. Using pixel graphics you could do even games. I think the demo game it came with was horce racing jumping over fences.

Also from Elektronika there was the IM-02 Nu, Pogodi! [1] handheld game device, which I used to play obsessively as a teen in the early '90s. Very good times. I've only later (with access to the Internet) learned that it was a clone after some Western-made device.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P9fqGVrh9vg

I had one as a kid. Incredibly capable machine with just a hundred bytes of RAM.

You could play real-time games on it, using GRAD-DEG-RAD switch as hardware joystick!

To illustrate its capabilities, it could find a solution to 8-queens problem in 5 hours, but the program size was only 54 bytes.

54 _bytes_? Thats astounding. I just checked a sample haiku in utf-8 and it was 72 bytes.

Gorgeous and adorable website! Even the markup is admirable.

Wouldn't exactly call it capable, it had 20 memory registers and 106 bytes of programming memory. Plus Reverse Polish Notation is not exactly easy to use. Still great memories, so many kids of my generation discovered computers through those. I actually got one from eBay last year, cost me about $60 with 220->110 converter. I think somebody's selling unsold inventory from the factory. Printed out some old articles and went through first 2 legs of Kon-Tiki journey. Fun times :)

Yes, MK-52 and MK-61 always had a large community of tinkerers around them, exploiting hardware and software bugs (or rather the machine's extreme simplicity) to write seemingly impossible programs. The bugs were never fixed in later revisions though, so while they were fun to play with as a kid, I have mixed feelings about it as an adult engineer. Having an errata instead of actual bugfix wasn't very helpful. My uncle hated them back in the days for this, and when home computer kits appeared, he got one and never looked back.

Perhaps off-topic, but .su is the TLD of the Soviet Union.

Removing a top level domain (TLD) from the DNS when people still want to use it is a no-no. There's a vibrant, active community in .su, and I hope they continue.

It's mostly completely distinct from the political question "what does it mean" regarding 2 letter top level domains, and the ISO3166 list, and the status of entities in the ICANN process. (well.. maybe not the last bit: ICANN has enough fights on its hands without trying to reclaim some namespace territory)

Most .io domains are not from the British Indian Ocean territory. Yet, many people like to use that TLD. And it's OK.

Sure. Tuvalu made good income from .tv, There's a vibrant market in ideas out there. It's just a bit odd that it existed as a grandfathered in thing, And then the grandfathering remained after the raison d'etre ended.

Haha I love how most of the internet just agrees that tokelau is like the outcast TLD of the internet. I've seen filters alert just from accessing a .tk because of them being free and maybe still are. I think it used to be Dot.tk giving them away

> And it's OK

I agree that the use of ccTLDs by people who are not from a given country is OK - like having a .it or .me or a .tv domain as an American or a Brit etc. However the specific case of .io is, to put it politely, rather complicated.

Cool website! I bought one of these for a pittance about 5 years ago on eBay. Came from Ukraine as ‘new old stock’, with the old manuals and everything. A time capsule! Unfortunately this thing has the worst buttons I’ve ever pressed. I’ll buy any RPN calculator I come across though.

Currently hugged, cache: https://web.archive.org/web/20220402000658/https://elektroni...

I have an MK-52, which I bought a few years ago very cheaply from an Ukrainian vendor on Ebay. It's interesting because it's programmable and even has a hardware expansion slot (although those expansions are hard to get). However, the keys are a disappointment, they're quite mushy.

I wonder if we in time will see a “new Soviet” block with a completely parallel ecosystem of computing devices - from military systems to toys, phones and personal computing.

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