Soviet computer has been forgotten for 30 years [video]
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I was one of the few kids in my elementary school with a computer and a printer, so I was able to score some clout with the classmates, until a few of the richer kids starter to have access to more modern computers.
We had 256 KB of RAM until my dad upgraded it to 512. I learned to program using QuickBasic on it when I was around 8, I think.
I have many memories of this machine, and I would be so thrilled if I could gain access to it in the US somehow.
In 8th grade I started socializing and lost the gift. Still can't believe I did all that.
Positioning (fn42h)
When pointer is moved [advanced?], take value of highest bit of CX register as special flag value. After jump? [hard to understand, the literal work is positioning], when pointer will point the code "LATRO", add or subtract from the pointer the value offset veryend [not exactly clear]. If pointer points after end of the file and MS DOS [interrupt?] is triggered decrease from DX:AX offest veryend (Elementary!)
Reading (fn 3Fh)
In case if current position < 1Ch, then, later remembering to restore current position, read necessary amount of bytes from the end of the file (eof - |offset veryend - offset save_area|) [it is not clear, but it really looks like there is modulo]. During capture of LATRO area, trim the read (SRF).
^ (curpos + numread) > (eof -offset veryend)
I'd guess he doesn't have the disk or files (although I wouldn't be surprised if they did - I was not so neat or organized at 10)
I remember when I first got on the Net in 1993, almost none of the sites I wanted to connect to had DNS entries so I had piles of notepaper filled with random IP addresses.
Young Harry Potter fan?
- Chessmaster 2000
- nz.exe which took me decades to find to be "Saboteur 2",
- digger, a game similar to digdug, as you can see in the video
- moon patrol
- kicks.exe -- I still can't find what the actual title was. It was a game where balls bounce around an area and your job is to slice sections of the area closing off the balls, once you capture the balls in a small enough area, you move to the next level.
If you wanted to be patient, it was almost impossible to lose. But if you hurried, it was anlmost impossible to win.
The version I had had cycle-based speed so it became unplayable when I changed computers for a faster clocked one, which prompted me to attempt coding a clone.
Another one I was wondering about was an Infogrames (i remember the name and logo of the publisher for some reason featuring an ant eater i think) police? game featuring a sniper element where you have to scan windows in telescopic sight and shoot before you are shot at.
And lastly there was a Prince of Persia / Another World like game that featured similar control mechanics, but also had guns.
ChatGPT (specifically GPT4) is also very good at these kinds of tasks. I pasted your original comment verbatim to GPT4 and these were the suggestions it gave:
1. Sopwith
2. Hostage: Rescue Mission (Originally titled "Hostages")
3. Flashback: The Quest for Identity
https://www.old-games.ru/search/ change to English in the top right corner and select Inforgrames in Developer or Publisher
https://www.old-games.ru/forum/forums/international-zone.54/
The Wikipedia article for Xonix mentions a Soviet clone of it called Antix, which seems likely for a Soviet computer, although that seems to be too generic a name to find anything related by searching.
Mine's lived in a wooden hut by 1991.
Cybernetics has nothing to do with computing or computers at all; it was a very opinionated attempt at explaining natural and social phenomena in terms of some narrow snippets of control theory. Nothing from that media panic "set USSR back" in computing; the control theory was being used in engineering (case in point: R-7 with a SOTA control system), computers were being developed (BESM-6 was introduced long after the moral panic caused by Wiener's book ended), etc.
The real cause was the engineering tradition (and planned economy which led to twisted economic incentives). Soviet engineering school has been influenced by the German one for half a century, and was really slow at picking up computer science and software engineering as separate disciplines; both were mostly seen as some unimportant subset of applied math. It wasn't some ideological bullshit, just genuine inertia. By the time US programmers had a strong software development culture, Soviet programming culture was stuck at the pure math level. Just read any Soviet textbook or programming manual from that era and you will see the difference immediately. Hardware development has been following suit, struggling not just from the lack of the expertise in high purity chemistry (traditionally weak point of Soviet physics and engineering) and semiconductors, but also from the lack of direction set by the software development and economic incentives. That's why the Soviets decided to copy IBM - and the computer in OP is an IBM PC clone. Not because of the cybernetics (the panic was unrelated and died long before that decision) or any other reason.
>that it would never catch up
Hardware, sure. The software development eventually started to catch up around mid-80s, when the Soviet computing craze has started with first personal computers that were more or less accessible to the population.
Same thing was with information materials - Soviet ones were badly made, severely outdated and rarely available without some kind of special access (you had to know people). I had to translate things from foreign materials (yes, I was lucky to know the right people to gain access to some foreign computer journals), bring books from other neighboring countries (e.g. Bulgaria), etc. As I said, I was lucky - most of my age peers were at best told what the computer is and how one would program it on a whiteboard, if at all.
So yes, by the 80s the Lysenkoist wars were in the past, and actually computers were thought as a way to solve the inadequacies of socialist planning (by then amply evident to all smart people, who were furiously searching for ways to prop up the collapsing system). But general weaknesses of economy, scientific culture, engineering culture, consumer goods manufacturing and in general overall decay of nearly everything (that very soon led to the collapse of the system) ensured that Soviet computer industry was constantly way behind and reduced to badly copying old Western samples, both in the high and consumer ends. It wasn't some one "panic" event that set the Soviets back - it was the inevitable consequence of the overall societal model, and could not have been avoided.
That said, once the USSR collapsed and people could access the world's technology and information freely, people from ex-Soviet countries caught up pretty quickly on the software, indeed - there are a lot of excellent programmers there, though many of them are "from there" already.
Still, by the second half of 80s home computers were more or less available. IIRC a BK-0010 or Mikrosha were around 500-600 rubles, about three monthly salaries of a senior engineer, a lot of people had them, including my family and my uncles/grandparents. And there was a substantial "ecosystem" of a sort around them. Regarding the PCs and workstations, my grandfather, a mechanical engineer (not related to computers in any way), looked for the 1840 in particular (he had some ideas that never worked out) and was able to get it at home by finding the right people, for 1/3 the official price. Which was a lot.
I'd still argue that Lysenkoism can't be compared to the cybernetics panic. The former was an actual attempt to bend the science, the latter was more or less a nothingburger caused by some party cogs freaking out at the suggestion that a PID loop can explain (or Engels forbid, control) the politics. Although they seem to think otherwise in Czechia: apparently that moral panic rippled through the entire Eastern Bloc, and for example forced Antonin Svoboda [1] to leave the country.
>you had to know people
It was a motto of living in USSR, it applied to... everything, basically.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anton%C3%ADn_Svoboda_(computer...
The inevitability of the USSR collapse was certainly framed that way by pro-western ideologues, but my understanding is that it was the result of conscious reforms and more often than not, blunders, taken on Gorbachev and his cadre of supporters.
The first institute tasked with creating computers was set up in 1948, the same year the word "cybernetics" appeared. The USSR had nothing against computer science, and the initial progress in that area was not that bad (given the post-war scarcity). The USSR mainly had issues with some of the more philosophical parts of Norbert Wiener's books.
The USSR failed in its usual manner: the progress was great only while it required just individual brilliance, or something that could be constructed by small teams.
So the USSR had pretty decent discrete-logic computers, including truly innovative stuff like Setun' that was based on ternary logic. And then the USSR predictably started losing ground, once the world moved to integrated circuits.
You just proved the point.
[1] https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262534666/how-not-to-network-a-...
I could not find much in favor or against it. I would say that Stalin really did not care much, in the sense that he was not concerned about computers either way. He had way too much stuff on his plate anyway: executing medical doctors, trying to claw back power from WWII military leaders, that sort of stuff.
The USSR also started serious computation research in 1948, including construction of a fully programmable computer ("MESM - Small Electronic Calculating Device") that was finished in 1950. It actually fit the USSR ideology quite well, the economy was supposed to be centrally planned and computing devices obviously are helpful in creating plans.
Some early computing history of the USSR is fascinating, with real spies and drama. E.g.: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Sarant
So my opinion: there was no real persecution of the early computer science in the USSR. And it's not the reason the USSR eventually fell behind.
The _networking_ was an entirely different story. The USSR government instinctively was against making communication across hierarchical structures easier.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Cybersyn
There's a book called "Cybernetic Revolutionaries" about it, I haven't read it yet though.
https://www.kino-teatr.ru/movie/kadr/4780/65656.jpg
Just a funny reminder of how it was promoted at some point.
The was during the most intense period of “anti-cybernetic” sentiment.
The biggest negative factor affecting Russian computer science was the fact that the US has been at economic war with them for essentially the last century. There has almost never been a time when Russia didn’t have heavy sanctions against is.
For example, when Toshiba sold CNC machines to Russia in 1987, the US threatened to ban their access to the US market entirely.
One day we discover this old russian tech that was a fork-in-road tech-wise 70 years ago and is ultimately the key to beating the enemy!
The best part though is that even a long time ago in a galaxy far far away they used ST-225 drives!
https://www.amusingplanet.com/2019/12/vladimir-lukyanovs-wat...
Legend has it that there was once a water-cooled Soviet mainframe model. At some point one of the machines was overheating and it was tracked down to the algae growth in coolant tubes. So the joke was that this made Soviets the pioneers of bionic computing.
The Linux source is included, which can be a good way to understand how you can implement such a game.
At least in 50 years we should be easily able to crack all the signing keys etc so we can boot old software and write new software the passes auth checks on old hardware.
SBC are picking up that trend and JH7110 is a good contender to the final hardware.
The only thing left is to make sure the GPU saturates with one CPU core. The driver is still too broken to judge.