Reverse Engineering a Soviet CMOS Chip

I hope the mods fix that since the blog post is more important.

I lived in USSR, but not in Russia but in Baltics 30 years of my life. In Soviet Union you couldn't mail order any stuff. In planned economy you supposed to depend on local shops. In practice it meant that it was really important where you lived and who you knew. The shops a la Radio Shack existed, but these were relatively rare and were mostly full of stuff nobody really wanted or couldn't buy. Things were really different if you lived near some big factory/lab dealing with electronics and knew someone who worked in there. Stealing in these places was very common, even normal. Thing could be prohibitively expensive though, especially if you were teenager.

Russia 90-2000. Few common spots to find electronic components were:

1) dumpsters - literally, after school we went on a hunt for thrown away TVs and other stuff. Especailly near factories. We knew some common spots to loot and visited them periodically. Many of those logic/gates/counters ICs I had came from one junkyard near the industrial zone - they used to "respawn" in a form of pcbs from old mainframes or something like that (pcbs were varnished and removeing ics was huge pain in a butt)

2) TV repair shops. They usually had some stuff they don't need and with enough persistence (aka soft skills) we as kids were able to get some goodies, along with books and advice.

3) Absolute treasure - someone working at a factory that is miraculously not closed yet - getting aka stealing stuff for them was easy. Stealing stuff from school and other places we could gain access to was also a thing - they often had a lot of old crap sitting in basement, like record players, amplifiers.

4) Radio markets and shops. These were often out of reach for kids especially in that period, but sometimes we were able to save enough money for something that can be purchased but not found elsewhere. The choice was also very limitted, but I found few ex-engineers selling a lot of goodies stolen during their employment - selling these was ofter the only way to survive, but again with enough "soft skills" we were able to "loot" them for free.

5) In soviet era there were a lot of clubs for kids/teenagers, even in small towns you could find a club with teacher where everyone can come and learn how to build some electronic stuff. Those usually had access to element base. During 90s most of them have closed, those who survived were barely afloat in this new world. I personally never had a good experience with those, but know that someone did, so getting goodies there was also a possibility.