Moscow retrocomputer club at Teksteili, and the Yandex Museum/Store

My friends managed to open a retrocomputer club that was in a basement of a youth center in eastern part of Moscow, later it was transformed to Yandex store/museum. Now there are as Soviet/East block machines, like PDP-11 compatible Electronica-60, DVK3m, BK11, or Soviet DOS compatibles like ES1841 or Iskra1030, also some interesting Western machines like NEXT, Apple][e or IBM 5155. Here the pics of that place around 2011 and now, the present Yandex museum/store.

Old “Soviet/East block computer club” around 2011

the present Yandex Store/Museum at Moscow

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Thanks for the links and welcome!.. I really love the former Soviet computers - some are really strange but they always challenge the thinking from the western hemisphere.

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thanks for the good words ! About Soviet computers - here even was a home computer based on PDP-11 architecture - the BK10-01 and BK11M -

bout BK

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Well we (USA) had home PDP 11 – Heathkit H11.

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The machine running that fancy flight simulator on the blue screen (seen in the 2011 photo stream), is this an UKNC? It may be nice to learn more of the various soviet PDP-11 compatibles and what they were actually capable of.

No. that’s “Poisk-1” XT clone. the game is 1988’ Grand Prix Circuit. UKNC can be seen on later stream of Yandex store - the one with green acreen and title on it “Road Fighter”

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Just for reference:

https://twitter.com/Foone/status/1191186873797902336

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Are there any points awarded for getting everything wrong? :wink:

It may be interesting how this compares to the BBC micro’s Tube. It seems to be pretty much the same idea. (The kind of integration is apparently different as this also may perform as some kind of graphics card, etc, and is probably a more low level approach.)

Ah, haven’t you heard the song? “Nothing compares 2 Tube®” - it seems then that the UKNC is a dual-PDP11, maybe a little like the idea of the dual-Z80 Superbrain, and other machines of the day. It would indeed be interesting if that inter-processor communication bus and protocol was something which could be broken out and the machine expanded today with a fast secondary CPU.

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A thorough comparison of the two machines may be interesting. The BBC Micro was probably the archetypal educational microcomputer of the West (and probably the best 8-bit micro of its time) and the UKNC may be the closest to a soviet counterpart. While the latter one is about 5 years later, hence 16 bit, faster clock at 8 MHz and more RAM, the two computers apparently share some basic characteristics or concepts, like an eye at the OS, graphics, expandability, networking quite early on, etc., based on a readily available processor.

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I saw a youtube video from ChaosConstrucntions festival about the UKNC, there it was told, yes, that it has two CPU’s… Also in professional DVK3m color grapical controller - “KCGD” can work as a computer insid computer - play games while main CPU is disabled

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I guess, there must have been some clever memory architecture in place…