I know that copies/clones of western machiens existed. Heck I wanna say they made a micro-variant of the PDP-11.
I do know that they experimented in trinary (though I forget what/if anything it’s useful for in spite of all the down sides.
Just, given everything going on in the world and the iron curtain slamming down again? Seemed topical from a hardware, software, and sociological perspective.
EdS
March 23, 2022, 8:27pm
2
We’ve certainly touched on this theme - searching the forum for past threads is often fruitful, I’ve often forgotten things that I’ve certainly read. I can think of three or four keywords which would bring results.
Here are some threads which turn up:
A search for some background information on a Soviet computer led me to this book found on the Internet Archive.
Abstract: Boris N. Malinovsky’s Pioneers of Soviet Computing is the English language version of his earlier Russian language The History of Computing in Personalities. Partly technical history and partly a memoir, it is the only existing first person account of the birth of modern computing in Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus.
My brother-in-law just showed me this absolutely amazing piece of machinery (link in Russian):
If you don’t speak Russian (mine isn’t nearly good enough to read the page), use Google Translate; it’s pretty good on this particular page, although you may wish to know that: “car” probably means “machine”, “lamp” probably means “tube”, “earn” means “work”, and maybe a few others that you can hopefully figure out as you go!
This video in particular is amazing, he shows the internals of the machin…
Only a few hundred of this Russian machine were made, in the latter part of the 80s, but it looks pretty special. Apparently non-rectangular windows were supported too, by whatever special hardware was in the machine.
Here’s an emulator running a feature demo:
[Союз-Неон ПК-11/16, Демо, исправленная яркость]
At 8MHz it has, apparently, slightly less performance than the Amiga 500.
Some photos at the Soviet Museum where we learn it had, or could have, 1M Byte of memory. (Via twitte…
Here’s a rarity, only some dozens made:
http://www.cpcwiki.eu/index.php/Aleste_520EX
The Aleste 520EX is a clone of the Amstrad CPC 6128 developed 1993 by Patisonic in Omsk (Siberia). The Aleste is rare, according to Patisonic themselves, they “produced several dozens of the model, some of them were in ‘kit’ form” .
It’s compatible with CPC6128, with extra graphics modes, ability to support more RAM, improved expansion port, and so on. Here’s a photo of the machine (the board) fitted into…
Looking for ideas for a FPGA/PAL project;
I got looking at trinary computers. Great front PANEL
device led +1 green 0 off -1 red and 3 state switches up +1 0off -1 down.
In English I found this:
http://brokestream.com/daf.txt
Still looking of programming info in English
on the Setun-70
Ben.
Continuing the discussion from CONvergence Apollo 11 Panel :
Here’s an illustrated article (in Russian) on the computers used in the Soviet space program at time of Apollo:
It was on the basis of “Argon-1” that the first space-based computer was created. The onboard computer Argon-11C was designed to control the movement of the L1 spacecraft from the Zond series during its flyby of the moon and aerodynamic descent to Earth when entering the atmosphere at the second cosmic velocity.
Here - in…
Viewer discretion is advised: lots of computer hardware in really sad condition.
This project isn’t particularly new (2008), however, besides its merits of having conquered the Hacker News front page (which brought this to my attention), it combines two topics some of us seem to like here: the mostly unfulfilled promises of ternary computing and the simplicity and accessibility of the 6502 processor:
Tunguska is a ternary computer emulator. On a good day, it’s performance it is roughly equivalent with that of a personal computer from the 1980’s, with peak speeds around 1,0…
Here are a couple of pointers:
http://ternary.3neko.ru/setun.html
" Setun’ operated on numbers composed of 18 ternary digits, or trits , giving the machine a numerical range of 387,420,489. A binary computer would need 29 bits to reach this capacity."
Trinary, or ternary, has some advantage, in some sense I don’t fully understand, of needing a little less effort to do arithmetic. See here where we see this quote:
Most economical radix for a numbering system is 𝑒 (about 2.718) when econo…
I’m sure there’s more!
Edit: there is more:
Nice find! There’s a comparison table in there of various machines from the Germanys and elsewhere.
I like the use of computers in optical systems design - something which can improve an existing technology - by Carl Zeiss Jena in the middle of the 50s, and described here as the first in-house computer. First the OPREMA (“In order to increase the service life of the relays, they were only switched when there was no voltage”), then the ZRA1 (electronic) and then transistor-based machines.
We se…
I still love the minimalistic design!
A more practical question: How would you come up with the BIOS and BDOS adaptations and PL/M compilers in the GDR in order to run CP/M on a custom machine? Where the resources available and well understood? (English documentation probably provided a serious language barrier.)
With the cloned LSI-11 chip, the К1801ВМ1 and family, the Soviet brand Electonica produced an all-in-keyboard home computer in 1984:
and then in 1986 a handheld computer, the MK-85, running Basic and selling perhaps 150 thousand units selling for just 145 roubles ($230 approx):
[Elektronika MK-85 Short Introduction]
See also this technical info site which says it was quite expensive at the price and also very slow:
http://oldcomputermuseum.com/elektronika_mk85.html
In normal mo…
Article on Hackaday on the MESM-6 project :
The MESM-6 project is focused on bringing the 1960s Soviet BESM-6 computer to the modern age of FPGAs and HDLs. At the moment the team behind this preservation effort consists out of [Evgeniy Khaluev] , [Serge Vakulenko] and [Leo Broukhis], who are covering the efforts on the Russian-language project page .
The BESM-6 (in Russian: БЭСМ-6, ‘Bolshaya Elektronno-Schetnaya Mashina’ or ‘large electronic computing machine’) was a highly performing Soviet sup…
And then, if looking for reading material for further research, this might be a good starting point:
This is the list of Soviet computer systems. The Russian abbreviation EVM (ЭВМ), present in some of the names below, means “electronic computing machine” (Russian: электронная вычислительная машина).
The Russian abbreviation EVM (ЭВМ), present in some of the names below, means “electronic computing machine” (Russian: электронная вычислительная машина).
Computer systems from the Ministry of Radio Technology:
Computer systems from the Ministry of Instrument Making:
6 Likes
jhi
March 24, 2022, 6:43am
4
Sorry to point out the obvious (I am “that guy”, I guess), but there is History of computing in the Soviet Union - Wikipedia which seems to have a decent collection of pointers.
1 Like
EdS
March 24, 2022, 8:16am
5
Sorry @Singletona that wasn’t my aim! I was a bit surprised myself at the number of hits for my searches. Which is a good sign about the health of this forum: intentionally it’s a discussion space with a record, so the back-catalogue is part of the aim. It’s also a bad sign about my memory!
1 Like
oldben
March 24, 2022, 4:42pm
6
A emulator of a Soviet computer design, a trinary 6502.
http://tunguska.sourceforge.net/docs.html
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EdS
March 24, 2022, 4:58pm
7
For myself, I don’t have any direct experience of the Soviet computing story - other than seeing the BESM machine in London’s Science Museum - but I do like to look at computer history as widely as I can, and I do tend to react against a US-centric telling of the story.
I have wondered about buying one of the Elektronika RPN calculators , but it would be a real struggle to use it, and I probably wouldn’t!
1 Like