Soviet Era Eastern Bloc Computing Questions

[EdS]

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:

Pioneers Of Soviet Computing

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.

What is an Operating System? A historical investigation (1954–1964)

Fascinating Soviet mechanical computer in Russia: the Ascot 170

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…

PK 11/16 - Russia's advanced 16 bit machine with PDP-11 inside

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…

Aleste 520EX - a Russian tribute to Amstrad's CPC

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…

In russia FORTH finds you

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.

To the Moon, on Zond - Soviet computing in space

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…

Cemetery of Soviet computers

Viewer discretion is advised: lots of computer hardware in really sad condition.

East European microcomputing - a series of posts (with pix)

Here’s what I might call a tootstorm, from eiZen on mastodon: (You can, right now, see them all at the top of their profile page, or at the top of the #retrocomputing tag. But next week, you’ll thank me for linking to each toot.)

The story of Tetris

There’s a short account here, by way of a review of a graphic novel of the story: The Bizarre History of ‘Tetris’ And some snippets of that graphic novel can be seen here: There’s a nice long-form written story of Tetris by Jimmy Maher here: A Tale of the Mirror World, Part 1: Calculators and Cybernetics The Digital… A Tale of the Mirror World, Part 2: From Mainframes to Micros → A Tale of the Mirror World, Part 3: A Game of Falling Shapes → A Tale of the Mirror World, Part 4: A Differen…

Tunguska – Ternary, 6502-like processor emulation

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…

What was the trinary computer?

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:

An article on the history of computer technology in the GDR (in German)

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…

An East German, home-built Z80-computer from the mid 1980s, running CP/M

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.)

Electronika - putting PDP-11 on your desk and in your hand

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…

Hackaday on the MESM-6 project

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…

Pros and cons of BESM-6

BESM-6 with its operator

Just a BESM-6 with its operator https://twitter.com/sovietvisuals/status/1399261361448816640 [E2ZvsIrVcAox2_V]

And then, if looking for reading material for further research, this might be a good starting point:

List of Soviet computer systems