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Technology

Soviet Computing Technology? 41

Posted by Cliff from the what-did-they-use dept.
TSServo asks: "I started wondering about this the other day in one of my more dull moments at work. What was the USSR using for processors and an OS during the cold war and prior? I doubt that any US based company such as Intel had them on their mailing list. They developed some pretty darn sophisticated stuff and had to have been using something. Does anyone have any information on who the Soviet software and hardware tech leaders were, and moreso how this stuff stacked up against our products during that time?"
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Soviet Computing Technology? More

Soviet Computing Technology?

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  • Babelfish [altavista.com] does support Russian-to-English (scroll to the very bottom of the list).

    Too bad it breaks on this insider story [demos.ru]. The story is mostly about Russian business - it talks about the OS only in the very beginning.

  • Returning to the old Soviet computers (Soviet Union died about 9 years ago) -- in the USSR of 50s - 80s military designs *were* superior to most of the civilian ones. Just because about 30% of Soviet budget was military. And military had been able to get the best hardware, fabs, and heads. The Elbrus project (quite advanced for 70s -- tagged memory, parallel architecture, high-level 'assembly language') had lots of military applications and some of parts, IIRC, were classified. Several other military-inspired designs were classifed, too; it covers not only computers, but a whole lot of more or less advanced researches and designs in any area.
  • An interesting question I already thought of myself. A quick search with Google revealed the following links: o An ACM article http://www.acm.org/crossroads/xrds5-3/soviet.html o An article about a mainframe called BESM-6 (interesting technical details) http://www.mailcom.com/besm6 o Again something about BESM-6 http://www.icfcst.kiev.ua/text/triumph.htm o A byte column with some notes about russion soft and hardware http://www.byte.com/column/monitor/BYT19990722S000 4 o Some history (including inventors, starts about midpage) http://www-scm.tees.ac.uk/users/a.clements/History /History.htm http://www.byte.com/column/monitor/BYT19990722S000 4
  • Someone else has already mentioned KFKI [www.kfki.hu]. This group was based out of Hungary. Their TPA series consisted of PDP-8, PDP-11, and VAX clones. Some of the systems were reverse engineered. Others were made up of smuggled parts. There's a decent Hungarian website [telnet.hu] covering some history of the TPA line. The site is maintained by Akos Vargo, who himself has a respectable collection of these old TPA machines.
  • Minor nit - it's the F-15 *Eagle*, not Falcon.

    -Vercingetorix
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • homed in russia (Dynamo of Kiev

    Dinamo Kyiv (I think that's the official name) is based in the capital of Ukraine, not Russia (now, at least).
    __
  • D'oh! I knew that. Thanks for the boot to the head. :)
  • They got some masks for making some older Intel processor (8086 maybe?) somehow, but couldn't make pure enough silicon, so they scaled the design up to a larger size, and its maximum speed ended up being only a few hundred khz.

    Also heard about the navy capturing Soviet sonobuoys and discovering that they had some modified Atari game computers in them.

    But, this stuff is only hearsay... who knows. I put even less faith in those stories than the average slashdot comment. :-)

    Seems like they could have done some pretty advanced stuff depending on whether it was a priority for the government.
  • Our project is not based on IA-64 architecture. It is protected by our own patents. So, no legal problems.

    I hope they are not Russian patents. I was astonished when I read that someone had patented the bottle.
    __
  • I don't know whether this is apocryphal: I heard that the Soviets built some computers according to American plans. But the plans were in the Imperial system (like in Burma?) and the Soviets were metric. So they decided that 1 in = 2.54 cm exactly.

    They built computer parts that worked but were not interoperable with Western equipment.
    __
  • COTS = Commercial Off The Shelf

  • One inch *is* 2.54 centimetres exactly. It used to be 2.5399977 centimentres, but the definition was changed (sometime around 1990, I think).

    Of course, this story may be apocraphyl. I wonder what the consequences of having inches differ by 23nm are, if any.

  • Actually, I was reading in some mag about how the next frontier in chip making is to stack chips so they can communicate faster. One company invented a way to solder two processors and 3 memory chips together at the edges for the military's computerized soldier program. It was neat, about the size of a sugar cube. But they said that only the military could probably afford it. I have also heard of the military being able to afford really exotic and rediculously expensive tech like synthetic diamond substrates, because diamond is the best known conductor of heat, or exotic semiconductor materials like rubidium.
  • Was this perhaps a clone of the Tandy Model 16 or 6000? These machines used Z-80s for CP/M and TRS-DOS programs and the M68K for Unix.
  • Rumor that this tech went into crusoe chip. Here is an excerpt from this website. [elbrus.ru]

    February 25, 1999, Moscow, Russia -- Today Elbrus International, a Russian microprocessor design company, disclosed the details of its revolutionary new microprocessor to the Russian press. The new technology promises to redefine the processor performance frontier. The microprocessor, termed E2k, will function 3 to 5 times more quickly than Merced, the next-generation Intel chip, while still running all legacy software. The E2K project represents the latest commercial endeavor of the former Soviet Union's most talented computer scientists, many of whom have designed and delivered three generations of supercomputers, including those running the Russian Space Mission Control and the Russian Missile Defense System.

    I think it would be cool if this was real. Hmmm, a new processor maybe for macs? Sweet!

  • Robotron manufactured most of the old Warsaw Pact's computer technology. They built a lot of PDP clones and some more original designs, but they relied a lot on reappropriated Western technology.

    Robotron produced an 8-bit chip called the U880 that was basically a copy of the ZX80 chip until reunification in 1990. It was generally believed that the chip design had been stolen from its British manufacturer and reimplimented unchanged.

    The KC-85 and KC-87 were the only things that could be called a "personal computer" in the East. It had 64k of RAM and could run CP/M. It was roughly equal to early 80's Commodores. It also had a printer, a disk drive and some other peripherals.

    A more interesting factoid: Vladimir Putin was directly invovled with Robotron's operations in the 80's. He was the KGB liason in Dresden and Leipzig who controlled Soviet technology transfers (or to put it another way, he coordinated stealing Western computer designs.)

    Half of eastern Germany's senior computer scientists seem to have worked there at one time or another.

    Robotron is still around, although it is a shadow of its former self. Nowadays its a database services company. They are now "Robotron Datenbank-Software GmbH" and they have a website at http://www.robotron.de/.

    There are still hobbyists playing with old eastern block computers. For the German-compatible, try: http://www.robotron-net.de/, the KC-Club at http://www.iee.et.tu-dresden.de/~kc-club/, and http://robotron.informatik.hu-berlin.de/.
  • ... wiping tears from eyes.

    That was one of the funniest things I've read in a long time. Silly puddy 'tat. hihi.

    Bravo.
  • Wouldn't they have continued using the same things ??

    Or, wouldn't we have seen something of it post cold war ??

    Or was it just a top secret, to be used in the cold war period, but not to be given out after that ??

    just wondering...
  • Or, wouldn't we have seen something of it post cold war ??

    The existance of companies like Elbrus [elbrus.ru] show that there is some competence in the field available.

  • In about 1983-84 I remember one russian Apple II ripoff evaluated in a French computer magazine. The computer was named alice if I remember and had a red case. Since the Apple II was a really cool hack employing no state of the art technology and was even sold with the complete electronical diagrams (Gee I wish PC Mobos were still sold like that too instead of this 20 page ill written pamphlet full of buzzwords you get these days) Anyways, it just wasn't Woz-ardry to clone the whole system and get the parts anywhere in Asia, Europe, India.. whatever. Hong Kong and even Italy was making clones (The Lemon). The RAM were also completely ripped off of course (just go and sue the 80's Warsaw Pact). Things haven't changed for long until PC's came in and I suppose they also ripped them off once any asian country could provide them with chips. Last I heard they were looking for VMS source code right? That was in The Hacker's Crackdown and other told about a second hand market for super computer like crays using Pakistan or India as a middle man. Not hard to believe and it's a US friendly solution. :> :> Why bother investing millions in the development of a product like a PDP if you can get it from "Natsha". Sorry if I sound too 1960-ish, but even a cheap R. Moore James Bond used that line as an ending pun. (The one with Walken)

    A fun story, once looking at a football match on TV (I mean the one with the foot. Foot and the ball.. soccer!) homed in russia (Dynamo of Kiev vs ???) I was watching with a friend the slow teletyped cyrilic results overlayed on the screen in complete amazement. Not only was Russian technology not so bad but the fonts displayed were kindy familiar to us (I mean the size, the bitmap resolution not the alphabet) Then all of a suddent the computer crashed and we were even more amazed as what we saw was:

    ] CATALOG

    Yep! They were using Apple DOS, a complete replica where the OS was in plain English and used probably a program where Cyrilic fonts in a bitmap were cut and pasted like you did in old VGA game designs.

    Sometimes we even used to think the USSR was a hoax, not just it's technology but the whole idea and methods of production. Didn't it turn out to be in the end?

  • . . . in the Soviet Union didn't have the best reputation. I remember reading in Byte magazine (back when it was a real magazine) in the early 1980's about a Soviet Apple ][ clone. One part that stuck in my mind more than anything was that CPU's like the 6502 and Z-80 that the Soviets made (presumably copied) came with a list of instructions that didn't work on that particular chip! Imagine a 6502 with LDA on the defect sheet--what a bummer. This may, however, explain why there is some awesome programming talent there.
  • Sorry, there was a confusion here.
    The Alice was an other red (color :>) crap computer made in France, I can't remember the codename for that russian one. It was published in an old out business magazine called L'Ordinateur Individuel which was a techy heaven with assembly code taking the last 40 pages. (Wooooh hoooh!)

    This is back in those wonderfull days where Microsoft meant Microsoft BASIC only, the label of quality for any of the 20 or so new computer makers on the block (ahem). And also where keyboards had the Error Correcting device. Basicaly it beep when you pressed a key so who wouldn't have blank or 20 times duplicate letter "p" when you entered "print" on a flat keyboard. Great fingers killing devices!

  • but on the analog market, the price of tube guitar amps droped signifigantly after the berlin wall fell, as the warsaw pact was still mass-producing vacuum tubes, whereas we were here with our beautiful solid-state technology
  • Nice job, a very interesting project you have uncovered here actualy. This should even make the news at slashdot (I am serious, this stuff IS hot)

    Still the questions were related to the USSR. And they are very easy to answer eg:

    q) "Who were the leaders of that technology?"
    a) Whoever the state appoints, they have final control.

    Now did the USSR provided the people with one computer for each like a communist state is expected to do? Of course not, just a very small priviledged class which superseeds the Prols like the military or high party members Mmmm?! Strange contradictions, has the USSR gone out of the original specs carefully laid out?

    So did they have a popular computing revolution like we did? The answer comming from the story of early virus writters in Bulgaria seems to say: one shared by a dozen, and all in MS-DOS, so I coded Sophia or xyz out of disgust.

    Now Russia has changed... Pfewww!

  • East German Computers (Score:3)

    by EABinGA ( 253382 ) on Monday November 13, 2000 @05:07AM (#628365)
    I am not too familiar with russian computers, but I have a lot more experience with East German computers, which the russians imported and used a lot.

    One of the last computers they build, was the Robotron ESER 1834, it was an IBM XT compatible. It used a 16 bit K1810WM86 microprocessor (16 bit) and the operating system was DCP 3.2 (Disk Control Programm, i.e. MS-DOS 3.2)It came in 256K or 640K RAM variants, 2x360/720Kb floppies and harddrive. In 1990 they came out with an EC1835, basically an IBM AT.

    Earlier computers ran SCP (a CP/M clone), I also have the manual for a P8000 unix system III. Interesting thing about the P8000, it was a hybrid 8 bit CP/M, 16 bit Unix machine.

    A history of computers build by Robotron can be found at http://robotron.informatik.hu-berlin.de/studienarb eit/files/hardware/hardware.html

  • Most Soviet computing technology of this era was obtained from the US by Soviet spies (KGB, GRU). Most of the stuff they independantly designed was special purpose stuff for the military. Probably still classified. An interesting book about this is the "Mitrokhin Archive".
  • Visit http://www.elbrus.ru/roadmap/e2k.html. AFAIK, they had an excellent x86-compatible microprocessor E2K on paper but they never raised enough funds to make an actual implementation. Below is a quote from that site:
    • "According to the performance figures published in the same report (p.6) our CPU will be two times faster than Merced.
    • It will be 4-5 times faster on x86 binaries with binary compilation.
    • Our project is not based on IA-64 architecture. It is protected by our own patents. So, no legal problems.
    • Our microprocessor ensures security on widespread languages like C and C++, and regular OS like Linux."
  • actually l'ordinateur individuel was not out of business last time i was in france, but changed drastically from a computer tech/programming oriented mag to a bullshit oriented mag.

  • Demos OS (Score:3)

    by Sam Lowry ( 254040 ) on Monday November 13, 2000 @05:44AM (#628369)

    Also, Russians made a damn good UNIX-clone called OS Demos. The project was started in 1982 in http://www.KIAE.ru and the OS quickily became pretty popular and run on many types of russian hardware of the mid-, end-80ies like CM-4, Electronika-1082, Elbrus or EC (PC XT/AT clone).

    Nowadays, I hear rumors about Linux and BSD clones like OC MCBC which are used by FAPSI (Federal Agency for Government Telecomminication and Information)

    and some other secretive institutions.
  • Military technology is not the same thing as civilian technology.
    Even if the US military chips were made by Intel (on a higly classifed contract) you would never see "Intel Inside" label anywhere. Military technology is almost always superior and classifed. Thus I think the soviets had their own contractors and their technology weren't so bad.

  • Then all of a suddent the computer crashed and we were even more amazed as what we saw was:
    ] CATALOG

    <grin> I used to work for a TV station. At the time, all of our titling was done with Chyron boxes in the studio, and our mobile stuff was done with a genlocked Amiga 2000 and a copy of Broadcast Titler 2.0.

    Well, Amigas were fine computers. I love them dearly, and I have several, but I've never known them to be too stable.

    Neither was this one. In the middle of a live broadcast, the computer crashed. It took a good few seconds before any of us noticed the little "Zzzz" mouse pointer (an Amiga hourglass, if you will, looks like a cartoon sleep bubble) sitting in the corner of the Program and On-Air monitors.

    Of course, this was for the Progressive Conservative Leadership Convention in Ottawa a few years ago; a big political thing. And the news director couldn't stop flipping out that the Zzzz looked like we were trying to editorialize the guy currently giving a long and boring speech on the screen.

    No matter what, always remember, if the character generator is not actively superimposing a title, switch it off of the Program bus.

  • Re:Demos OS (Score:3)

    by Sam Lowry ( 254040 ) on Monday November 13, 2000 @05:57AM (#628372)

    Here is the link - http://www.demos.ru/cp866/company/truth.htm - unfortunately, in Russian - with the story of Demos OS. Sorry, Babelfish does not support Russian yet. So does Systran. Funny because AFAIK, SystranSoft has a Russian-to-English translation engine.

    Use http://www.translate.ru instead.

  • I recall that a lot of Soviet computer technology in the late 80's and early '90s was based on a clone of the VAX or microVAX processor from Digital. Apparently, the Soviets had reverse-engineered the chip or had obtained technical specs on it through industrial espionage. These systems ran a Unix-like/ VMS-like OS.
  • I don't think so, at least I can't recall anything tandy compatible, but the Z-80 was extremely popular in the east, because they manufactured it themselves, it was called the U880.

    Sometimes I was invited as a guest to an east german computer club, and they done some wicked stuff with the hardware that was available to them. I was very impressed to see real time video digitilization on a sinclair zx-81. (remember, the computer that normally couldn't even show the screen when it was running a programm)

    One of the companies I worked for in 1990 after the wall fell, was building dual processor 8086 workstations for WYSIWYG high quality typesetting.

    Now, that the news is full of elections, I have a little east german computer election story to tell. :)

    A friend of mine was in charge of programming and running the computer system used in the last east german elections. The way elections worked was, you got a preprinted ballot with a slate of candidates from the party (yes, there was only one party), and you got to drop it in the box. If you didn't like a candidate, you could cross out his name with a single line, but if you did, you would wind up on a list you wouldn't want to be on (State Security). So it isnt surprising that election results look something like this:

    Berlin 99.5%
    Dresden 99.2%
    Leipzig 99.7%
    Halle 99.1%

    And so on... Well, in any case, the east German TV covering the elections wanted to be a little more like the west, and planned to show computer generated bar charts of the election results. My buddy programmed it for them, and during a test run the folks in charge decided they didn't like it, because all bars in the chart were about the same height. (Duh)

    So they decided to reprogramm the system to zoom in at 98% so one could see the difference better. But that didn't fly either, because now, a district with 91.1% would look very bad next to a district having 91.5%, and the head of the party in that district would complain that he looks bad on TV.

    Needless to say, they scrapped the whole idea and just scrolled the districts and their percenteges like the credits at the end of a movie.

    btw. The software used for the elections was ReDaBas (Relational Data Base), known to us westerners as dBase.

  • TPA (Score:1)

    by kps ( 43692 )

    Hungary produced (at least) PDP-8 and PDP-11 clones under the label "TPA". From the PDP-8 FAQ:

    There was a decree that computer development in Hungary was to cease, with all computers to be purchased from the USSR. In response, the people at KFKI ceased developing computers and began developing "Stored Program Analyzers", the acronym for which is TPA in Hungarian.

    Silly communists!

    The venture capitalist's insistance on avoiding the term computer was based on the stereotype that computers were big and expensive, needing a computer center and a large staff; by using the term Programmable Data Processor, or PDP, DEC avoided this stereotype.

    Silly capitalists!

  • I have checked and I was wrong. From Byte [byte.com] (with typos) and Fred Langa [langa.com]:
    Some of the things we found about Soviet technology were astonishing: For example, in 1990, most US computer chip leads were spaced 1/10 of an inch apart. The Soviet Ministry in charge of cloning western chips had mandated metric spacing, but one-tenth of an inch works out to be about 2.54 mm.; an odd metric size.


    The Soviet solution? A "metric inch" with 2.5 mm spacing. This means that Soviet clone chips could be an exact electrical and functional equivalent of their Western counterparts, and even look exactly the same--- until you tried to plug them into a western socket. The Soviet chips would almost fit--- but not quite.

    There are more impressions of glasnost-era computing in the rest of the article.
    __
  • State of the art in the mid-80's:

    * Elbrus, under development: a family of different CPUs; some of them were called SVS, basically advanced BESM (see below); some were "high-level" processors bridging the lexical gap (a la iAPX432). Original Soviet design. One interesting use was on-board flight control and automatic landing of the Soviet shuttle (Buran) in 1988.

    * VAX clones, under development.

    * ES series: IBM/360 clones. The government-mandated mainframe. Some ESes had vector co-processors.

    * SM series: PDP-11 clones. The government-mandated mini.

    * BESM6: 60's era monsters, built with transistors(!), real core memory and magnetic drums. 1 megaflop peak per processor. 6-byte words. 64K words memory space. Integers are denormalized floats. Drums were eventually replaced with ES disks, core memory with 64K chips (hanging in the middle of the vast space vacated by the cores), but huge transistor CPU stayed. Nice toy, but kinda big. Used mostly by the Academy of Sciences.

    * Various military microprocessors.

    * Whatever it was called: PC sized PDP-11 clones.

    * Oversized calculators slowly evolving in microcomputers. Were coded in Basic. Bizzare - all numbers in BCD.

    * Bunch of home-brew processors from universities.
    One of those which got government funding was designed for Modula-2 and as such didn't have a GOTO (JUMP) instruction. Fortran compiler designers had to push address on stack and return.

    Soviet VAX clones were developed on real VAXes.

    There were enough companies willing to break COCOM restriction and deliver latest PCs, UNIX boxes,
    HPs, VAXes and many more.
  • Military technology is not the same thing as civilian technology.

    Bzzt, sorry, thanks for playing. While this was true in the very early days of computing, it hasn't been true for some years. Nowadays, the military wants COTS (Cheap Off The Shelf). If Intel has an entire fab line pouring Pentium IIIs onto the market, it's far cheaper for the military to buy P3s than to pay Intel to abandon their current fab line and make new chips custom to military spec.

    Military technology is almost always superior and classified.

    Bzzt, thanks for playing. The on-board computer on an F-15C Falcon is the rough equivalent of an Intel 80286. I think the entire avionics fits in 4mb, but I'm not sure.

    On the F-22 (Raptor? Lightning II? What the heck is its name this week, anyway?), all the on-board avionics are controlled by a chip roughly equivalent to an 80486/33.

    Military computer hardware tends to be old, like ten years or so out of date. The reason for this is the military doesn't want to get a Pentium division bug. If your brand-spanking-new-in-1990 Pentium chip has a hardware error on long division, okay, great, your Quicken software shows you the wrong result. If that chip is controlling an aircraft or weaponry, someone dies.

    Because of this, the DoD has standards for reliability which very few chips can live up to--and they very rarely buy anything which hasn't been proven by years in the marketplace.

    There's also the problem of chip design. Put bluntly, the military has nobody capable of pushing the state of the art in chip design. All the expert chip designers are working in private industry, making money hand over fist. So how could the military have all these brilliant designs, when they don't have any chip designers?

    There's a myth out there that says military hardware is new and bleeding-edge. It's not, and the military likes it that way.
  • vacuum tubes ... are harder to disable via electromagnetic pulse weapons.

    Apparently, a lot of the missile detecting radar stations installed by the U.S. in the Canadian and Alaskan arctic used tubes (for that reason, perhaps?). There was a period (must have been after the cold war) when the the tubes had been discontinued by the American company, but not all the stations had been converted to transistor electronics. During that time, the only source of vacuum tubes of that type was a Russian company.

  • BESM6: 60's era monsters, built with transistors(!), real core memory and magnetic drums.

    For more information, see the BESM-6 Nostalgia Page [mailcom.com].

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