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Technology

What Were Soviet Computers Like? 80

Posted by Cliff from the differences-in-technology-due-to-nationality dept.
kwertii asks: "Does anyone have any information on computing in the former Soviet Union? A Google search turned up this virtual museum, which has some good historical background on the development of early Soviet computer technology (a lot only in Russian, unfortunately) but not much on later systems. What sorts of architectures did Soviet computers use? Were there any radically different computing concepts in use, like a standard 9-bit byte or something? What kind of operating systems were common? How has the end of the Cold War and the large scale introduction of Western computer technology affected the course of Russian computer development?"
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What Were Soviet Computers Like? More

What Were Soviet Computers Like?

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  • Like IBM's. (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Bob_Robertson ( 454888 ) on Monday February 18, 2002 @09:21PM (#3029642) Homepage
    The reality is that the KGB was stealing American computer designs from the beginning. As Glastnost was coming into being, and the "west" was getting a look into how things worked inside the Soviet system, they discovered that they were running clones of the IBM 360's.

    I've seen an interview recently with an ex-KGB big-wig who said he realized how bankrupt the Soviet system was as he learned how little they developed "in house" rather than copied from the west. The Soviets were always one or two generations of technology behind simply because they weren't inventing it.

    Bob-

  • Architecture (Score:1, Funny)

    by theNote ( 319197 )
    CPUs were made of black market levi jeans.
    Case cooling was achieved through imported Coke mixed with domestic Vodka.

    Gorky Park CDs were all a CD ROM drive could play.

    Yakov Smirnov was a coding god.

    At least thats how I picture it.....

  • Another.. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Xunker ( 6905 ) on Monday February 18, 2002 @09:26PM (#3029665) Homepage Journal
    An an slightly different node, I found this link a while ago that discusses, in great depth, Sinclair Clones [nvg.ntnu.no] from teh late 1970's to the early 1990's.

    Another thing I remember reading a long while ago was an article in "A+/Incider" magazine (and Apple II magazine) where the cover story was the giant headline "Red Apples"; in it they talked about a close of the Apple IIe that looked like a negative of the Apple IIe we know (black case, white keys), but otherwise was more or less the same -- compatible logic, just made somewhere else. I may even throw that coppy in my flatbed if there is enoguh interest.

    If I had to guess, all but either very high-end or very early machine will be of the same designs as western counterparts, probably for engineering reasons because an engineer doesn't want to reinvent the wheel (or bitwise logic in this case) just to make machine to do word processing.

    • Re:Another.. (Score:3, Informative)

      by morcheeba ( 260908 )
      Here's some info on the Agat [old-computers.com] - a clone of an Apple II.

      If you want to buy an old Russian computer, try here (has many pictures!) [seller2001.euro.ru]. I don't know if this guy's stock is representative of 1980's Russian computing, but it contains a lot (31) of Sinclair clones [seller2001.euro.ru], and information on other computers, including IBM PC-compatibles [seller2001.euro.ru]. If nothing, the names listed should help searches.

      • Re:Another.. (Score:2, Informative)

        by deicide ( 195 )
        Sinclair clones are VERY reprepsentative of personal computer market of that time. There were literally dozens of variants, with various extensions and addons, custom operating systems, modified OS, etc. They were self-made (I've had one of those, total cost: $20), with mass-produced pc boards and cases, and even factory-made (even with OS translated to russian.

        Most of them connected to a TV and used tape recorders for storage. Eventually, I had a dot-matrix printer and could've gotten a 5" floppy drive if I really wanted. I've seen mice, modems and light pens. I've seen cable and broadcast tv system's audio channel used to broadcast binary data when station wasn't broadcasting regular programming (would that be predecessor to cable modems?) We would record audio to tapes and then load them back into computer.

        There were clones of 286 PC's as well (Poisk), although that was just about when I moved to this side of the ocean..

        There were also completely original computers with BASIC or FORTRAN interpreter as "operating system".
        • heh he.. sinclair modems.

          I remember trying to set up a system with a friend across town where the spectrums were wired up to mangled phones and we'd send messages by saving a program across the phone that the other end would load and then repeat... each message also included the basic app required to send the next one - or something - I forget now

    • Re:Another.. (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      I live in the USSR. Most of what I saw where:

      - Z80 machines running CP/M or custom operating systems like the DIOS

      - Sinclair clones

      When the opening to the west happened, there was a huge leap in technology because 286 and 386SX PCs were brought.

      I was fortunate enough to have one, and it seemed to me, at that time, that they had gigantic CPU power and a huge memory.

      I was running benchmarks all the time to compare my 386sx with my Sinclair.

      My 386sx was about 10-15 times faster, and had 15 times more memory!

      How was that for a leap?

      Now in Eastern Europe we have very good programmers. Why?

      Because, when the outside world is not that interesting and funny, more and more people have fun (I mean, programming is lots of fun) with their computers!

      Thank you for your time reading this, and sorry for posting as AC. I don't have a ./ account and I find logging it each time in order to read ./ is pretty hard.
      • >Thank you for your time reading this, and sorry for posting as AC. I don't have a ./ account and I find logging it each time in order to read ./ is pretty hard.

        you know, you can cookie your logon and only have to actually log on once a year, when your cookie expires.
    • Thye have (had?) one of the Russian Sinclair clones in a display case by the stairs at the staff entrance of the National Science Museum in London when I was there (~5 years ago). First time I had ever seen one. I've often thought how much fun it must have been trying to deal with the strange 5 functions / key system that the Spectrum had PLUS having everything in Cyrrilic(sp?)!

      I'd love to pick up one of those babies!

    • i have a good friend who is from bulgaria, and there they mass-produced an apple IIe knockoff called the Pravetz. they reverse engineered the apple and started making their own version. He said that they ended up being more powerful than any of the apple II line. People like the Dark Avenger (ever had a real computer virus? he probably wrote it) grew up hacking these things. anyway, they are mentioned in a really good wired article [wired.com] about the Dark Avenger and the Soviet Bloc's more recent computing history, and Woz even has a picture of one [woz.org] on his website.

  • link (Score:5, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 18, 2002 @10:15PM (#3029732)
    http://rickman.com/brett/russian_computing/ -- also has bibliography to printed materials
    • Mod parent up -- it's one of the only two informative posts so far (and no, that guy ranting about how you have to go to the library to do research is not insightful)

      Link for the lazy:

      http://rickman.com/brett/russian_computing/ [rickman.com]

    • Ryad line (Score:4, Informative)

      by clem.dickey ( 102292 ) on Tuesday February 19, 2002 @12:14AM (#3030100)
      In the late 70s or early 80s ACM's "Computing Surverys" ran an article on Soviet computing. Here's what I remember:

      The Soviets said that military computers were generally original designs.

      Most of the commercial computers were either IBM 360/370 models diverted through 3rd countries (direct exports were prohibited) or the Soviet "Ryad" line. Ryads were 360/370 copies. Not having to worry about copyright andd patent issues, the East copied IBM mainframes directly. IBM engineers recognized an I/O problem with one Soviet model, since the IBM original had the same problem. Just as the 360 model development was split among groups in Poughkeepsie and Endicott, different Soviet Bloc countries were assigned development/manufacturiing responsibility for the copies.

      Software was, of course, pirated OS/360. (Back in those days, software came with source.)
    • Also this [bashedu.ru] page has interesting info. History, timeline, pics.

  • The Old-Fashioned Way (Score:2, Insightful)

    by fm6 ( 162816 )
    Let's see, so far we've got one offtopic post, one bigoted and ignorant post from the Tom Clancy crowd, and the usual noise. I don't think you'll get much help here. Sometimes all you can find online is opinion and rumor.

    Now, don't get me wrong. I love the Web in general and Slashdot in particular. Both are invaluable resources for obscure little questions like the one you're asking. I know I used to write technical documentation without having the net as a reference source -- but I'm damned if I remember how.

    Still, information you can get through this kind of informal research is limited in scope. There's a lot of stuff online -- but a lot more that's not. A lot of texts exist only in proprietary databases, not on the web. Not to mention the the much larger document base that simply doesn't exist in eletronic form.

    You need to find a good library, probably one at a university or in a major city. They all have web sites (librarians love the web) and usually have their catalogs online. But searching a library catalog is not as simple as typing a few content words into Google. You probably need to interface with one of those old-fashioned access nodes that are only available onsite -- the ones with comprehensive heuristic and associative search features. I refer, of course, to reference librarians.

    • That's very politically correct of you. You show a tendency common to most PC types -- Don't let the facts get in the way of feel-good politics.

      The Soviet Union didn't do very much independent computer design after the early 1960's. Various Soviet agencies and front organizations obtained IBM, Burroughs and Sperry-Univac mainframes and setup factories to manufacture spares and even a few backward-engineered copies.

      The Soviet Union did not embrace information technology. It was a society that was essentially living in the 1930's. Heavy industry was the priority of the USSR, not semiconductors.

      If you looked on the desks of Soviet desk jockeys in the late 80's, you'd find most offices to be non-computerized (like many western offices). The ones with computers had green screens, IBM or Apple clones. Engineers had Intergraph or Apolla stuff.

      The truth isn't bigoted or ignorant.
      • I love the term "Politically Correct". It allows you to dismiss any difference of opinion as a kneejerk reaction. Which is itself, of course, a kneejerk reaction.

        (I once heard Night of the Living Dead condemned as "Politically Correct" because the main character was black. Too typical.)

        Look, I never said the Soviets never ripped off American technology. The US leads the planet in this area. People imitate us. Well, duh. Go to the Sony web site sometime and read that company's history. Their early attempts to reverse-engineer and manufacture magnetic recording devices are quite amusing.

        I'm no expert on the history of Soviet technology. But I do know enough to know that saying "They never did anything with computers except rip off American designs" is simplistic and stupid. In point of fact, Soviet engineers in all areas were not able to imitate Western technology as much as they would have liked. There were many reasons for this, some obvious, some not. If you're really interested in the subject, go do some actual reading. In any case, spare us the Clancy cliches.

        • The term "Politically Correct" in this context means that you are more concerned with your notion of "fairness" towards the former Soviet Union than the facts.

          You have further reinforced my assessment of your original post with your reply. You suggest that i visit the Sony web site to learn about their early reverse-engineering efforts, then admit that you know virtually nothing about Soviet technology. You then assert (while posting in "Ask Slashdot") that we would all be better served by reading printed books (that Tom Clancy didn't write) on the subject rather than asking people on the web.

          Maybe you should have taken a second to read my post. In that post I stated clearly that Soviets did have their own computer innovations until sometime in the 1960's. At that point it was cheaper and easier for them to appropriate and/or copy Western equipment. Technology as it applied to semiconductors just was not a priority.

          Spare this forum your offtopic pseudo-intellectual rants and go away.

          • It's so paradoxical being PC. On the one hand, people assume you're so thoroughly brainwashed that you can't think for yourself. On the other hand, they continue to lecture you as if you were actually capable of rational thought!

            Well, I can't sneer. Here I am arguing with a guy who enters the discussion with the premise that nothing I say can make sense. Pretty futile, no?

            But I love the way you put "fair" in quotes. In this context "fair" simply means admitting that you don't know what you don't know. It means being skeptical about your own prejudices and assumptions.

            It might help if you separate out the issue of whether the Soviet system was morally bankrupt and profoundly inefficient. Actually, that's not even an issue any more -- almost everybody agrees that it was. But it doesn't follow from this fact that Soviet technology consisted entirely of pathetic American rip offs. However screwed up the state was, it had some brilliant citizens, and only a bigot would dismiss their accomplishments out of hand.

      • Re:The Old-Fashioned Way (Score:4, Insightful)

        by Peter H.S. ( 38077 ) on Tuesday February 19, 2002 @07:57PM (#3035283) Homepage
        The Soviet Union did not embrace information technology. It was a society that was essentially living in the 1930's. Heavy industry was the priority of the USSR, not semiconductors.

        If you looked on the desks of Soviet desk jockeys in the late 80's, you'd find most offices to be non-computerized (like many western offices). The ones with computers had green screens, IBM or Apple clones. Engineers had Intergraph or Apolla stuff.

        The USSR was indeed behind behind the west regarding advanced semiconductor technologi, but your anectdotical evidence can be misleading, since the USSR soviet economy was sharply devided into a civilian part (who got almost nothing) and a military who had first priority.
        So even though the standard USSR office was pen-and-paper, the military complex would have access much more advanced technology.
        IMHO, soviet military equipment since WWII to until the eighties, was often on par, if not better, than US equipment (especially missilies, tanks, infantery weapons, airplanes, though perhaps not avionics).
        OTOH, civilian USSR equipment was always decades behind, what could be found in the west.

        The truth isn't bigoted or ignorant.
        I believe that a famous USSR newspaper was called "Pravda", meaning "The Truth" ;-).

  • Bug free code (Score:5, Interesting)

    by andaru ( 535590 ) <andaru2@onebox.com> on Monday February 18, 2002 @11:38PM (#3029931) Homepage
    I remember a book called Writing Bug Free Code (yes, you all scoff, but this is for real) written by a Russian computer scientist.

    The basic premise was that he was using punch cards, and the actual computer on which he was compiling and testing his programs was in a relatively distant city.

    He would punch up a set of cards and mail them to where the computer was, which would take a week or two. When they got around to it, they would compile his program and print out a test run using input he gave them. This would take another week. The week or two return trip made the average round trip take a month.

    Now if you had to wait one month to find out that you had missed a semicolon, wouldn't you be more careful?

    • Depends wether it was fixed price or time and materials :-)
    • Now if you had to wait one month to find out that you had missed a semicolon, wouldn't you be more careful?
      Actually, that POV is not restricted to the former Proletarian Dictatorship. Most of my early programming was done by punching FORTRAN and PL/1 code onto punched cards. I used to stay up all night so I could submit my jobs when the turnaround was down to 15 minutes.

      I had a FORTRAN textbook that said this was Very Bad, and not just because of lost sleep. It urged students to think through their code before trying it. Do hand simulation. Read it through with a friend. Later on I read books by people who insisted all software should be "provably correct."

      Now I work with Delphi and Kylix, which thoroughly encourages the cut-and-try approach. Oh well.

      • Including functional front panels, paper tape and thoughts like "Wow, that 1200bps cassette tape is fast!"

        Used to do punch cards in PL/1 at school at least until I discovered the lab with vt-100s in it, and made friends with an operator who showed me how to make the machine punch the cards based on the source file that I had entered at the terminal. ;-) Hello David, are you still out there?

        • Yeah, IBM really resisted interactive computing for a long time. Actually a good thing, since it helped give companies like DEC and DG their shot. One way to do without keypunches in IBM shops was to write a card-reader emulator!

          Are we in nostalgia mode? Elsewhere on /., somebody is asking for help porting his RPG code to Linux. I seem to recall that RPG was little more than a software emulator for an IBM accounting machine, which used plugboard programming to process data on punched cards. Perhaps I misremember. Silly to invent a language for something like that!

  • In... (Score:1, Troll)

    by Satai ( 111172 )
    ...the words of Yakkof Smirnof (or some spelling variation thereof,) in Communist Russia, Computer crash you!

  • Found lots of information (Score:3, Informative)

    by Evil Attraction ( 150413 ) on Tuesday February 19, 2002 @12:57AM (#3030274)
    I found some related (and maybe some not so related) information on this by using Google [google.com] and searching for "soviet union computers technology". Here's a handful of links for ya; Not much, but you might find more for yourself by refining your search a little.

    --
    Evil Attraction

  • Ukraine (Score:4, Informative)

    by Detritus ( 11846 ) on Tuesday February 19, 2002 @01:02AM (#3030291) Homepage
    See this [icfcst.kiev.ua] for a Ukrainian perspective on Soviet computer history.

    You also may want to do a google search on the comp.arch newsgroup. I think the topic has been discussed there.

    The Soviets reverse engineered a number of American designs (IBM 360, PDP-11). They also did some original designs for special applications.

    Some of the work was farmed out to other Warsaw Pact countries, such as the GDR.

  • The PDP-11 series were extensively copied in the USSR, as were the IBM 360 mainframes [csd.uwo.ca]

  • VAX - When you Care Enough to Steal the Very Best (Score:5, Funny)

    by fooguy ( 237418 ) on Tuesday February 19, 2002 @01:57AM (#3030457) Homepage
    This quote is from page 15 of the OpenVMS at 20 publication that Digital Published in 1997. The PDF [compaq.com] is available from Compaq.

    During the cold war, VAX systems could not be sold behind the Iron Curtain. Recognizing superior technology, technical people cloned VAX systems in Russia, Hungary, and China. After learning that VAX systems were being cloned, DIGITAL had the following words etched on the CVAX chip, "VAX...when you care enough to steal the very best."

  • [Adopt cod Russian accent:]

    Glorious new Soviet People's Dual Potato 3000! With advanced UVR (Ultra Root Vegetable(tm)) technology and many obedient clock cycles working for common good. Running Mikkelzoft Window KGB. Own the means of production and experience many kilohertz of glorious revolution in the People's progress today, comrade!

    Adski_
    /

    NB. Before you complain, I must point out that as a Linux user myself, I am of course a fervent communist.
  • I believe that the coolest invention the Russians ever made (concerning computers) was the ternary computer. More appropriately, the balanced ternary computer.
    It was a bit like our binary computers, but it had real potential with the trigits having the values of up, down and neutral. The computer was called SETUN, although it was experimental and never truly realized since the 60's.
    If anyone has a link concerning SETUN, I'd be interested, so far my only source has been the meager note on 'An introdunction to cryptography', Mollin.

  • Elbrus Supercomputers (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 19, 2002 @07:50AM (#3031081)
    There is an article [xbitlabs.com] on X-bit labs about Soviet supercomputers Elbrus-1, Elbrus-2 and Elbrus-3, and their successor, Elbrus-2000:

    The history of the world computer science is connected with the name of Elbrus. This company was founded in Lebedev Institute of Precision Mechanics and Computing Equipment, which team had been developing supercomputers for the Soviet Union's defense establishments for over 40 years. E2K processor embodies the developing ideas of the Russian supercomputer Elbrus-3 built in 1991. Today Elbrus-3 architecture is referred to EPIC (Explicitly Parallel Instruction Computing).

    According to Boris A. Babaian, chief architect of Elbrus supercomputers, superscalar architecture was invented in Russia. To quote him as saying: "In 1978 we developed the world's first superscalar computer, Elbrus-1. At present all Western superscalar processors have just the same architecture. First Western superscalar processor appeared in 1992 while ours - in 1978. Moreover, our variant of superscalar is analogous to Pentium Pro introduced by Intel in 1995".

    The historical priority of Elbrus is confirmed in the States as well. According to the same article in Microprocessor Report by Keith Diefendorff, the developer of Motorola 88110 - one of the first western superscalar processors: "In 1978 almost 15 years ahead of Western superscalar processors, Elbrus implemented a two-issue out-of-order processor with register renaming and speculative execution".

  • I seem to remember that the only computer system ever built on trinary (base-3) logic was produced in the Soviet Union. The name escapes me, but I think something like that is enought to dispell the idea of them not doing any original research (good research, OTOH...).
  • I just noticed that kwertii lists 9-bit bytes as a "radically different concept", an example of what Soviet computer architects might have considered. Worth mentioning that the 8-bit byte was not always something you could take for granted. I can't think of any production machines, but I seem to recall that Knuth's specification of his famous MIX [dannyreviews.com] machine (an imaginary computer he invented for teaching purposes) doesn't require that bytes be implemented as 8-bit values. In fact, a programmer is not even supposed to assume that a byte is a string of bits!

    Before IBM introduced the byte concept back in the 60s, all computers used "word-level" addressing. That meant that data path width and the addressable unit of data had to be the same thing. Made it hard to write portable software. By divorcing the addressing scheme from the data path width, IBM was able to design computers where differences in word size were a matter of efficiency, not compatibility.

    There was nothing to force manufacturers to use 8-bit bytes. (Unless, of course, they were trying to rip off IBMs instruction set. A few did, but competing head-to-head with Big Blue that way usually didn't work out.) On the one hand, the standard data terminal of the time used a 7-bit character set. On the other hand, you can make a case for a 12-bit byte [colorado.edu]. But IBM used an 8-bit byte, and in those days, what IBM did tended to become a standard.

    • Bull-Honeywell's GCOS machines still use 9-bit bytes. C was designed to run on these machines (Kernighan's Programming in C [lysator.liu.se] begins ``C is a computer language available on the GCOS and UNIX operating systems...''). The size of various types is intentionally left flexible to allow for these machines.

      A 36-bit word on a machine with limited address space allows pointers to individual bits.

      Those who do not know their own history are doomed to assume that it was lived only by `backward' peoples?

  • I've heard we used to read the architecture of western silicon chips slice by slice.
    Also there were many IBM and other boxes bought in. Many of which were copied since there wasn't enough money to by them for all the needs.
    • s/\bby\b/buy/;
      And of course I'm not saying we didn't do any original research. The engineers were really good, probably because eduaction had really high standards. That's changed unfortunately, at least here in Estonia with the adoption of international degrees.
  • Not sure if anyone can expand on this, but I thought that Bulgaria was the east-European silicon valley? As mentioned already, the GDR also made some kit. I've read some material describing Russians buying fairly advanced homegrown systems from Bulgaria; it's no secret that they have a few virus authors there... so they certainly have some latent expertise. It's long-suspected that Russian coding techniques were superior to those in the West, motivated by the presence of less-powerful CPUs. Or was this a myth too?

  • A colleague of mine is of Slovak descent, and tells me one of the wildest dodges in the Bad Old Days was CPUs with weird numbers of bits, like 28 bit words. It seems that it was illegal to export 32 bit CPUs to the Eastern Bloc. But anything smaller was OK.

    In Wireless World in the late 1980s there was a very good series of articles on Eastern Bloc computing, including all the PDP-11 and S/360 clones that have been mentioned. Sorry, I don't have the exact citation. Check your library.

    ...laura

  • Well, I don't know anything about the history of Russian/Soviet computing. However, I was over there last summer, and found a computer store which had state-of-the-art peripherals for sale, right alongside a bootleg copy of Windows 2000. In a bookstore, I found (and bought) a Russian translation of Olaf Kirch's Linux Network Administrator's Guide (aka, The NAG [oreilly.com]). The text was Russian but the examples were all in the default language of Linux, English.

    The products in the computer store were selling for about the same as in America given the exchange rate at the time (except for the Win2K which was ~USD13). When you consider that the average Russian salary is USD2000-3000/yr, you aren't going to find many Russians online, at least not at home. Businesses seem to be fairly up-to-date as far as technology goes, aside from the mom-and-pop shops. Broadband internet access seems to be more myth than reality there.

    Some of posts here said that they were a couple generations behind because they were just copying American technology. Appears they're catching up.
  • Check out the Robotron [google.com] site, created in memory of the East German line of computers. Pictures, manuals, and screenshots. (A PacMan clone!) Z80 clones, 8086 clones, CP/M clones, etc.

  • Not that helpful, but...

    Just after the Baltics broke away, I was visiting the University of Latvia. I asked to see the computer facilities and was led to a room full of Norsk Data text-based terminals with cyrillic keyboards. The displays were able to show both cyrillic and roman characters. I do not, sadly, remember any specifics of the computer they were connected to other than that it had a lot of wires hanging everywhere.

    • Norsk Data ("Norwegian Computers") designed fairly advanced 32-bit systems in the middle of the 80's. I remember using them at my local university in Sweden. (Obviously the VAX 11/785 we had too was more exciting since it could run Hack under VMS Eunice).

      Back then there was an export embargo on advanced computers to the Soviet union, which basically meant that 32-bit computers couldn't be sold there. So they cut off 4 bits and voila! had an exportable 28-bit computer (ND-505).

      Maybe technically not a soviet machine, but still...

  • ICL (Score:1)

    by morn ( 136835 )
    I seem to remember hearing something about the ICL almost managing to become the computer supplier to the Soviet government, but this being blocked in the final stages by the British government. I can't find anything to support this anywhere, however - does anyone out there remember more of this than me?

  • The lines were: (Score:3, Informative)

    by Alex Belits ( 437 ) on Wednesday February 20, 2002 @06:28PM (#3040511) Homepage
    1. "BESM"/"Elbrus" line -- originally developed.
    2. "ES" Line -- clone of IBM 360 line
    3. "Elektronika"/"SM" line -- clone of PDP-11 line, often with some creative changes (high-density floppies, graphics controlers on a second PDP-11 CPU), then some VAXen
    4. "DWK"/"UKNC" line -- same as "SM", but made as a desktop. "DWK" models 3 and 4 were built as a single unit with terminal (keyboard was separate), "UKNC" was a very nice flat box with builtin keyboard and extension connectors at the top, connected to a separate monitor.
    5. "BK-0010" -- can be described as a PDP-11 squeezed into Sinclair's case, everything was in the keyboard, with TV output, tape recorder connector, and on some models a serial port.
    6. "Elektronika-85" -- Dec Pro/350 clone. Was hated just as much as its prototype.
    7. "ES-1840","Iskra-1030" lines -- IBM PC clones, usually with some changes. Appeared in early 90's and soon were replaced by conventional PC clones.
    8. "Radio-86RK","Specialist" -- hobbyist 8080-based boxes, never were mass-produced but popular among various computer enthusiasts.
    9. "Sinclair" clones

    There were some others, however I have mentioned the most popular ones.

  • What about this:

    It seems that a Russian company, called Elbrus, is trying to make a fast & cool x86-compatible processor/computer.

    Check it out here [elbrus.ru].

    And remember, children, open source **is** some form of communism/socialism... guess the circle goes round, doesn't it?

    ;-)

    bye,

    Hummer357

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