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Soviet Computing Technology?
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?"
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.
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Men with no respect for life must never be allowed to control the ultimate instruments of death.
GW Bu
COTS = Commercial Off The Shelf
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
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/.
The existance of companies like Elbrus 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?
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
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.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.
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
There are more impressions of glasnost-era computing in the rest of the article.
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Men with no respect for life must never be allowed to control the ultimate instruments of death.
GW Bu
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.