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What Were Soviet Computers Like?

Posted by Cliff on 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?"

2 of 80 comments (clear)

  1. link by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    http://rickman.com/brett/russian_computing/ -- also has bibliography to printed materials

  2. Re:Ryad line by RGRistroph · · Score: 5, Informative
    I found the acm.org's site search to be unuseable on linux/mozilla, which is ironic -- however, a google search on "soviet site:acm.org" turned up some interesting papers available as pdf (special tribute to Russian Dmitry Sklyarov ?):

    The Soviet Bloc's Unified System of Computers by N.C. Davis and S.E. Goodman -- this talks about the "Ryad" s/360 clones.

    Computing in the Former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe -- more an overview, but has a biography.

    There are more, but the google search page is probably the place to go, rather than me cutting-and-pasting it here.

    By the way, that guy S.E. Goodman seems to have also written an article about Red China's internet infrastructure.