What Were Soviet Computers Like?

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?"

Comments

Another..

[Xunker]

An an slightly different node, I found this link a while ago that discusses, in great depth, Sinclair Clones 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.

Bug free code

[andaru]

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?

Elbrus Supercomputers

[Anonymous Coward]

There is an article 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".