Slashdot Mirror
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?"
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.
Hilary Rosen's speech was about her love of money and her desire to roll around naked in a pile of money.
http://rickman.com/brett/russian_computing/ -- also has bibliography to printed materials
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?
Why is Grand Theft Auto a much more serious crime than Reckless Driving?
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.
This quote is from page 15 of the OpenVMS at 20 publication that Digital Published in 1997. The PDF 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."
"All I ever wanted was to see Larry Wall give Bill Gates a Perl necklace."
http://www.eisenschmidt.org/jweisen