TOP 10 fascinating facts about computers in the USSR

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

More than 12 years ago, DataArt engineers began to collect their own museum of rare and simply interesting obsolete devices. When the material in the development center in St. Petersburg had accumulated more than one exhibition and the collection required professional cataloging, the museum project got its own curator. Aleksey Pomigalov was previously a researcher at the Hermitage and the Faberge Museum, and was also responsible for replenishing and describing the historical collection of the Zenit football club.

We asked Alexei to choose a dozen facts from the history of Soviet computer technology that surprised him the most when collecting material as a museum worker who had never worked as an engineer.

The first electronic computers in the USSR

There were two of them at once: a copyright certificate for one was received by a team from the Energy Institute of the Academy of Sciences under the leadership of Isaac Brook and Bashir Rameev. The second one at the Institute of Electrical Engineering of the Academy of Sciences was assembled by the famous Sergei Lebedev (after the completion of the project, he became an academician). Development of both machines began in the late 1940s, and were publicly demonstrated in 1951. It is interesting that Brook moved to Moscow from Minsk, and Lebedev from Kiev, that is, Belarus and Ukraine also inherit this history along with Russia.

War spoils

The circuitry of the M-1 computer - one of those two first Soviet computers - used captured German semiconductors sent to special warehouses of the Academy of Sciences after the war.

Turned on the computer - de-energized the area

When the first MESM was launched - this is exactly the second of the mentioned machines - the electricity was cut off immediately in the whole quarter of Kiev. The power consumption of the first systems went off scale, and the institute itself was located in the building of a former hospital in the Kiev Feofaniya park and did not have sufficient capacity of its own.

Clone, copy or original development

The main stumbling block for everyone who is related to the history of Soviet computers or is simply interested in it remains the ES computers series. Was it good that in the mid-1960s a machine with the IBM System 360 architecture entered the series, or did this copying eventually lead Soviet IT to a dead end? Each expert gives his own arguments, each has reservations, but the attitude to this issue clearly divides everyone involved into two camps.

Variety of architectures and solutions

The universe of Soviet computers seems endless. Even introducing a single series (the controversial ES computers mentioned in the previous paragraph), engineers in each field still continued to invent their own computers. A machine of its own design was in almost every large research institute, and the military had dozens, if not hundreds, of alternative devices. At the same time, the developers did not always communicate with each other, many developments were completely classified. The planned economy did not allow the system to rule out reinvention, and many parts were at times in short supply.

Accidental declassification

The first personal computer in the Soviet Union appeared, apparently as a result of an accident - a batch of Soviet clones of the i8080 microprocessor was mistakenly delivered to MIEM (Moscow Institute of Economics and Mathematics). There, young employees tried to assemble a working system on its basis, and then published the scheme in the magazine "Radio" under the name "Micro-80".

A personal computer is fiction

In 1980, Nikolai Gorshkov, Deputy Minister of Radio Industry of the USSR, told the developers of the home-made Micro-80 computer: “Personal can be a car, a summer residence, a pension, and a computer is 100 square meters, 25 personnel and 30 liters of alcohol per month.” But two years later, the factory production of personal computers "Agat" began on the basis of the development of NIIVK using the architectural solutions of the Apple II Plus computer.

Transition to personal

Organizations that had computers on their balance sheets handed them over to the state in the early 1990s. With this, they could provide themselves with a sufficient (or almost sufficient) number of personnel. They accepted computers, since the volume of gold in one machine sometimes reached 3 kg.

The hunt for the "yellow"

After the collapse of the USSR and the loss of funding by most research institutes, many old computers and their components fell victim to hunters for precious metals. Computers were stolen, gold was smelted, and part of the high-tech industrial heritage was irretrievably lost.

Relation to technological heritage

Parallel to the gentrification of industrial buildings, in many countries there is also a tendency to preserve the industrial heritage - museumification of equipment. The history of computers is still very short, but behind each machine there are people and events, a detailed description of which clearly characterizes this or that time. An amazing feature of computer museums is that in almost all countries, large collections are located outside the capital cities. Apparently, outdated computers were more often concentrated in the provinces. In all the former republics of the USSR, old equipment was actively destroyed: it took up a lot of space, required attention, and at the same time, as we remember, was suitable for extracting gold. Therefore, it is so important for the modern engineering and cultural community not to lose the little that has survived from this heritage.