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Project SPHINX – When the USSR tried to change the computer (2019)
- bserge 5y agoA surprisingly advanced concept for the 80s, and from the USSR no less. I take it half (or none) of those peripherals didn't work or were really bad? Like, I can say the flat speakers using the tech available at the time would've sounded absolutely horrible. And the flat screen was very likely just a mockup.
- rbanffy 5y agoThis is a mockup, most likely intended to showcase the vision and test the mechanics/ergonomics. I'd be surprised if anything worked (even if the keys could be pressed). It's still a pretty impressive - and prescient design though.
- rbanffy 5y agoI love this design. Reminds me of the Esslinger's desk-integrated Snow White Mac, with a touch of the Jonathan's modular design, with a tiny bit of Bibdesign's geometric purity. Maybe we can take some inspiration on the design utopias of the past.
- buescher 5y agoI like it too, enough that I'm thinking about whether I could make a pair of electrostats that small. The keyboard suggests some kind of awesome galaxy brain user experience like the Space Cadet keyboard, but would probably be more like operating a phone switchboard.
- timdiggerm 5y agoThe design is cool, but was any of it actually functional at all?
- helge9210 5y agoNo.
- helge9210 5y agoWhat you see at the pictures is all USSR industrial complex was capable of. And I don't mean the computer. I mean single instance of wooden/paper "device" representing how the concept would look like.
- nemo44x 5y agoLike many of their policies, looks good on paper. But the reality just doesn’t support it as anything practical.
- fsloth 5y agoThat is quite harsh. While no credible consumer goods requiring complex manufacture or design come from the former USSR area (except of Baltics which retained pre-soviet spirit) to this day, the industrial complex managed to create quit a lot of ... industrial stuff that they managed to sell around the world. Some well known examples: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antonov https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antonov https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UAZ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UAZ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mikoyan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mikoyan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soyuz_(rocket_family) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soyuz_(rocket_family) And of course the list would not be complete without: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kalashnikov_rifle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kalashnikov_rifle
- pantulis 5y agoAnd https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lada_Niva https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lada_Niva
- helge9210 5y agoMost of the stuff in your list was basically produced manually in very small quantities. UAZ/AK would be an exception, but they were unusable without careful selection or manually manufactured replacement parts.
- fsloth 5y agoWhile inefficient, the system did create complex things that worked more or less as advertized - which is quite far from the the claim that the system could not make anything real or worthwhile. It's just not a very good system.
- bruce343434 5y agoThose who are interested in the esoteric computers of the USSR might be interested in the Setun 70. [0][1] [0](pdf) https://hal.inria.fr/hal-01568401/document https://hal.inria.fr/hal-01568401/document [1] http://ternary.3neko.ru/setun70.html http://ternary.3neko.ru/setun70.html
- fao_ 5y agoEveryone here saying that the soviets didn't/couldn't build computers, there's literally a wikipedia list of Soviet-manufactured computers (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Soviet_computer_systems https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Soviet_computer_system...), including this PDP-11 microcomputer: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DVK https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DVK
- rbanffy 5y agoA PDP-11 home computer (!) nevertheless.
- buescher 5y agoHeathkit had the H11 in 1977: http://cini.classiccmp.org/heath_h11.htm http://cini.classiccmp.org/heath_h11.htm
- rbanffy 5y agoIt’s a shame they didn’t out-PC the IBM PC. Such a nice machine. Imagine if everyone had Unix instead of PC-DOS…
- kragen 5y agoHeathkit was kind of shitty at designing computers. I grew up on an H89, a contemporary of the Apple ][, but without sound, color, or a memory-mapped character generator, and vastly slower in software. It actually had a 9600-baud serial link between the computer and the screen, which was run by a separate CPU you couldn't reprogram without an EPROM burner. Heathkit's HDOS (on the H89, no idea about the H-11) was a clone of RT-11, not Unix. It wasn't a bad clone but it lacked Unix's power and generality.
- pinewurst 5y agoThe H-100 was really very nice, but it was already too late for anything not PC compatible.
- papito 5y agoOff topic, but, the USSR had a brutal education system (as in "good"), and lots of stellar talent. It was too poor to have the proper tools to widely cultivate that talent. At least the world got Tetris out of it.
- dsign 5y agoWith the right outlook, it was the single most profitable piece of luck one could have to balance all the other not so great things from communism.
- papito 5y agoLuck had a lot to do with it. Just like Bill Gates was stuffed into an ultra-privileged boarding school that happened to have a computer, exposing him to an opportunity, Alexey Pajitnov was lucky enough to be born in Moscow, where he went to the Soviet Academy of Sciences. Tetris (I believe) was developed on the Academy's computers. Communism had nothing to do with it - but you had to win the Birth Lottery even in a bigger way.
- artem247 5y agoSlight correction. Soviet Academy of Sciences is not an educational institution, nor it is limited to those who were born in Moscow. A lot of university students in Moscow, Kyiv, St. Petersburg or any bigger Soviet city weren't actually born there. If you were from another city the university will give you dorm room if you pass the entry exams. In case of Pajitnov luck is more about getting a job at Academy of Sciences, but probably it has something to do with his talents.
- papito 5y agoFair point, but let's not forget the USSR was not a very mobile society. You didn't just "move" from your government-allocated apartment, if you even had one. Where you were born greatly contributed to your trajectory, especially if it was Moscow. Education-wise, YES, the USSR was a meritocracy, way more so than the United States. My father was born in a God-forsaken Ukrainian village, and he studied in then Leningrad. After you graduate, of course, it's different. It requires significant maneuvering in the political system and ample butt-licking to get anywhere serious.
- boomboomsubban 5y agoWhat are the white spheres in the picture? They look like speakers, but the article only mentions the flat speakers. Soviet disco balls?
- pimlottc 5y agoThe article mentions does mention them (emphasis mine): > A large flat-panel display and TV with *two spherical satellite loudspeakers*, for home entertainment, and video-conference.
- boomboomsubban 5y agoMy bad, I searched the article for "sphere" to double check I didn't miss anything. Thank you.
- coolman123 5y agodid those things even work?
- thereddaikon 5y agoSadly, the article and anything else I can find with cursory google search leaves out an real specs or capabilities. The article just talks about design and only briefly mentions capabilities. The Soviets did have computers and did have a semiconductor industry. It was a bit behind the west but not terribly so. For example the Intel 8080 was launched in 1974 and The Soviets were able to fab clones starting in 1979.
- buescher 5y agoFive years was an eternity back then. Motorola launched the 68000 (32 bit registers and 16 bit data bus) in 1979. The Intel 8086 was a year old. The first-generation Apple II, Commodore PET, and Radio Shack TRS-80 were two years old.
- thereddaikon 5y agoIt was and it wasn't. On the consumer level it wasn't that big of a deal. 8bit 8080, Z80 and 6502 based machines were being sold right up to the end of the 80's. Even though 16 and then 32bit cpus were introduced surprisingly early. 386's and equivalents were considered high end in 1990-91. That had more to do with cost than it did the advance of tech. But it did mean that competitors had a chance to catch up and get into the market before they were blown away. In the case of professional workstations and up, midrange, big iron etc the difference was felt far more. This was especially true in military tech where NATO forces we able to become fully digital sooner than the Warsaw pact.
- buescher 5y agoThe 386 was still kind of expensive in 1990-1991 but it was not particularly high end. The high end was the 486, introduced in 1989. The 386 had gone into volume production in 1986, so in 1991 it was five years old. I wouldn't even see a 1986-era Compaq 386 until 1988, when it was already kind of dreary next to a Mac II. By 1991 non-enthusiasts in the USA who "needed a computer" would buy a 386SX with Windows 3.1. Competing with Apple and "Wintel" - there wasn't much. Enthusiast computers like the Atari ST and Commmodore Amiga and, in the UK, the Archimedes, targeted a sort of odd market of folks who would really have liked a nice workstation or big box Mac but couldn't afford one. They didn't sell many. There really wasn't anybody who "caught up" by introducing an 8-bit after the early eighties - maybe Amstrad in Europe? They pivoted to PC clones, didn't they?
- flohofwoe 5y agoMinor nitpick: "This picture of a parade in Berlin in 1987 shows one of the very few original PCs ever produced in a Socialist State, the VEB Robotron PC 1715 manufactured in East Germany" The PC1715 was actually a run-of-the-mill CP/M compatible office computer and fairly common (together with the higher end IBM PC compatible EC 1834: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/EC_1834 https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/EC_1834). For some actually 'original' computers, check out the KC85/2../4 computers (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KC_85 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KC_85) and the extremely rare "Mansfeld MPC": https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mansfeld_MPC https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mansfeld_MPC Nothing "revolutionary" of course, but also not straight clones of Western designs (like the PC 1715 or EC 1834).
- buescher 5y agoRight - and to get an idea of how behind the times they were, in the west CP/M office computers had an extinction level event occur in 1981 that some people might remember. The KC models were introduced in 1984, a year that saw the introduction of another notable personal computer system.
- flohofwoe 5y agoYes of course the GDR electronics industry was behind the US, but so were most Western countries. At the beginning of the 70s, Eastern Germany didn't have chip manufacturing capabilities at all, and at the end of the decade it was able to manufacture Z80 clones along with all other chips needed to build Z80-based computers, and two years later 16-bit CPUs (the Z8000 clone U8000). What CPUs did (for instance) Western Germany build at that time? ;)
- buescher 5y agoCompare to Japan, then.
- flohofwoe 5y agoJapan had a much better starting position: it was built up by the USA after WW2 similar to the Western European countries, while Eastern Germany was looted by the Soviet Union. Japan had access to the free market, while Eastern Germany had to deal with trade restrictions (especially for "sensitive" technology like computers), and finally Japan had a nearly 10x bigger population than Eastern Germany.
- notum 5y agoEven the original photos have plastic that's yellowed. UV blocking compounds: underrated inventions!
- kragen 5y agoJust to be clear, this article is about an attempt to reimagine the peripherals (so that several people in a household could use the same computer at the same time), not the computer itself, as in balanced-ternary SETUN, or the ferrite/diode systems in which the Soviets held the lead in the early 01960s until they were finally obsoleted by transistors getting cheaper. The article doesn't touch on the architecture of the actual computer at all, but we can presume that, like most designs of the era (both Soviet and non-), it followed industry standards.
- sweis 5y agoI don't think a balanced-ternary Setun was ever built in hardware. It was emulated on a base-4 machine according to this contemporaneous RAND report by Willis Ware [1] The Setun creator N.P. Brousentsov made a lot of dubious claims, including that Setup "worked correctly at once without even debugging" [2]. Balanced ternary was never competitive in transistors. It was hypothesized to be more efficient for vacuum-tube based ring counters, and even that was "only approximately valid, and the choice of 2 as a radix is frequently justified on more complete analysis" [3]. [1] https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_memoranda/RM2541.html [2] https://www.computer-museum.ru/english/setun.htm [3] http://bitsavers.trailing-edge.com/pdf/era/High_Speed_Computing_Devices_1950.pdf
- buescher 5y ago>"Since a base-3 electronic technique is not available, they decided to construct a base-4 machine and to utilize only 3 of the 4 possible states. The unused fourth state in each case is available for some form of checking." Thanks - that clears some things up. It also appears that DSSP (Soviet trinary Forth, yes there was such a thing), postdates Forth, was based on Forth, and was not an independent discovery as it is sometimes represented. http://www.euroforth.org/ef00/lyakina00.pdf http://www.euroforth.org/ef00/lyakina00.pdf
- kragen 5y agoYeah. Balanced ternary clearly makes sense if you were getting regeneration, amplification, memory, and inversion from your flip-flops and doing all your combinational logic with diodes, which was a common approach at the time and probably the right choice with tubes (the famous LGP-30 and LGP-21 worked this way) and maybe with ferrite logic too. A three-state "flip-flop" isn't really just a three-state ring counter, any more than a two-state flip-flop is just a two-state ring counter, although that's definitely one way to configure it. Ware definitely is not claiming that they didn't build the Setun in hardware, nor that they emulated it on a base-4 machine, only that the circuit elements they used were capable of four states. Brousentsov's account certainly says they built it. Ware is careful to disclaim, "Among other things, the difficulty of communicating across a language barrier introduces uncertainties in the information." As for the debugging, it's entirely plausible to me that they debugged the logic equations well enough on paper before building the computer, and designed it conservatively enough (operating 1 MHz transistors at 200 kHz, for example), that they didn't have to correct any design defects after it was built. Of course, this would have been very likely if they had simulated it on another machine first, as you seemed to be saying, but I don't think they had one available. Brousentsov's other claims (that a balanced-ternary machine doesn't have an unsigned type or require unsigned comparisons, that rounding is achieved simply by truncation, that people common reason informally with three-valued logic, and that programming is easier in ternary) seem either uncontroversially true to me or subjective; which ones did you think were dubious? The potential economy of ternary, which is marginal to begin with (5.7% greater density in one-hot circuits like those mentioned), does of course disappear when your "trits" are represented as pairs of bits, as in the realization that Ware saw. (There's a diagram of a ternary Setun shift-register stage on p. 128 (141/205) of Ware's report, figure 53.) But it seems from Brousentsov's account that they were able to eventually build some ternary gates as well; the machine wasn't ready for "official testing" until the year after Ware's report. Then they manufactured 50 units in total over the next five years, which could of course have incorporated hardware simplification. Surely they all had to use binary core memory, though, which means the 2916-trit RAM (worth about 4621.8 bits) would have been 26% larger if it had been configured as 5832 bits instead. Incidentally, Ware's Appendix III starting on p. 171 (184/205) is a relatively in-depth look at the square-loop ferrite logic ("switching") cores that were a less popular alternative to transistors and tubes at the time, the core of the ferrite/diode systems that remained popular in the USSR until the end of the 01960s. They finally lost out because they couldn't scale to the high densities, low powers, or high speeds that transistors could (even the Russians had 400 MHz transistors at the time of Ware's report), and their assembly was much less amenable to automation, putting them at an even greater disadvantage in the US. They did have the merit of being considerably more robust than transistors. Thank you very much for bringing these delightful documents to my attention!
- geezard 5y agoI'll just leave it here for anyone interested in the topic. https://translate.yandex.ru/translate?url=https%3A%2F%2Fhabr.com%2Fru%2Fpost%2F554916%2F&lang=ru-en https://translate.yandex.ru/translate?url=https%3A%2F%2Fhabr...
- meepmorp 5y agoNeat industrial design, but the keyboard looks absolutely awful to type on. I realize it probably never got made, but still.
- joshmarinacci 5y agoHoly Carp, those things look so cool. Like from a vintage sci-fi film.
- GekkePrutser 5y ago> The system was intended to replace all the technological devices in a house, computers, telephone, television, radio, audio system, and so on. Wow, amazing vision considering the early tech. I love the design too. I had no idea that size flat panels were a thing back then.