10 ms·

Everyone here saying that the soviets didn't/couldn't build computers, there's literally a wikipedia list of Soviet-manufactured computers (https://en.wikipedia

• rbanffy 5y ago
  A PDP-11 home computer (!) nevertheless.
  • buescher 5y ago
    Heathkit had the H11 in 1977: http://cini.classiccmp.org/heath_h11.htm http://cini.classiccmp.org/heath_h11.htm
    • rbanffy 5y ago
      It’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 ago
        Heathkit 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 ago
          The H-100 was really very nice, but it was already too late for anything not PC compatible.
          • rbanffy 5y ago
            Yeah… the H100 is one I’d love to play with.
            • kragen 5y ago
              I spent a fair bit of time with a Z-100. It was indeed pretty great; MS-DOS ("Z-DOS") was a big improvement over HDOS, but the graphics were the biggest draw for me, being roughly EGA-class. It lacked speed and compatibility, though, and IIRC sound. Also, my dad's monitor was monochrome, so it lacked color, too. I hated that green.
              • rbanffy 5y ago
                Just by running MS-DOS and not having that garish CGA font makes it already a winner. A lot of companies thought that making a better computer was enough, but the PC was so poorly designed that people had to write software that directly used the hardware to make it run at bearable speeds. This nullified any advantage those who built better PCs had.
                • kragen 5y ago
                  Not sure what was so wrong with the design; I recall people would bypass BIOS calls for speed but I never understood why. I guess there was no BitBlt or set-multiple-pixels call, so you incurred call-and-return overhead for every pixel drawn? Later I ran AutoCAD on a PC-XT with a CGA and an MDA. The graphics were on the CGA, but all the text was on the MDA screen, which had, I think, a slightly nicer font; the lack of a shadow mask made the letterforms break up less, although it was the same shitty green phosphor as the Z-100. Even bypassing the BIOS, line drawing was slow enough that when you erased a line it would just draw the line in the background color, leaving spaces wherever it intersected anything else; periodically you would have to type REDRAW and wait a second or two, which would have been unbearable if you had to do it after every erasure. Games got by with blits to small parts of the screen, commonly with XOR (a trick AutoCAD used for drawing the crosshairs and rubberband lines, and ended up having to pay a patent troll for). Some, like ASTROTIT (nsfw), managed to draw a fixed background with sprites on top of it, redrawing it when they passed. This was the era when 3-D CAD systems still used "calligraphic" displays from Evans & Sutherland (called "random stroke CRTs" in less pompous times), like the vector displays used in the arcade games Tempest and Star Wars, but so expensive I never saw one in my life. You could do 3-D on a CGA (3-DEMON was a super fun first-person CGA Pac-Man clone, like an FPS but with no shooting) but at its shitty resolution, 640x200 (or half that if you wanted color), and updating the whole CGA screen was, as I said, noticeably slow. The same 16 kilobytes of RAM used for a vector display would have been enough to put 5000 lines on a 4096x4096 "calligraphic" display, and you could move any of them whenever you wanted --- or change the camera matrix.
        • rbanffy 5y ago
          > 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. Such a missed opportunity… it’d be easy to set up a memory-based terminal to be read/written at QBUS speed… It could have a serial keyboard, as those were relatively abundant, and a composite monochrome output. It’d make a world of difference. And they could sell it to DEC customers who used PDP-11’s as technical workstations. If there were companies using IBM 1130’s connected to 2250’s, there has to be someone who used PDP-11’s…
          • kragen 5y ago
            I don't think the H-89 had a QBUS, and you couldn't have sold it to DEC customers who used PDP-11s, because it wouldn't have been able to run either their software or their peripherals. I don't know what kind of display hardware the H-11 used. Terminals of that epoch were full of missed opportunities. Woz was smart enough to see them and avoid them, but most companies didn't even have a position where someone would have been in a position to do what Woz did. And that's a major (necessary but not sufficient, of course) reason that Apple is bigger than Datapoint, Olivetti, Tandem, Heath, Kaypro, and Hewlett-Packard today.
• Kafkish 5y ago
  By all accounts, Soviet chip development was ahead of that of the US (Intel). Then one day a party official killed the project. At least the lead guy found his way to the US and to Intel and the rest, as they say, is history.
  • varjag 5y ago
    citation needed
    • spoonalious 5y ago
      Is it? Not every comment needs to be cited; this isn’t University. Google Soviet engineer Intel and look at https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_Pentkovski https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_Pentkovski
      • varjag 5y ago
        Pentkovski was a student when the decision to axe domestic development was made. His achievement is overstated in Russia (mainly from the urban legend that his surname led to Pentium). He is a great engineer, but Intel never had a shortage of people of his caliber.
        • Kafkish 5y ago
          But he was still good enough to lead the Intel team that developed the Pentium III, or is that an overstatement? From his Wikepedia page: > At the beginning of 1990s, he immigrated to United States where he worked at Intel and led the team that developed the architecture for the Pentium III processor
          • varjag 5y ago
            He was good enough, what's your point though? That Pentium 3 (started well over a decade after Soviet demise) wouldn't have happened if he hadn't worked at Intel?
• rini17 5y ago
  Yes, there were computer builders all over eastern europe, then it was decided cybernetics is "bourgeois pseudoscience" and most of them emigrated. They usually ended up in California.
  • _vbnz 5y ago
    It's a shame things ended up this way. Were it not for the May 1947 crises, we might have avoided the Cold War entirely (though perhaps not, as the Spanish Civil War shows the USSR wasn't great at letting allies stay independent, and Operation Sunrise on the US side was already treating the USSR as hostile). France and Italy could have had moderate communist governments, Yugoslavia would have had closer allies against the more authoritarian USSR. Czechoslovakia and Hungary could have remained more independent, etc. - no Vietnam war, no Prague Spring clampdown, no Cuban missile crisis. May 1947 crises - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/May_1947_crises https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/May_1947_crises Operation Sunrise - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Sunrise_(World_War_II) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Sunrise_(World_War_I...
    • gruturo 5y ago
      > France and Italy could have had moderate communist governments As an Italian born in the 70's, thanks but no thanks?
      • eecc 5y ago
        Why? Has the “partitocrazia” first and the ‘80s cleptocracy, Berlusconi’s downward spiral, and the last attempts an installing neoliberal proxy governments done any good to the country? I guess there’s no point discussing impossible alternative scenarios - especially given the extremely conservative attitude of Italian society - but an Italy with a more Scandinavian-like compromise would have been an interesting country to live in.
        • fsloth 5y ago
          "Italy with a more Scandinavian-like compromise" Not OP but as a Finnish (so not True Scandinavian but close enough)- Scandinavian wellfare state is as far from Communism as anything. Please don't confuse our social democratic parties with actual communists. The Scandinavian liberal and egalitarian political outlook predates Marx (and Adam Smith in fact) - see for example Anders Chydenius https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anders_Chydenius https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anders_Chydenius . While set in familiar enlightenment milieu Scandinavian concept of wellfare-state cannot be understood by labeling it as "socialism" which is a later construct. Wellfare state itself of course was born after second world-war but the philosophical basis is more or less set in an earlier egalitarian view of man.
• zokier 5y ago
  > including this PDP-11 microcomputer Notably, a clone of a western design. Which is a recurrent theme in Soviet computer industry, there were very few indigenous Soviet architectures, and the few that existed were mostly limited to high-end mainframes that saw only handful of installations.
  • kragen 5y ago
    It's a recurrent theme in the computer industry in general, which is why I'm typing this on an AMD A10, AMD's souped-up clone of Intel's i386, a souped-up clone of Intel's own 8086, a souped-up clone of Intel's own 8080, a souped-up clone of Intel's own 8008, a low-performance but cheap clone of Datapoint's 2200 terminal CPU from the early 01970s; running Linus's souped-up clone of Unix and Mozilla's souped-up clone of NCSA Mosaic, itself a souped-up and crippled clone of TimBL's graphical WWW browser.
  • retrac 5y ago
    Ah, but there are clones, and there are clones. Of course, many Soviet designs were literal copies of Western designs. This included many of the mainframes and minis copied from the IBM 360 or PDP-11 family. The USSR produced TTL integrated circuits in number from about 1970 on and they just used them to copy Western designs built the same way. Sometimes loosely, sometimes exact copies of the schematics just scaled around the metric inch (1 inch = 2.5 mm) the Soviets preferred. When VLSI came along they also copied those designs at the mask level. But that wasn't always the case. And the K1801VM1 and family is one of the exceptions. It's a clone of the PDP-11 which was popular in the USSR and they had software that ran on it. It has the same instruction set and a Q-Bus-like interface like a PDP-11 -- but it was an original design throughout electronically and not some mask ripoff of DEC. Originally designed as a microcontroller unlike anything DEC ever used the PDP-11 architecture for. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1801_series_CPU https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1801_series_CPU
    • buescher 5y ago
      That's pretty wild. Note that the PDP-11 was widely used in control and high-level embedded applications, the sort of thing you'd use a nice SBC for today. In a previous life, I used an LSI-11 as recently as the nineties that was part of an X-ray diffraction machine. But as you said, not as a microcontroller.