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> 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 indigen

by 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.

by zokier 5y ago

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.