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I wish the Soviets had focused more on developing an independent computer industry and their own distinct flavors of programming languages. Imagine the thrill

I wish the Soviets had focused more on developing an independent computer industry and their own distinct flavors of programming languages. Imagine the thrill of studying languages built to run on completely separate hardware architectures, featuring entirely novel paradigms and structures. This would be the closest thing to experience reverse-engineering a computer from an alien spaceship.

falcor84 4mo ago
That was my feeling when I first heard about Lisp Machines. It's unfortunate that I never got to see or use one in person.
przemelek 4mo ago
But they simply weren't able to sustain it. In the West, while the military industry initially pushed computer development, private companies quickly adapted those technologies for the consumer market. Over time, the Western consumer market became vastly larger than the military one. In the USSR, this cross-pollination wasn't possible because anything that even touched the military was immediately classified as a state secret. This obsession with secrecy even affected civilian infrastructure like nuclear power plants. Plant operators weren't fully trained on how the systems worked under extreme conditions, and they were kept completely in the dark about inherent design flaws—because in the Soviet system, everything was by definition perfect and superior to the West. Furthermore, because the consumer market was strictly controlled by the government and the party, the Soviet economy lacked any organic market signals regarding what people actually wanted or needed. Apparatchiks had to look elsewhere for data, so they resorted to copying Western solutions—sometimes just copying the basic concept (like a radio where users could choose their own stations), and sometimes cloning the entire machine. While Soviet scientists had some highly innovative and interesting ideas in the beginning, central planners eventually decided it was faster and easier to copy a Western solution that was already 5, 10, or 15 years ahead in mass production.
- vbezhenar 4mo ago
  I think it's a bit different. USSR just wasn't rich enough to afford experimentation and innovation. Resources (including human brain power) were quite limited. So they had to copy proven solutions. Simple as that. It's easy to judge them in the retrospective. But they had to make decisions, using the information the had at the moment, weighing risks as they saw them at that moment.
  - przemelek 4mo ago
    It wasn't a lack of raw brainpower or wealth; it was a structural and ideological failure of resource allocation. The USSR and the Iron Curtain bloc had a massive population and world-class scientific talent. The problem was that the Soviet system viewed independent thought and individuality as a threat, actively sabotaging its own geniuses: Persecution of Top Minds: Sergei Korolev, the literal architect of the Soviet space program, was sent to the Gulag, where he lost his teeth to scurvy and survived a broken jaw before being pulled out to work in a sharashka (a prison lab). Andrei Sakharov, the father of the Soviet hydrogen bomb, was relentlessly persecuted and exiled later in life for pointing out systemic flaws. Ideology Over Reality: The state actively banned the teaching of modern genetics for decades because Trofim Lysenko’s fraudulent agricultural theories were deemed "more communist." When you look at where the USSR did choose to spend its massive resources, it wasn't on pragmatic, cost-saving solutions. It was on hyper-expensive, top-down military prestige projects—many of which the West mathematically evaluated and discarded as impractical. They built the RBMK reactors (like the one at Chernobyl) specifically because the dual-use design allowed them to generate civilian electricity while simultaneously harvesting plutonium for weapons, creating a fundamentally unstable system. They spent fortunes building the "Caspian Sea Monster" (a giant ground-effect vehicle) and the Tsar Bomba. The tragedy of the Soviet computer industry wasn't a lack of money or smart people. It was that any "von Neumann" or "Seymour Cray" born in the USSR who asked the wrong questions or challenged a party bureaucrat's stupid idea was far more likely to end up in a labor camp than heading an independent tech company. Those born in countries like Poland, Hungary, Bulgaria or Czechoslovakia were usually "asked" to leave country and they were working for the West ;-)
BoxOfRain 4mo ago
There'd be other interesting implications as well, socialist systems were more open to the idea of cybernetics and with a proper computer industry the Soviets might have had more room to explore it. Mind you I still think it would have likely been impossible for political reasons, there were many structural incentives to falsify economic data in the USSR due to the high degree of corruption and patronage among the nomenklatura. The whole point of cybernetics is to treat economic problems as systems problems and expose data transparently, and given the USSR was structurally dependent on falsifying this data suddenly having an accurate picture might have actually been destabilising kind of like how Glasnost turned out to be. Another interesting 'Soviets had decent computers' counterfactual is that the Chernobyl disaster might have been prevented, since the Kurchartov Institute would have been better able to characterise the processes in the bottom of the fatally flawed RBMK in low power regimes before it was put into mass production. Again this might not have actually helped, the overconfidence the Soviet system had in its scientific and technical institutions was high and genuinely really interesting.
shrubble 4mo ago
Their semiconductor manufacturing was 10-15 years behind the Western technology. They just didn’t have the capability. Despite that they had good brains and delivered efficiently with what they had.
theamk 4mo ago
When I first learned about ternary machines like SETUN [0] I was so excited! Forger bits, there are "trits", and instead of boring boolean logic you have +/0/- trits. As alien as it gets! But then I read much more about the design, and it turns out that the reason machine was ternary is the designers had to minimize number of transistors, and leaned heavily into transformer-based logic - which naturally favors ternary values. But for transistor/IC circuitry, there are no advantages in ternary - they key to reliability is margins, and margins require only two states. Any transistor-based ternary implementation would be forced to using a pair of bits and declare one of the four states invalid - a clear efficiency loss. History confirmed it - even in MSU, once transistors became more available, they abandoned SETUN and started using those. Turns out at least that ternary branch was just a evolutionary dead end. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Setun https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Setun

falcor84 4mo ago

That was my feeling when I first heard about Lisp Machines. It's unfortunate that I never got to see or use one in person.

przemelek 4mo ago

But they simply weren't able to sustain it. In the West, while the military industry initially pushed computer development, private companies quickly adapted those technologies for the consumer market. Over time, the Western consumer market became vastly larger than the military one. In the USSR, this cross-pollination wasn't possible because anything that even touched the military was immediately classified as a state secret. This obsession with secrecy even affected civilian infrastructure like nuclear power plants. Plant operators weren't fully trained on how the systems worked under extreme conditions, and they were kept completely in the dark about inherent design flaws—because in the Soviet system, everything was by definition perfect and superior to the West. Furthermore, because the consumer market was strictly controlled by the government and the party, the Soviet economy lacked any organic market signals regarding what people actually wanted or needed. Apparatchiks had to look elsewhere for data, so they resorted to copying Western solutions—sometimes just copying the basic concept (like a radio where users could choose their own stations), and sometimes cloning the entire machine. While Soviet scientists had some highly innovative and interesting ideas in the beginning, central planners eventually decided it was faster and easier to copy a Western solution that was already 5, 10, or 15 years ahead in mass production.

vbezhenar 4mo ago
I think it's a bit different. USSR just wasn't rich enough to afford experimentation and innovation. Resources (including human brain power) were quite limited. So they had to copy proven solutions. Simple as that. It's easy to judge them in the retrospective. But they had to make decisions, using the information the had at the moment, weighing risks as they saw them at that moment.
- przemelek 4mo ago
  It wasn't a lack of raw brainpower or wealth; it was a structural and ideological failure of resource allocation. The USSR and the Iron Curtain bloc had a massive population and world-class scientific talent. The problem was that the Soviet system viewed independent thought and individuality as a threat, actively sabotaging its own geniuses: Persecution of Top Minds: Sergei Korolev, the literal architect of the Soviet space program, was sent to the Gulag, where he lost his teeth to scurvy and survived a broken jaw before being pulled out to work in a sharashka (a prison lab). Andrei Sakharov, the father of the Soviet hydrogen bomb, was relentlessly persecuted and exiled later in life for pointing out systemic flaws. Ideology Over Reality: The state actively banned the teaching of modern genetics for decades because Trofim Lysenko’s fraudulent agricultural theories were deemed "more communist." When you look at where the USSR did choose to spend its massive resources, it wasn't on pragmatic, cost-saving solutions. It was on hyper-expensive, top-down military prestige projects—many of which the West mathematically evaluated and discarded as impractical. They built the RBMK reactors (like the one at Chernobyl) specifically because the dual-use design allowed them to generate civilian electricity while simultaneously harvesting plutonium for weapons, creating a fundamentally unstable system. They spent fortunes building the "Caspian Sea Monster" (a giant ground-effect vehicle) and the Tsar Bomba. The tragedy of the Soviet computer industry wasn't a lack of money or smart people. It was that any "von Neumann" or "Seymour Cray" born in the USSR who asked the wrong questions or challenged a party bureaucrat's stupid idea was far more likely to end up in a labor camp than heading an independent tech company. Those born in countries like Poland, Hungary, Bulgaria or Czechoslovakia were usually "asked" to leave country and they were working for the West ;-)

BoxOfRain 4mo ago

There'd be other interesting implications as well, socialist systems were more open to the idea of cybernetics and with a proper computer industry the Soviets might have had more room to explore it. Mind you I still think it would have likely been impossible for political reasons, there were many structural incentives to falsify economic data in the USSR due to the high degree of corruption and patronage among the nomenklatura. The whole point of cybernetics is to treat economic problems as systems problems and expose data transparently, and given the USSR was structurally dependent on falsifying this data suddenly having an accurate picture might have actually been destabilising kind of like how Glasnost turned out to be. Another interesting 'Soviets had decent computers' counterfactual is that the Chernobyl disaster might have been prevented, since the Kurchartov Institute would have been better able to characterise the processes in the bottom of the fatally flawed RBMK in low power regimes before it was put into mass production. Again this might not have actually helped, the overconfidence the Soviet system had in its scientific and technical institutions was high and genuinely really interesting.

shrubble 4mo ago

Their semiconductor manufacturing was 10-15 years behind the Western technology. They just didn’t have the capability. Despite that they had good brains and delivered efficiently with what they had.

theamk 4mo ago

When I first learned about ternary machines like SETUN [0] I was so excited! Forger bits, there are "trits", and instead of boring boolean logic you have +/0/- trits. As alien as it gets! But then I read much more about the design, and it turns out that the reason machine was ternary is the designers had to minimize number of transistors, and leaned heavily into transformer-based logic - which naturally favors ternary values. But for transistor/IC circuitry, there are no advantages in ternary - they key to reliability is margins, and margins require only two states. Any transistor-based ternary implementation would be forced to using a pair of bits and declare one of the four states invalid - a clear efficiency loss. History confirmed it - even in MSU, once transistors became more available, they abandoned SETUN and started using those. Turns out at least that ternary branch was just a evolutionary dead end. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Setun https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Setun