
Soviet PCs - grhmc
http://rbth.co.uk/multimedia/pictures/2014/04/07/before_the_internet_top_11_soviet_pcs_35711
======
gesman
In 1985-87 I worked on plant that manufactured personal computers with
russian-translated DOS in Minsk, Belarus.

The cost of this computer was close to the cost of car so blue collar workers
established multiple schemes to steal either parts of computers or the whole
computers.

The best plan by far was to throw computers out of the windows of factory so
it would land on the soft grass right outside of the secure perimeter fence.
Then whatever was thrown - would be picked up by co-conspirators and drove
away immediately. Usually during the night shifts.

Clever, simple and working scheme that took a while to discover and crack for
local security and law enforcement.

~~~
prodmerc
Lol, classic Soviet Union story. It worked well in soviet-influenced
countries, too. Widespread corruption was inevitable with everyone doing this
stuff (I still blame the shit government) :-)

~~~
eveningcoffee
_Lol, classic Soviet Union story._

I have been thinking about this.

In general people tend to work on greed and fear.

Could we build a system that is based on peoples goodwill or it would be
doomed?

 _I still blame the shit government_

Quote: "The cadres determine everything."

~~~
pen2l
> _In general people tend to work on greed and fear. Could we build a system
> that is based on peoples goodwill or it would be doomed?_

 _Some_ people work on greed and fear, while some others do work on wanting to
improve the world.

In my experiences and observations, the ones who work because they want to
improve things were the ones who grew up in stable and loving households and
were taught to be nice.

~~~
nickff
There has actually been a great deal of work trying to find the best
predictors of generosity and trust; people who have grown up in free markets
have more of both than do those who grew up in more socialist countries.
Interestingly, the first people to make this finding were socialists who
thought the games (such as 'the dictator game' and 'the ultimatum game') would
show how socialism improved fellow-feeling, kindness, and understanding.

~~~
selestify
That's very interesting, any suggested reading? Were the socialist researchers
able to publish their results in their own countries?

------
grhmc
So this post was original posted this morning, but after HN requested I repost
it got to #1:

[http://s.gsc.io/hn-repost-request.png](http://s.gsc.io/hn-repost-request.png)

~~~
jakejake
Wow that's quite interesting. I've never gotten one if those so I don't know
if it's new or I just never post anything interesting?!

~~~
dang
We've only recently built software support for this. Before that we did it
manually for several months to test the idea.

More on this at
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10395389](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10395389)
and the links from there.

~~~
arama471
As cool as it is you guys are giving good stories a better chance of hitting
the front page. I can't help but wonder: 1\. How a post is determined to be
"good"? \- Is it just if any of the moderators like it? \- Is there a voting
system for mods to determine this? \- Would these not require a lot more work
for the mods for possibly little benefit? 2\. How do you ensure that feature
isn't abused by a "bad" mod to promote their own content or views?

~~~
striking
In the linked comment, dang writes:

>> We use a combination of software filters and human review to find good-but-
overlooked stories. "Good" here means by HN's definition of "gratifying
intellectual curiosity".

Hopefully that answers your first point. Second, HN mods are hired to work
full-time on improving and polishing HN. This requires that they be
professional, and professionalism in this sense requires ignoring your
personal views. Having any kind of motive not based on improving HN would be
unprofessional.

This is a way in which HN is distinguished from Reddit: YC puts money into
guaranteeing that HN works well. Only well-known people can be mods, not
everyone on the Internet. These people have reputations for being "good,"
being fair and impartial.

Mods have something at stake (jobs, reputation). So does YC. They're not going
to make a mistake.

And in my experience, (although I realize that the plural of "anecdote" is not
"data") dang et al. have been nothing but totally neutral in every action
(that I've seen, so far) on HN.

~~~
l33tbro
Just curious if you guys have also tried seeing what happens when you run the
meritocracy approach to articles? Ie, let the upvotes decide.

I think most of the inmates here would be surprised that they're not running
the asylum :)

~~~
striking
The upvotes do decide here, though. Mods rarely manually pull posts that
aren't spam. Most are flagged by users, which either kills them or pushes them
into the bottom of the rankings.

And at least HN is clear about where the moderators stand. Meritocracy doesn't
function. Either you have reddit, where users circlejerk into oblivion in
smaller communities because votes don't matter (and larger communities don't
work either, because their bigger mod teams do things like [1,2,3]) or you
have StackOverflow, where upvotes and downvotes are extremely powerful and
either allow you a lot of power or allow you to zap others and keep them in
line.

HN allows you to easily amass some karma so you can say something that isn't
in line with others' opinions. Sometimes people will even upvote you and make
your minority opinion prominent. Downvoting requires at least 500 karma,
making sure you have the lay of the land down (and prevents spam accounts from
taking down comments immediately).

HN has a lot of transparency. Try enabling "showdead" in your profile. Forget
uneddit, that's built in on HN.

We're not inmates. We're here for the conversation. We like cool stuff and we
like to talk about it.

[1]: [https://archive.is/CFKgq](https://archive.is/CFKgq) [2]:
[https://i.imgur.com/EWVH9RW.jpg](https://i.imgur.com/EWVH9RW.jpg) [3]:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/KotakuInAction/comments/3hewwm/misc...](https://www.reddit.com/r/KotakuInAction/comments/3hewwm/misc_i_was_banned_from_roffmychest_for_submitting/)

------
efoto
There was another IBM PC soviet-made clone, somewhat similar to Iskra 1030
mentioned in the post. It was designed and manufactured in Kiev, Ukraine in
mid to late 80s and was called Нейрон (neuron).

I was a part of that software team, porting IBM PC/XT BIOS code, so if you
have any questions do not hesitate to ask.

There is a Russian language wikipedia article dedicated to it:
[https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%9D%D0%B5%D0%B9%D1%80%D0%BE...](https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%9D%D0%B5%D0%B9%D1%80%D0%BE%D0%BD_%D0%989.66)

~~~
selestify
Do tell more! How behind was the Soviet Union in computing (if indeed it was
behind) compared to other countries at the time?

~~~
efoto
It was hopelessly behind in hardware. The processors were cloned by thinly
slicing them and making pictures. This is how i8086 was "designed" anyway.
[http://www.cpushack.com/soviet-cpus.html](http://www.cpushack.com/soviet-
cpus.html)

There was very little original software written at the time, multiple teams
were tasked with reverse-engineering popular software tools and programs and
translating them into Russian for internal consumption.

The gap in software development is somewhat harder to quantify. Overall the
software was rather decent in those rare cases when it was original.

~~~
jevinskie
Were they so far behind in VLSI design that decapping and reverse engineering
was a better option than re-implementing the processor from a published spec?

~~~
BarsMonster
They were much less behind than it is now (1-2-5 years max). The problem is
that leadership of USSR wanted to take advantage of using existing software -
hence demanded 100% exact copy of hardware (starting from IBM-360). By many
these actions were considered a treason, especially in retrospective.

There were independent developments, they worked but never went widespread
(because they needed an "order" from the state).

------
bholdr
I wrote a blog post about a soviet start-up from 1989 that used SM-4,
mainframe type computer.

[http://yansh.github.io/articles/rhythm/](http://yansh.github.io/articles/rhythm/)

A lot of the architecture was cloned from Western or nearby countries.

In any case, it was a fascinating period that in my mind produced some of the
best programmers in the world. They did amazing things with little resources
they had.

~~~
nine_k
SM-4 was very much like PDP-11, running a lot of compatible software
"appropriated" fromthe West.

------
more_original
This is the first I hear about the Robotron 1715 being developed in Russia.
All other sources I can find say that it was developed and built in Eastern
Germany (Robotron was an Eastern German company that developed a number of
computers in the 80s). Even the russian wikipedia say so. Wikipedia says that
even the U880 processor, a Z80 clone, was produced in East Germany.

[https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robotron_1715](https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robotron_1715)

[http://www.old-
computers.com/MUSEUM/computer.asp?c=864&amp;s...](http://www.old-
computers.com/MUSEUM/computer.asp?c=864&amp;st=1)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U880](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U880)

~~~
mindsuck
The article doesn't say it was developed in Russia, it says "The computer
itself was developed at a research institute outside Moscow, and production
was transferred to the German Democratic Republic"

~~~
more_original
How do you read "The computer itself was developed at a research institute
outside Moscow" to mean anything other than that the computer was developed in
Russia?

------
exhaze
For anyone interested in more info about this topic, my father and his friend
run a fan site for the BESM-6 (including an emulator!), a Soviet-era mainframe
computer:

[http://www.mailcom.com/besm6/](http://www.mailcom.com/besm6/)

------
TazeTSchnitzel
Relatedly, the German Democratic Republic had an arcade machine:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poly_Play](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poly_Play)

~~~
togusa
They also had full VAX 11/780 clones!
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robotron_K_1840](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robotron_K_1840)

Oh and wonderful art ( [http://imgur.com/GPPI56E](http://imgur.com/GPPI56E) )
but that's another topic.

~~~
krylon
I still think Robotron is about _the_ coolest name of any computer
manufacturer EVER. Imagine how cool it would be to own a laptop or smartphone
or whatever with that name on it.

~~~
detaro
Since there were jokes further up, this reminded me of another one:

 _A delegation of Japanese visits the GDR and of course is shown many
important companies and places. At the end, they are asked "What did you enjoy
the most?"

"The three great museums: Pergamon, Pentacon and Robotron"_

~~~
krylon
Hehe, that is a good one!

Earlier this year, I visited the Heinz-Nixdorf museum, not far from where I
live, which actually has a mainframe built by Robotron on display (a clone of
an IBM S/370, I think).

------
ommunist
БК family is missing, the bestselling Soviet computers. CISC architecture.
[https://ru.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/БК_(семейство_компьютеров)](https://ru.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/БК_\(семейство_компьютеров\)).
I wrote my first programmes on that Bulgarian made ISKRA 1030, that was nice
but very poor performing comparing to ЕС mainframe with PRIMUS OS. Also ЕС
desktops family is missing in this article. The latter sibling of that had a
cast iron mouse, I kid you not.

~~~
jaxb
ZX Spectrum clones (the big hit at the time) aren't on the list as well.

~~~
Zardoz84
And Russians develop a lot the ZX Spectrum architecture (and keep doing)

~~~
jaxb
there days it's mostly demos, though.

see f.e.
[http://media.assembly.org/vod/2011/Seminars/1203_arttech_sem...](http://media.assembly.org/vod/2011/Seminars/1203_arttech_seminars_digital_resistance_east_european_demo_art_h264_1024kbit.mp4)

------
nikolay
... and some Bulgarian ones:
[http://www.pravetz.info/](http://www.pravetz.info/)

A broader overview:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_computer_hardware_i...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_computer_hardware_in_Soviet_Bloc_countries)

------
x4m
UNIX-UNAS realy reads as a very funny joke for russian speakers

~~~
kemitchell
ROFL. Thanks for pointing that out.

------
xfour
Feel like these in no small part explain why Russians seem to have a
disproportionate amount of programmers compared to all other countries outside
the US.

~~~
oblio
There's another former Communist country with a "disproportionate amount of
programmers": Romania.

It even had its own PC clone:
[https://ro.wikipedia.org/wiki/Felix_PC](https://ro.wikipedia.org/wiki/Felix_PC)
(in Romanian, sorry, but you can probably figure things out just from the
dates and numbers :) ).

Edit: How cute! At the bottom there are links to all the Romanian-made
computers. There are at least 20 models I didn't even know of.

~~~
nathell
I'd wager a guess that most of the countries in the Eastern Block did have
their own computers.

In Poland, for example, there were the 8-bit Meritums [1], the Elwro 800
Juniors [2], the Bosman 8s [3], the Mazovia PC clones [4] complete with their
own Polish characters encoding that has the peculiarity of containing one
character that had never existed in Unicode [5], to name but a few, not to
mention the Odra mainframes [6].

[1]:
[https://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meritum_(komputer)#/media/File...](https://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meritum_\(komputer\)#/media/File:Meritum_II_komplet.jpg)
[2]:
[https://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elwro_800_Junior#/media/File:E...](https://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elwro_800_Junior#/media/File:Elwro_800_calosc.jpg)
[3]:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=79YSyyV9f2Y](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=79YSyyV9f2Y)
[4]:
[https://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mazovia_(komputer)#/media/File...](https://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mazovia_\(komputer\)#/media/File:Mazovia_1016_PC.jpg)
[5]:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mazovia_encoding](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mazovia_encoding)
[6]:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Odra_(computer)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Odra_\(computer\))

~~~
59nadir
> I'd wager a guess that most of the countries in the Eastern Block did have
> their own computers.

There's this beauty from Sweden:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ABC80](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ABC80)

I'm guessing a lot of countries overall had their own computers, not just
eastern block. We don't usually hear much about them because we base our
computer history mostly on the canon of the US.

I was surprised to read in "The Architecture of Open Source Applications" that
my former university's computer science department made a very prominent
sendmail version back in the day (IDA sendmail) and that this was noteworthy
in that context.

This field has been international for a very long time.

~~~
interfixus
You are aware that Sweden was not a member of the "Eastern Block"?

~~~
59nadir
That was exactly my point. Most likely every country (overall) had their own
computer. It wasn't an "Eastern block thing". The degree of separation was
obviously higher, but not all "western" manufacturers were American.

(Also: danskjävel...)

~~~
interfixus
I get it now. The context was ambiguous, though, so I don't quite get the
downvote.

Yes, we danskjävels made som as well.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regnecentralen](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regnecentralen)

~~~
59nadir
> I get it now. The context was ambiguous, though, so I don't quite get the
> downvote.

I can't even downvote, so it wasn't me. I edited my original post to be less
ambiguous. Sorry.

> Yes, we danskjävels made som as well.
> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regnecentralen](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regnecentralen)

There's something really beautiful about that setup. I like the splash of
color in select areas and the keyboard looks amazing.

------
yankoff
Yup, I wrote my first Basic programs on the Korvet. And it was 1994.

------
gtrubetskoy
Curiously the only PC in my school in Moscow in 1988 was an IBM PC (the
5150?). Actually, that may have been 1987 or 86 even... Then we moved to the
US. I've never seen or knew of existence of any of the machines in this
article.

------
msie
It's too bad that no one is taking a risk on developing an entirely new
desktop computer anymore.

~~~
stuxnet79
Funny comment.

Precisely what is the incentive? With smartphones coming to the fore as the
main platform of computing in recent times?

------
navbaker
The professor that taught my compilers course used to tell us crazy stories
about working in the Soviet Union before he immigrated as a reverse engineer,
essentially copying western operating systems. He gave us by far the best
explanations of real-world applications for the hardcore theory we learned in
automata class.

------
poelzi
I just sitting @ the c3d2 hackerspace in dresden germany which is located in
the old robotron building ^^ - but never saw one of those machines in person.
No idea if here are still some in the building, guess not.

------
cmiller1
I believe I heard that the soviets experimented in the early days with ternary
computers, and took it further than anyone else did. Does anyone have more
information on that?

------
RomanPushkin
One popular is missing
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UKNC](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UKNC)

------
Overtonwindow
These are actually pretty cool. Need to add this to my list for when I visit
Europe next. Maybe find some in a junk/antique/thrift shop?

------
venomsnake
Ahhh the memories. Pravetz 8d (with a cassete tape storage), Pravetz 16. The
black green monitors.

I still keep some around here for sentimental value.

~~~
fit2rule
Fellow Oric/Atmos user checking in.. those Pravetz machines are cool!

------
Zelphyr
I'm not sure I know how to feel about the fact that the author had to explain
what a Light Pen was. Why am I so old?!

------
santaclaus
Is the red color scheme an homage to the Soviet flag?

------
RomanPushkin
I worked with the second one for ~3 years

------
V-2
One thinq for sure, God were they dirty!

------
rpupkin
Never touch the red keys.

------
samstave
> __ _It could be had for 440 rubles - two average monthly salaries at that
> time._ __

Which is .88 Euros today.

~~~
rocky1138
Soviet Rubles are different than today's Rubles, no?

~~~
ommunist
You can compare Soviet Ruble to Sterling Pound of the 60-ies. A nice cottage
in St. Albans was £500 back then, now its £250000 more like.

