SKALA POSTERS ARE NOW AVAILABLE! Order here: ukposts.infoUgkxzxTC5WABX-371XwLcHOEMcyNVBioXVA6

The computer resource limitations you discussed are not only in the Chernobyl Skala system but also in the USA 3 mile island reactor installation. It was noted that the priority data output from the computer was lagging very far behind during the melt down emergency. I am thankful for the chance to see this equipment which may have been lost to the scrap yard without your intervention.

It's incredible how modern computers barely take up space, but 37 years ago they took up an entire room! SKALA was very powerful for It's time!

This is a viral historical treasure to preserve as much as possible.

This video is amazing and deserves a million views🎉

all these hand-soldered elements, the ton of wire-wrapping and these wonderful ferrite-core memory-elements. The amount of work that must have gone into this system is staggering.

This is insanely cool, thank you. Even with my understanding of computers and programming it still blows my mind that people figured all of this out with the limited technology they had. Both hardware and software.

Wow, that system has a strong creepy vibe to it (in a good way). The control rooms were part of the computers. The operators were integral parts of the system, enclosed within it, their minds filled with codes. It must have been an overwhelming experience.

After many questions received, we will make a series of Patreon posts with more details and bonus materials about SKALA and control room systems - you are welcome to join us! Link is in the description of the video.

You can't imagine how long i've been waiting for any sort of documentary on SKALA. Thank you!

This is brilliant; one of the most captivating documentaries I've seen in a while. Superb use of archive photography, and great to see such effort put into the illustrations. And thank you for going into such detail on the various processes and conventions involved.

You're going full-on CuriousMarc here! What a magnificent system and video. And the comparison with the AGC DSKY is on spot here. Same thought crossed my mind. Speaking of the DSKY... just look at all these electroluminescent displays - another feature these systems had in common.

My wife grew up in Slavutych. Her mom was one of those engineers at Chornobyl, but she got there in 1988; 2 years after the accident. She worked with the remaining operational reactors (obviously). I myself am OBSESSED with retro computing such as this, and especially the reactor computers of the era. I'm dying to create my own replica reactor control room... Edit: if it wasn't clear, this video is AWESOME. MASSIVE thank you for this!!!

I’ve been following the Chernobyl for disaster for years. Thank you for giving me more insight on how this system and how everything works. Always has been a curious fascination. I’m glad I found this channel.❤

Thanks for your dedication and work in sharing this precious information with the world! Greetings from Brazil.

Well done! I have an affinity for old computers, when I was in the US Navy aboard the USS Jason AR8 (a repair ship) circa 1974 I was responsible for operating a Univac AN/UYK 5V computer, used primarily for tracking parts and work hours. Not a single IC anywhere, everything was transistor/diode logic, with about 4096 18-words of ferrite core memory. I/O was four tape drives, a teletype for a console, a huge chain driven printer, and an even bigger card reader/punch. Surprisingly, the system had a COBOL compiler, and I wrote a small program to accept punch cards and print out a list of everyone serving aboard.

Thank you so much for this video. My mind is absolutely melted. I am a Sysadmin, and the tech back then was insane! I cannot imagine the amount of engineering that had to go into this.

This is beyond cool, always wondered what computer system was behind chernobyl. Will there be any chance that the Tapes and drives that still exist to be read it and archived? Maybe some day the SKALA architecture / system can be reverse engineered and be emulated with the original software Proud to be a patreon member for this channel

This is really interesting! So SKALA was much more than a computer solving complex reactivity equations but also an enormous real-time data acquisition system too - measuring and logging everything as well as looking for anomalies from "normal" operations?

Great video! I was searching for info about SKALA for years. Here in france, Tchernobyl was a tragedy that marked everybody. The RBMK reactors are prety well known and understood but cold war, USSR computers remain misterious. I went to the science museum in London ans they a stunning BESMM6, impressive machine for sure.

Amazing view of the system and thank you for saving and explaining it. The disaster is an incredibly personal story for many that the hardware and software underlying it all is often overlooked. Looking forward for more on this!

That array of analogue gauges is extraordinary. Thanks for showing us Alex, this is a fabulous documentary, so fascinating and just brilliantly presented. Thanks to both of you for all the effort you put into this channel.

So they were essentially dual-core, each core having 20K cache and 8K shared RAM, with ECC? Controlling VMs via machine code, with hand-punched, punch-tape BIOS? These computers may be light-years behind modern specs and functionality, but way ahead of modern computers in charisma.

I recently stumbled onto this channel and can only say it is AMAZING! Thank you for making these videos!

Thanks for the making of this video: it is incredibly interesting. Also, discovering, analizing and showing pics and video from that time demands a lot of time and work. Again, thank you very much for doing this!

Excellent video! I was always interested in SKALA and how it worked. Thanks for the video! :)

This was really fascinating and well made. I hope that lots of other people get to see your work.

Thanks for the detailed and considered look at the RBMK control system. Plus all the work that you have put in. All the best with your future projects :).

Thank you for commissioning and documenting this for us. Seems very well sculpted for an early age computer!

First video I've seen of yours. This was absolutely mind blowing. Thank you. I would love more on these details you eluded to.very well done and nicely paced with great footage and explanations

Thank you and your associates so much ! I have been waiting for this video , this documentation of this computer mainframe for a very , very long time ! Bravo ! Simply Bravo !

I had no idea that I needed this in my life, but now I'm hooked! Super interesting information, and very well put together, thank you for making this (and saving the computer).

Thanks! I've been waiting for a detailed video about the Skala computer for years. I hope in the future you make more videos about Skala and also the other less known auxiliary systems of the NPP.

Fascinating. I never really looked much into this and didn't expect that they actually had such a complex DAQ and control system. I thought this was all done by hand with manual gauges and some discrete analog electronics.

What is amazing is that at some point people knew what all those different buttons, switches, dials, and gauges meant.

History should never be forgotten. Saw this on YT main page recommends . Well done !

Greetings from Romania, amazing video, you pieced together so much info about this system… great work, we’re all grateful. Thank you!

The most amazing UKposts video I have seen in a very long time. A fantastic find and definitely something that needs to be stored for eternity - and your explanations just gave me so much new information about Chernobyl. keep up the great work.

Great video! Great visuals, explanations, added graphics too. Looking forward to seeing your next one!

Indeed very interesting video. Thanks for your work ! Deserves much bigger exposure

I remember reading about SKALA a few years ago (when my chernobyl obssesion). I was bummed by the low amount of information about the computer. This video really made my day if not my week.

Designing these systems must've been so complicated back in the days with the tech they had both software and hardware. I wonder which was more complicated: a nuclear control room or a lunar mission control room, as they were relatively from the same era

This is such a niche interest for so many people, and you just filled a void of knowledge that I didn't even know I had. Thank you for these videos, amazing graphics and explanations!

Excellent video.Very many thanks for posting this.

This video HAS to blow up. The immense amount of knowledge, research, and incredible amount of skill to apply here has absolutely paid off. This is HISTORY you're making, man!! You earned another subscription! 😄👍❤️🇺🇦

I wish I could give 100 likes. It was so touching to hear about Mrs. Pripyat feelings. You impress me in keeping on making good videos like this during more conflict. Ukrainian people must be very tough. Your people have overcome so much in the past 100 years.

This video is awesome and very informative. I really appreciate the time you took to make this as easy understandable as possible about a so complex subject. You earned a subscriber. Keep up the good work!

Another amazing video from you. It is great as a piece of Chornobyl history, and also as computer history.

Дякую за це фантастичне відео. Я був зачарований Чорнобилем з часів катастрофи, яка сталася, коли мені було 16 років, і здачі важливих іспитів. Я знав, що радіація досягла моєї країни, і що чудове весняне повітря, яким я дихав, також було (трохи) радіоактивним. I am from the UK, and have always wanted to visit the reactor, Pripyat, and the DUGA installation, but im disabled now, and I dont think I could handle all the walking!! I send you Blessings and Love from the Northern UK, to you and your family. Stay safe!. Slava Ukraine! 🇺🇦 ❤️

Hello! I would really like a more detailed summary of the SKALA system, looking at the implementation of the connections, the communication between the individual units, and the software implementation. Go to these, or to any of them :) I really liked your video, thank you!

This video is perhaps one of the greatest documenting videos I've seen on old computers! I genuinely loved every single moment; congratulations for such a beautiful production!

What a FASCINATING video! This is an area of the subject that really doesn't get the attention it deserves. You explain it well for an old tart like me who doesn't really understand computers. However, when you mentioned the request system I also started thinking about Apollo. I do hope you do more of these. Thanks for sharing your hard work!

It's so cool they decided to save it. I've always wanted an explanation of infrastructure like this because most of it is very vague and doesn't get into how it really works. This video deserves so many more views!!

Thank you so much for making this video! For decades I ran in to the same issue that you did, no resources I could find ever described the SKALA system at all; documenting industrial control systems like this is very important to retro computing history and is a very overlooked sector for computer historians!

Amazing work as usual, this is the video that deserves 2 million views!

Hi, really great video! Thanks for sharing with us this unique and rare informations. I would like to see continuation about this topic :)

I has been waiting a video like this. Thanks

Very cool documentary. Thanks a lot. Maybe you could think about a part 2 including more info about the H/W architecture of the SKALA and its monitor/OS. You made a comparison with the AGC. Did the SKALA also have a prioritization of tasks like the AGC did? Some remarks you made that measurements might be delayed waiting for a "processor window" seem to indicate that it did. How exactly did this task scheduler work?

Really amazing work ! Thank you for all ! SKALA design is very elegant :) Best greets from France

Been waiting for this video... And you did not disappoint! Excellent!

I also read almost anything what i could find avout chernobyl disaster. And cannot find any info about skala system in english speaking intetnet. Thanks a lot for this excellent presentation

"Skala" (plural: "Skaly" - stress on A)means more in Russian than "rock". Original semantics of the word aside modern use specifically denotes the upper part of tall mountains that is bare rock. The word is never used to refer to individual rocks, for example - a boulder that needs to be moved when clearing a road or a rock you could pick up with your hands. The word's frequent poetic use is possibly the main reason why they decided to stick with that abbreviation. I can see that NASA's taste for abbreviations was certainly shared by the Soviet programmers. This is certainly a very unusual, high value educational video. I thought SKALA was forever lost to history by now. My first ambient music track "Deus Ex Machina" was dedicated to this ancient apparatus ☺The scifi part of me envisions a future museum of computers where all of world's important and iconic historical computers, with "Enigma" and Turing's computer which cracked it, Apollo's computers, 1980-s Soviet ЭВМ and so on. And of course, - this amazing beast.

Very cool video, it's obvious that a great deal of research went into this. Well done.

Absolutely stunning. Thank you for helping save this piece of history.

Awesome video! Love to see how these old machines worked. The complexity is mind boggling. Thank you for making this and your hard work to research it.

I think this is the first video of yours which I've seen. Bravo! There's a ton of stuff about computers that I don't understand, but this is fascinating nonetheless! My friend has been educating me about Unit 4, and I have to say, it's very interesting!

It is amazing to see this system preserved, THANK YOU for your work!! I found it highly interesting!

As usual, a fascinating account of how SKALA worked. I can't thank you enough for this amazing video.

Thank you so much for this in depth info on this beautiful computer. Just love those old proprietary computers :)

I'd be cool to have a dump of all the alarm sounds and such, it's hard to find but honestly I find them cool. I'm kinda building a game around managing a reactor and this stuff always inspires me

A really fascinating video, well done. Subscribed and thank you.

I had wondered about these computers for years, thank you so much! Amazing channel!

Thank you guys, incredible stuff, such rare info. Had no clue, why there such small number of subscribers on this channel. Thank you for so detailed review of many types of equipment. Truly rare things you have access to. I`ll use some references from cannel, for props modelling, in future METRO game series. Greetings from Kyiv.

Good job again Alex.Some people thinks that USSR computers were piece of crap, but in fakt they were working well and reliable for their purpose. Thank You for all Your reviews

Great video! Also: SKALA was not based on ES EVM (soviet copy of IBM 360), this was not typical of soviet computer systems of that time. Also turns out that you absolutely needed this computer system for normal operation of the RBMK reactor, as RBMK had an unusually large positive void coefficient. RBMK doesn't keep water inside the reactor under pressure, now you end up with fewer water within the reactor, as the water evaporates. This creates temporary voids. Now water is also a neutron absorber, so that these voids are resulting in a stronger chain reaction and increasing the thermal output. Eventually the whole thing exploded... The book "Midnight in Chernobyl" by Adam Higginbotham mentions an accident at the first installation of the RBMK reactor in Leningrad: "On the night of November 30, 1975, just over a year after it had first reached full operating capacity, Unit One of the Leningrad nuclear power plant was being brought back online after scheduled maintenance when it began to run out of control. The AZ-5 emergency protection system was tripped, but before the chain reaction could be stopped, a partial meltdown occurred, destroying or damaging thirty-two fuel assemblies and releasing radiation into the atmosphere over the Gulf of Finland. It was the first major accident involving an RBMK reactor, and the Ministry of Medium Machine Building set up a commission to investigate what had gone wrong. Afterward, the official line was that a manufacturing defect had led to the destruction of a single fuel channel. But the commission knew otherwise: the accident was the result of the design faults inherent in the reactor and caused by an uncontrollable increase in the steam void coefficient. Sredmash suppressed the commission’s findings and covered up the accident. The operators of other RBMK plants were never informed of its true causes. Nevertheless, the commission made several important recommendations, to be applied to all RBMK-1000 reactors: develop new safety regulations to protect them in the event of coolant loss; analyze what would happen in the event of a sharp rise in steam in the core; and devise a faster-acting emergency protection system. Despite their apparent urgency, the reactor designers failed to act on a single one of these directives, and Moscow promptly ordered more of the reactors to be built. The day after the Leningrad meltdown, the Soviet Union’s Council of Ministers gave its final approval to construct a second pair of RBMK-1000 units in Chernobyl, expanding the station’s projected output to an impressive 4,000 megawatts" Interesting if SKALA was supposed to have fixed these inherent instabilities during low power loads, but no - it was only a monitoring and recommendation system that was not designed to control the reactor directly.

Great Video, the sheer engineering that went into this is amazing, especially the monitoring system.

Magnificent video for the tech geek community. Mad respect for the scientists and engineer that created these machines in those old days.

Great Video ! I was asking Russian friends for years to do this, but everyone did say, then i will be arrested as a spy. But there are people that did restore the SKALA systems, and specially the SKALA at Chernobyl ! Great uploads.

This is incredible! Thank you so much for creating and sharing this.

Thank you for this fascinating insight into the control systems of the reactors! As a computer enthusiast and professional since the early 80s, and with an interest in the history of computers, this was right up my street - subscribed 👍

Very interesting. I worked in US BWRs from the mid 80's. They had data gathering systems that tracked the power levels throughout the core. Like the RBMK, during refueling individual bundles were shuffled based on their previous exposure 'burn up'. Before this time, some plants just recorded the data on tapes and sent them to a vendor that would read/ analyze and project future thermal performance and 'fuel shuffles'. Yeah, those old 'band printers' were not particularly fast. Ours were 300 lpm (lines per minute) but the alarm typer was a simple dot matrix that was much slower.

Amazing content. Thank you very much for this unique and almost forgotten story. For me as a computer engineer it is mind blowing what they did with available computer hardware back then. The Chernobyl story is engraved in our collective memory, we'll never forget.

Thank you for documenting this beautiful and incredibly important piece of computing history!

Nicely done! The video is very well made and very informative! Thank you for creating it!

Very impressive technology for such a long time ago!

I was always wondered if that kind of signal CRT display actually existed or not. Thanks for clarifying that! Also, if you have any technical documents of SKALA, I'd be most interested in adding them to a Chernobyl-archive I'm building. Thanks for the great video!

I am an electronics engineer and it was very interesting to learn about this control and data processing system. There is nothing on the Russian-language UKposts about this system. Yes. You're right. Regarding the fact that the parameter time was output to the printer after processing. In one of the videos I heard from one of the panel board engineers, the time of changing the parameter and its subsequent indication.......... I was shocked...... 18 seconds!!!!!! So, really, the processing time after receiving the change signal and its indication (printing) is huge. 18 seconds is an eternity for a reactor.

Fascinating and very interesting. The animations and diagrams definitely helped with understanding.

Wonderful video! Thank you very much. I've been waiting for it for a long time. 20K RAM, no CRT no keyboard, writing programs in machine language. That’s it. That's what real men do.

Wolderful. Thanks for a great video !! I whish there were english documentation of skala Computer manuals and architecture so it can subsequently be emulated on an an FPGA !! Cheers

Brilliant! Thanks so much for making this!

Very informative, thank you for producing it and sharing.

Very intresting video complexity computer systems :)

This is awesome, totally delivered on what I’ve been looking for from this channel! It would be awesome to preserve the software and maybe with the documentation someone could build an emulator for the machine code to run SKALA and let it live again. Let it be the core of a Chernobyl simulator and see how the computer would respond to different inputs and situations in the reactor. I’ve seen another Chernobyl reactor simulator before but I highly doubt it’s running the real skala code.

You've done a very good work, to show how these controlsystems worked. Thanks for sharing. Best greets from germany.

I have always wanted to visit there, hopefully I will sometime. Thanks for the video!

Man. What a gem! Greetings from the other part of the world. This is amazing. What a nice retrocomputer dive into how the USSR created their first main frames and control systems.

Absolutely cool, and so nice it is survived (so few soviet-era computers are), but... can it run DOOM?

Very very awesome and informative video. Thank you for persuading them to keep the original machine and making this awesome video.

amazing video, I can't wait for this to blow up as it deserves