I once worked with a programmer from Russia. One day I marveled at his skill in reading English, which far exceeded his ability to speak English. His response was that all Russian programmers could read English well because they used computers smuggled from the West and all of the manuals were written in English.

On a sidenote, the largest computer manufacturer in East Germany was called "Kombinat Robotron", which is just objectively a rad name.

My father-in-law frequently travelled to Moscow for his work as an aeronautical engineer in the 1980s. The Russian engineers were known for saying "we may not have the best computers here, but we do have the biggest". You can't fault their sense of humour!

I had a dear Russian friend, now passed, who grew up in the USSR as a computer engineer. He told me that whenever the main computers in his department went down a notice would come up with the IBM US service phone number.

My father in law worked for the railroad in Houston in the late 50s. He worked in the money counting room and one day the big bosses came into the room and told them they we going to computerize things and did any of them have a interest in computers. He raised his hand and for the next 40 plus years that was his career. It’s especially interesting that he was born into a rural home without electricity only to have his life’s career be in computers.

As a Vietnamese, this is the first time in my life I hear about Soviet computer. All we have back in the day are Soviet made cars, and Aluminum wash-tub. The wash-tub is indestructible and the car was unbearable.

I love how everyone's uncle, grandfather or teacher in the comments was a computerexpert in the Soviet Union.

I have a relative who worked at the local "Institute of Cybernetics" during Soviet era; he told me that they mostly read magazines, listened to radio and drank coffee during working hours. He never even touched a computer.

The Soviet Union was 9 to 12 years behind the West in semiconductor device fabrication. But they did manage to do creative things with the transistor budgets they had, like superscalar architectures in the Elbrus supercomputers and the native Elektronika microarchitecture. The real thing that inhibited progress was the factory managers' hesitance to computerize factory accounting, because it would hamper the graft and corruption in resource allocation which happened with central economic planning.

Shortly before the fall of the USSR, I happened to be traveling there meeting with officials and notables from St. Petersburgh to the Altai, and had the occasion to have dinner/drinks (LOTS of drinks:) with a group of Soviet scientists meeting in Yalta. During that evening, an issue came up having to do with the then oil/gas pipeline being constructed thru the Caucasus. During the discussions between them, which quickly grew into a rather heated argument, I was amazed when several of them whipped out their slide rules in order to support their respective positions. I said nothing till things were winding down later( I had not even seen a slide rule, well, for decades.) Having resolved their argument, we returned to the meal (long, long, meal) and near its conclusion, I rose and announced that I had a parting gift as a token of my appreciation for the chance to meet and confer with the group. I then opened my briefcase, reached in , and presented to the groups' principal scientist and leader, the latest (and just released in the West) solar powered Casio Scientific Calculator (which surpassed the comparable HP products at the time). When he realized what I had just handed to him, quite literally, tears came to his eyes, and for a few moments, he could not speak. The rest of the group surged around him in astonishment and excitement as he opened the box and fired it up. :) Needless to say, the post meal celebration went on for some time:) JESUS could these men Drink! I've gotta say, it was one of most memorable, productive, and satisfying encounters with intelligent people of my lifetime, and frankly, let me tell you, THAT is saying something:)

Crazy to think these giant, room-filling computers, only managed to do Kilo-flop level calculations, whereas nowadays we have phones that fit in our hand that do TERA-flops... that's such a big improvement!! We went from measuring in thousands of calculations per second, to Trillions, in the palm of your hand rather than an entire room. This is why I got into IT/Hardware... because it fascinates me and I'm obsessed with hardware and how it all works.

From what I know, this is an outstanding representation of what happened up to a point. I worked with a former Soviet computer scientist. He told me some great stories but adding to your account. As you said, the Soviet Union built the equivalent of the IBM 360 CPU but did not have IBM's latest operating system, MVT. MVT had virtual memory allowing a computer that had only 4 megabytes of memory to act like it had 16 megabytes. The Soviets had obtained MVT and the more advanced MVS through clandestine means; although they did not have a complete version, they could make it work. The Soviet Union bought most of its peripherals on the black market. However, their domestically built CPUs were excellent. The showstopper was that they could not purchase disk drives on the black market and failed to produce Winchester disk technology on their own. Disk technology allowed the US to run more advanced operating systems like MVT and MVS and, importantly, solve more advanced problems that depended on fast access to large amounts of data, such as seismic analysis of oilfields, heat flow, aerodynamic drag on wings, physics particle collision analysis, digital image analysis, etc. The Soviets did manage to get a few disk drives from the black market but never enough to make wide use of the capability.

Back in the mid '70s my brother-in-law was one of the Secret Service agents detailed to escort Soviet space scientists while they were in Houston planning the Apollo-Soyuz orbital rendezvous. He said while they were filling blackboards with mathematical equations the Americans stunned the Soviets by pulling HP scientific calculators out of their pockets to solve the equations. The Soviets said they'd have to beg for time on a mainframe to solve them back in the USSR. Before they left they went to a local store and bought every HP calculator they had on the shelf.

This reminds me of a joke back in my day: The Soviets were the first to invent the microchip! Why didn't it take off? Cause they couldn't fit it through the hangar doors of the facility...

18:38 This is typical for every project done by the Soviet union. My father was a doctor in clinical chemistry and head of the laboratory in one of the most modern hospitals in the Netherlands in the 1980's. The hospital had a sister hospital in Poland which soon would be replaced by a new hospital. And Polish colleagues would visit the Dutch hospital, to see how all different departments were integrated into a single efficient hospital and how they changed the internal layout (compared to conventional hospitals of the time). This was to stimulate teamwork instead of stimulating rivalry between different departments under a single roof. My father was happy to help as good health care is good for all mankind. And his Polish colleagues were impressed and excited to one day have a similar working environment. But when the new Polish hospital was finished it had none of the ideas integrated into the new hospital. And nobody would have dared to say it wasn't the greatest thing ever (even though it was hardly different from a 1930's hospital). My father meanwhile now saw the whole thing as a pointless effort and a waste of time.

Me: "Please retrieve my data files" Soviet Computer: "Retrieving *our* data files."

Great video. However, it has several issues. With so many comments I think nobody will ever read this, but anyway. 1. At the moment of Stalin's death there were 4 computers in USSR. Not four models or types, just four computers. 2 in Moscow, 2 in Kiev. 2. MESM was initially decoded as a Model of an Elecrtonic Machine, not the Small Machine. 3. There were 8 Strela computers ever made. 4. Not all ES computers were copies of IBM-360 and also not all were IBM-compatible. 5. The newspaper shown is not Pravda, but Pionerskaya Pravda. The difference is like that between The Times and The Washington Times. Otherwise everything is almost correct.

Soviet achievement: The ZiL-114 was the first automobile fitted with 24 valves. 16 were in the V8 engine and the other 8 were in the radio.

I got to work with some of the Russian computer engineers that came post 1991. I have to say they were some of the brightest most innovative people I ever had the pleasure of learning from and working with.

I did my PhD research on microprogramming in the late '70s. Many years later I met someone who worked in a facility in the Armenian SSR who used some of my papers. They had a 360, a lower end one, and were modifying its microcode to support later peripherals they were able to get from the West. All of us working on microprogramming in my department got postcards from behind the Iron Curtain asking for reprints of our papers since they were not allowed copiers to do it themselves.

“10 kF was thoroughly unnecessary…” reminds me of overhearing an Intel engineer at a pub in Hillsboro, Oregon about 1987 say something like “why would anyone need more than a 32 bit bus?!?” I was so flabbergasted at the narrow mindedness that I almost interrupted his rant.

When I was a child in the 80s my family bought a bright red portable TV of Soviet origin, a really portable one, I didn't see anything similar in the shops for quite a while. But one day, after a few years, it broke. The technicians we brought it to told us it wasn't economically feasible to track the fault and repair it. We thought at the time that it was too advanced for the local repair shop. Actually it wasn't, instead of using ICs as their western counterparts, it was built using discrete transistors and the miniaturization was accomplished carefully crafting an incredible mess inside the device. I doubt the factory could produce many units per year. Still a remarkable feat of ingenuity and craftsmanship.

I did a course in Informatics at the Wroclaw Polytechnic in Poland in 1986-87. We had access to a Polish Odra computer which still used teletype terminals. The advanced classes had access to a Soviet Riad (or Ryad) computer which had CRT terminals. The year before, in 1985, the computer classes still were using punch cards for programming. In 1986 we were lucky to able to save our code on a disk. In think in 1987, the Polytechnic acquired a very modern East German computer that had a color CRT terminal. It filled an entire room and was made from simple integrated circuits (in the style of 74LS30).

I've had the chance to work on a vintage 80s soviet built computer. After getting past language barrier it was actually (for the time) a well thought out experience. The computer itself was easy to work on should repairs be needed and it served its purpose well.

I can't find it online right now, but I believe the Soviets reverse engineering was also sabotaged quite smartly by letting them steal modified and flawed IC designs back in the day. It was a fascinating story.

My father during the USSR worked in the Far Eastern Cybernetics Ministry, FECM. He began as a scientist - he was engaged in the development of programs for soil analyzers and in the creation of a mathematical model of permafrost soils depths - it was important for construction, drilling and mining, farming, paleontological and archaeological excavations, etc. But quite quickly my father became one of the directors, since he was practically the only one who understood Soviet computers in the entire ministry. According to him, they recruited ordinary employees by acquaintance - they did not understand anything in computers, and he had to constantly tinker with them, instead of actually developing and distributing computers in Siberia and the Far East, as well as lobbying for the interests of cybernetics in Moscow. Although, after a while he succeeded. He participated in the secret operation of the KGB, to steal a huge number of IBM documents, instructions and manuals from India, with help of their communists - the legacy of the Comintern. He was not an operative, but was involved in the technically correct translation of successfully stolen papers from English and Hindi. My father succeeded, so he was offered to go on an official business trip to the United States and Europe (naturally for industrial espionage). But his friend's friend was imprisoned for owning forbidden memoirs of Stalin's daughter, which father briefly read, for which he had been scolded by the KGB. They said there would be nothing punishment for him, but in fact they cancelled father's business trip a year later and forbid him to go abroad for 15 years. He remained in control, once told how they brought from France an machine for creating extra thin crystals and crystal films, a very important thing for research in microelectronics. Agregate was big, which is why... it didn't fit into the doors of the lab. Therefore, a wall was demolished in the laboratory, and a dozen people in their arms dragged the unit inside. They scratched the rest of the wall with a vacuum chamber and pierced it. Due to delays, French specialists replaced it only a few years later, and it turned out that almost no one can handle it, and only a couple of colleagues know for what this thing is used! In general, while they were messing with it, it managed to get technically outdated! But then the 90s have begun, and he and his colleagues PRIVATIZED this ministry completely, and turned it into ДВЭК, Far Eastern Electronic Company, FEEC. It still exists to this day, but in the 2000s father was driven out of the leadership, and he was forced (his apartment was robbed twice by bandits. Very unequivocally, but it turned out later that they were not connected with FEEC in any way, anyway this frightened the father) to sell his stake and remain a manager. When he suffered two heart attacks and quit, the company ceased to engage in any innovations (When my father was in charge, this company computerised whole region) at all and turned into a simple landlord, because the company owned a bunch of expensive office space, from the lease of which money flowed in millios of dollars. Now he is retired, sits in the next room, drinks Coke - illegaly imported from Kazakhstan due to sanctionsa - and watches UKposts 24/7, due to the consequences of heart attacks. Bright, interesting life and inglorious end. But his business lives on - I enter the university for applied mathematics and computer science. Upd: I chose aerospace engineering & software profile. Hope to get a master's degree abroad in 4 years. I translated some parts of the story with online translator, 'cause I am not that great in English yet. I hope it does not sucks.

Keep em' comin' and thanks for all of the help!!

My uncle worked for a company rhyming with west sing house. In the mid to late 70's, he and his family moved to Romania for about 3 years to teach the (people) there how to build and program modern computers. I suspect that this was an official state secret on both sides. It would be nice to learn why this was done.

I think it's interesting how the Soviet's big computer accomplishments were part of the official state apparatus, while the USA's great computer leaps came from businesses, mainly IBM. The Soviet Unions wasn't just competing with the US gov't, it was competing with the entire US computer industry.

My dad was required to drive a different route to work each day to conceal his location while working at a special plant facility for Univac in the early 1950’s ... as a child I was given “toys” from his work... transistors the size of pocket watches, solar cells to power my small electric car and printed circuit boards... after hours he drove my by the location and pointed it out.

This is quite interesting. I'll have to read up on this history further at some point. My family emigrated from a former soviet-bloc country to the USA when I was a kid. My father told me that one of my uncles worked in some program to reverse-engineer IBM computers in the 1970s and 1980s. I don't know the details of his projects. I was told that he traveled to Moscow several times and that he worked on a team that used to disassemble and study IBM computers. I don't know which models. I worked as a professional software engineer in the USA for quite some time as an adult. One project that comes to mind after reading the comments below was for a big state government agency. The government agency relied on a mix of old software written in COBOL and developed on mainframe computers in the 1980s (or even the 1970s + 80s) as well as a mix of Microsoft technologies from the early 2000s. At the time, I worked at a small consultancy + software development firm that was brought in to develop some new systems in Java. I wrote some code to import and synchronize data from the old mainframe systems every day, and then we wrote a bunch of web-based software tools to allow people in this very large government agency to automate a lot of manual processes, develop new auditing protocols, and generally improve the efficiency of some government programs that were coordinated using the new software systems that we built. A lot of middle-managers at this government agency were thrilled with my team. We delivered features that the internal teams could not build, and we did it quickly. A lot of stakeholders in this government agency wanted us to continue to migrate some of the older government systems to new web-based systems that we developed. Then some of the older managers at this government felt threatened. They really had no understanding of the newer technologies that we used to spin up new systems. We used open source frameworks + programming languages. Newer systems used open source databases. We deployed our java systems on Tomcat fronted with Apache's web server for static content (this was maybe 15 years ago when these systems were still gaining in popularity). First, the head of the state's IT office asked us to migrate our web servers to IIS running on MS Server. We migrated our postgres databases to MS SQL Server. We still ran Tomcat + Java on windows server. We wrote REEMS of documentation on our systems. But then they realized that the internal groups still could not really understand how to maintain and develop our software. The internal IT folks felt threatened because the stakeholders at the government agency didn't respect their skills, and they wanted to continue to use our small outside team to develop all the new software systems for the government agency. So the internal IT folks eventually managed to terminate our contract. They tried to hire people to continue to develop the systems that we had built, but the internal IT management didn't have the competence to find people who could do it. I kept in touch with some of the non-IT stakeholders at this big government agency. I had lunch with one of them a couple years later. She told me that basically all new development had halted at this government agency. I head like 10 years later that they were still using some systems that I had built to calculate payments to hundreds of small companies in the state that provided services for this government agency, but the internal IT team at the government agency had not developed any new features for the system in a decade. I try to keep an open mind when I think about how the personal interests of individuals in positions of power are sometimes at odds with the interests of a larger organization or group. On the one hand, I would entirely support moves by the government to bring development of technological infrastructure in-house to reduce its dependency on outside private contractors, but if this is just done to increase the job security of some older bureaucrat at a massive loss of capabilities that serve the interests of the government's constituents, I think that's a real shame. I have seen this happen at private companies as well, although the most egregious example I've ever seen was within a government bureaucracy in which there were really no consequences for IT management if the managers made decisions that benefited their personal job security and advancement above the interests of the effective operation of the government agency, its broader workforce, or its constituents. I'm certain that this must have happened quite a bit in the soviet union. I've heard examples of how this continues to happen in Russia's crony capitalism today at companies like Rostec and even Gazprom when the government will spend massive amounts of money on wasteful projects that benefit politically-connected government contractors.

i love your documentary style, detailed, no excessive audios and great for learning english structures

Interesting review of the Soviet computing efforts. My first computer was a BESM-6 - I was at school, and would write my programs in a notebook, in Fortran, then travel by metro once a week to the institute that had the computer allocated to us, to type in and attempt to run my programs. It was around years 1987-88. You would have been well advised to show the video to someone who speaks Russian though, prior to publishing. The pronunciation of some of the relevant names is unrecognizeable, and what you claim to be a headline of "Pravda" was actually "pionerskaya pravda", an entirely different newspaper, targeted at the younger audience.

That wasn't the title page of the Pravda but rather the *pioneerskaya* Pravda, a children's newspaper, published by the pioneers organization (similar to scouts).

New Subscriber! Damn, extremely interesting & explains why I had to always fill out so many official documents that I would not on sell or place hardware samples of new microprocessor into the hands of specific Eastern Block Countries!

Thanks, I started learning computing in the late 60s using Fortran and punched cards, you used 3 fingers in different combinations to punch the cards. It often took weeks to get past the syntax errors, and then compilation errors before it would execute. A few years later , Basic came along, if you knew Fortran, then you could use Basic straight away, error checked as you typed it in, and you could debug in a very short time,such progress in a few short years.

I can add, I worked with a former Czechoslovak electrical engineer. He was part of the effort to reverse engineer the Intel 8085. He would mill off 0.0001" off the top of the chip and take a photo. Repeat until they got to the bottom of the die. Though not mentioned, the failure to develop domestic photo lithography equipment was significant. His 'personal computer' was horrific. It was a paper tape programmable machine. He'd have to literally cut and tape pieces of paper together to make a program. He later came to the USA and enjoyed success on may projects here. If I suspected a $10 Intel chip was bad, I'd casually toss it in the garbage. But to him, it was still practically made of gold and he'd have to resist the urge to go and fish it out. :-) He made several trips to the Middle East to buy Western chips and smuggle them back to Czechoslovakia.

You know I have never seen a computer made in the USSR, however I did buy an old transistor radio made in that nation when it was still under the rule of Communists. I was greatly impressed with the quality and workmanship of this radio. It arrived very well used from Ukraine a month or so ago. When I opened her up the quality compared to those made in China Hong Kong, and even Japan look like throw away machines, which in fact is about what they are. The USSR Radio, made in the 70's was built like the FM Radio Transceivers I used to work on in the US ARMY back in the 70's. Most of the parts appeared to be from military stock, the circuit boards are thicker, the traces much thicker, the parts extremely well made. The only thing wrong with it was one bad capacitor. The radio worked but was rather quiet. When I replaced that cap, she came back to life. It will receive stations that my other radios only dream of receiving, I have an external antenna for AM/FM reception, the little transistor gets stations without the use of that antenna where my other sets have to be attached to get much more then local radio in my house. The case is built of a much heavier plastic, the radio was well used and along the line, the lock for the battery case was lost but I have it in place and it works fine with my little home built latch. She runs of a 9V battery I recently get a new Lithium rechargeable to use in her and that works fine. That radio is my bedside set and although I am an old fart of 71 I still like laying in bed, late at night tuning in to the shortwave band on the set, and I am not disappointed with that reception either. The little radio amazes me every time I turn it on. With Shipping the set cost me 40 bucks and man is she worth it. I wonder why the same quality is not present in soviet computers.

My former computer science Professor always told us about the skills of Soviet programmers. They often had less hardware power to work with so they often had a much greater focus on efficiency

Brilliant briefing, thank you. Was in Moscow in 1987 as a tourist and wandered into a computer facility... with an invitation. Amazed to see the IBM kit I worked on back in the UK replicated almost exactly. Apart from being painted red not blue!

In a Uni I had lectures for Computer Security and the professor was 75+ yo guy who lived thru all this soviet computing era. He was a pretty chill dude and liked to tell stories from that time. One of the stories was: He was invited in a science group to reverse engineer a computer from a captured remotely controlled submarine. The task basically was: Dismantle - Gather as much information as possible - And put it all back together. 🙃

Fascinating. As a little anecdote in the early 1990s I worked for a US computer company and made a business trip to our office in Budapest. My main contact there was about my age so he would have been at university (studying computer science) in the early/mid 1980s. I remember to this day the story he told me about how he and his friends earned a bit of extra spending money while at university. Apparently at the time the Austria/Hungary border was quite easy to cross so most weekends they used to drive to a very small town just over the Austrian border which despite only having a population of a few hundred people had three shops on the main street all specialising in selling electronic components to service the market of all the Hungarian university students (there were lots of people doing this apparently) coming in to the town to buy electronic components to take back to Budapest and sell on to the local research institute that was using them to attempt to reproduce a DEC VAX.

This is very interesting. Thank you for sharing this.

Thank you for the documentary

A Latvian colleague once told me that peripheral manufacturing was distributed around the Soviet bloc, and disk drives were allocated to Bulgaria. The nicest thing that could be said about any of their products was the less they had modified the originals from which they were reverse-engineered, the more likely they were actually to work.

In the late 1980s, I worked on the ES-1036. It was the second generation of the ES series and was an analogue of the IBM370. These computers eventually became increasingly used as servers and communication centres for users.

Thank you for the overview. I started my software engineering education in Kyiv in 1985. We had ES-1060 though it was barely available for students and took punch cards. But we also had several SM-4, and analog of PDP-9, and those seemed to be more widespread at that time as opposed to much larger ES-1060. Even some schools had SM-4-based computer rooms. Those computers were made in Kyiv. Also, the same factory made Mir and Mir-2 computers back in 1970s, and my high school had one of those. Those were developed under Dr. Glushkov's patronage and from what I have heard were not Western copycats like ES-1060 or SM-4. Where the gap really showed up was the personal computers market.

I just saw a video of the unboxing of a Globos inertial guidance system used on Soyuz spacecraft until 2003. It looked like a toy from the early 1960's that was supposed to make them like science. The Soviet system had a little plastic globe inside a window that would go around so the crew of the spaceship would know kind of where they were. This video really pulls into focus why that was still being used in this century.

My grandfather did a lot of work on computers around SU in 70s and 80s. He spoke quite a bit about the gap between soviet and western capabilities. Also about how part of his job was reverse engineering the ICs "acquired" from the west and that it was really, really difficult. I still have a decent amount of soviet ICs he stole from his work to tinker around for his own purposes.

Their electrical engineers knew where things were heading, but the Soviet political class was reticent. There is a parallel story to this which may also explain why, on top of all other issues regarding lack of incentives and productivity, the Soviet political class never really loved the idea of the proliferation of computers. Back in the late 1950s, early 1960s, around the time in the US they were designing the first computer networks, a Soviet electrical engineer whose name I forget (one may search for it though) had sat down and designed quite thoroughly a theoretical but very much realistic plan of connecting every single production unit with every single warehouse facility and every single sales point, including the last supermarket (whatever they had as "supermarkets" anyway back then!). His system did not just include the exchange of production and sales data but also an extensive service of direct communication including person to person chats so as to facilitate the flow of both tangible and intangible information. Basically, much of what he proposed were to become features of the WWW, precisely because his system was not centralised but rather decentralised based on the idea of individual nodes. Well? Guess what! The Party commissaries did not like it. Not because it was decentralised. Afterall, it could still be monitored centrally and every one could be spied upon - if anything computer networks facilitated spying, especially on systems that permitted "chat forums"! The actual reason they did not like it was because... it was increasing productivity unecessarily too much and above all eliminated the need for intermediary Party commissaries since suppliers and clients, producers and consumers would be communicating directly to each other. I.e. they feared that it would turn their economy from a planned one into a Just-In-Time demand-based economy (i.e. much like the Japanese one). As such their fear was political, they really feared computers would remove their power which in a straight line goes against general wisdom (i.e. that you can spy more easily through computer networks used by the general population). I would argue that one of the key aspects of the reticent of the Soviet leadership, next to a number of other mentioned in the video and in the comments here, is that the Party feared the sociological changes that could appear as an outcome of a wider proliferation of computer usage outside the strict boundaries of the Soviet military. They viewed computers only as a military application not a civilian one.

3:10 The naming of the machine reminds me a little of the first Austrian computer. Because American computers at the time had names like Thunderstorm and Hailstorm, the first Austrian computer was called May Breeze (Mailüfterl).

There's a cognitive bias that we tend to equate the every day with being unremarkable. I would suggest this subject is a good example. We are all surrounded by computers, our society couldn't function at all without them. But the 'silicon chips' these devices run on remain so difficult to make that there are only a handful of facilities churning out the more complex devices in the entire world. It's not a exaggeration to say that if just five or six specific factories burned down tomorrow the production of most computers and practicably all smart phones would cease for years.

My Aunt said in 1980 one of her classmates, a Chinese teenager, told their math teacher that he had bought a computer and it was at home. The teacher mocked him and said what on Earth did he need a computer for? How ridiculous of him. I've never forgotten her telling us that. I love computers.*

Very thorough and very well narrated.

It's very interesting to hear the first hand accounts in this comment section from those who were involved in Soviet computing. Thank you for sharing!

Makes me appreciate what I had. Went through engineering school at Ohio State 1964-1966. First year, we could not use calculators on exams. In 65, they were optional. By 1966-1967, we were required to use them. During that time period I went from a fixed point 4-function calc costing $25, to a TI Datamath, to a TI SR50 full engineering calculator for $150 in lieu of the more expensive but equally capable HP-35 for $395. At that point guys with slide rules hanging from their belts became real nerds! Quite a rapid step forward in technology over those three years. After four years in the service, I came back to the US and bought me a programmable HP-65 with card reader for that same $395 by 1975?

A company that manufactures frames from us is located in Moldova, part of the old USSR. I visited the plant almost 20 years ago. The plant from was an old Soviet computer factory in Chisinau that was abandoned when the Soviets pulled out. The computer factory had razor wire and two sniper towers. Very ominous place with earthen barriers and all that security. The concrete floors were coming apart and the brickwork was haphazard. The building's condition looked like it was from the 1930s, but it was built in the 1980s.

Amazing video. Thanks!

Constantine Tsiolkovsky was devising aeronautics, space travel, space suits and rockets in the 1880's when Americans were riding around the desert on horseys shooting each other. To say they "paperclipped" their way into space is absurd.

Back in the 70s I was a programmer for one of the five sisters. One of my colleagues was an ex systems programmer from Moscow trained on the Soviet S/360 clones. He claimed one of the major duties of the USSR diplomatic core in the USA was to go dumpster diving at night at data centers around Washington DC for installation and maintenance tapes, manuals and TNLs.

Beg pardon. IBM's first commercially successful computer was not the 1401 but the first-generation 650, with tubes. It had 1000 words of 10 decimal digits each stored on a drum. I saw one in action in 1968 when I was looking for my first programming job, though the first computer I worked on was an IBM 1440, a scaled-down version of the 1401, with a card reader-punch, tape drive and printer. The console had sense switches to control the tape drive and printer: you could stop the tape drive and rewind it manually to zero in on a particular record. They also had a roomful of unit-record equipment (punch-card readers, punches, sorters and collators). But as I recall, the 1440 was used in parallel with a /360-40. My first assignment was to flowchart Autocoder 1440 programs, then recode them in /360 Assembler. I may have some of the details wrong: it was a long time ago. However, the first commercial computer was the British Ferranti Mark 1, introduced in 1951.

It can't get anymore simple than this. Thank you soo much howtobasic!

I went to the Soviet Union in the very early 1980's. -and I was presented with one of the first private computers that existed in that country. (A country in the Soviet Union). -That was a very cool experience that I'll never forget ❗ Cheers all, from 🇮🇸 Iceland

The biggest shift in Russian computing in the late 1980s was probably through the z80 clones of the ZX Spectrum, they increased the speed and created extensions and wrote software that really pushed the architecture.

Great video! Please continue to make this Sovietometry content.

What also made situation worse was denying the need for personal computers as a thing of oddity. With more people keen on programming and using them perhaps the whole industry could at some point benefit from the fact that there are skilled people using relatively simple computers on a regular basis.

I was in optics for many years and had several "high end" Soviet cameras pass through my hands, including their "photosniper" surveillance set and medical camera. They were absolutely awful. Many were inoperable new from the factory. The two major SLR lines, Kiev and Zenit seemed to be in competition to see which could be worse. Kiev won. Zenit was still being made through the 90s. What did they do when a reliable and capable camera was needed? They got them from East Germany which had housed two major camera makers when WW2 ended. It was all that saved them.

Did they mention "metric" chips and circuit boards? Soviets were using 2.5 mm pitch instead of 2.54 mm. So parts were not interchangeable and there was no much international demand for non-standard components. In 1970s Soviet SN7400's were very cheap (in Finland at least) but you had to twist them legs sideways, which was annoying and potentially harmful.

It sounds like a lot of economic problems in the Soviet Union could have been solved by better metrics. Steel manufacturers were judged by steel quotas, not by what others could do with their steel. Computer manufacturers were judged by production quotas instead of what clients could do with the computers, so they didn't help customers with training.

Thank you very much for sharing this, and I have always been interested in the history of cold war technology

Great video. I love history and those that commit the time to capture our history.

When I started UCLA in 1966, UCLA was building a two-story connection wing that connected the nearby Math Department and Engineering Department buildings into an "H" building with the wing being the cross-bar portion. It eventually housed not one, but TWO, IBM 360 Model 95 super-computers, pne on each floor. How could UCLA afford such machines? They had the Math and Engineering students create and debug the Operating Systems for this class of machines: Essentially an army of FREE and highly dedicated programmers and operators, saving IBM MILLIONS of dollars and YEARS of development time. I am willing to bet that UCLA got its machines at a big discount below actual hardware cost and IBM still made out like gangbusters financially, expanding their lead over any rivals. The earliest kind of hacker is one you hire to get your machine done ASAP and they really want to do it!!

Soviet computer industry was HORRENDOUSLY inefficient, even by Soviet standards. The output of working CPU chips was extremely low, just about 15-20% of any given batch. My father had been a chief engineer in a Soviet chip factory in the late 80s and told me there were days when they were unable to get a single working chip from a whole wafer. Because of that Soviet computers were just ridiculously expensive, pricing started from around 4000 rubles which was an ordinary paycheck for 3 years.

Very nicely illustrated🎉🎉🎉

Very interesting. I grew up on a Univac site in the irish speaking area of the west of Ireland. A central planning decision if ever there was one. There was a branch of ICL in our closest city and my father and the other Univac engineers called it International Clocks and Locks, so primitive was it to them.

I really enjoyed "How not to network a nation" by Benjamin Peters. It's basically the same thing but with more details on the infighting and important and interesting details of the whole discourse. There actually was a lot stronger pull towards cybernetics because central planning is a very clear use case for it. Just, can't be done without computers and it's very obvious to almost anyone. When you have a building full of people trying to make a "database" with supply and demand for next 5 years, make "predictions" based on "models" and get "inputs" from factories ... but Stalin didn't like it. And so it begun.

“Soviet MCUs are biggest MCUs in the world!” That was a common joke at those time. But indeed no one could imagine that electronics industry in Russia will collapse so quickly after Soviet Union was gone.

such an eye opener fab video

I know where the map showed at the beginning of this video because I was born and grew up there, and the map might be drawn 100 years ago. So surprised and impressed that it was used and known by somebody outside there. Thanks. Oh yeah great video. Thanks again.

Interestingly as a result the Soviet war aircraft were much more radiation hardened because they were full of valves not integrated circuits.

Thank you!! I’ve been wanting information about this for so long. This is my dream video

Once again reminded of just how brilliant this video is

Excellent content 👍

Ironic that ICL was mentioned. My first three years in IT was programming one in assembly. That laid the groundwork for my 40 years of software development. It has been a great career.

Very interesting video. One minor point: ENIAC was the world's first all-electronic computer, not the first digital computer. The first digital computer was Karl Zuse's Z-1 in Germany in 1941, which used electromechanical relays in place of vacuum tubes that the Nazis could not obtain. It was slower than the later ENIAC but was sufficient to help design the V-2 ballistic missile.

BK-0010 computers were produced from 1985, 78000 for households, 44000 for schools. Or more. In 1988 we had a class with 30 at school. Electronica MC 0202 was produced from 1987, 310000 computers (22000 school classes). Then some others, like Agat (12000 from 1983 to 1988, 7000 im 1989). Plus the big amount of self made ZX Spectrum clones... not everyone are lucky but I had the access to several university computers in Leningrad and Volgograd (Apple II, DVK-2, 286 and sometimes even 386) and 2 school classes (even in 1st grade).

Wow, this brings back (dim) memories! I learned to program in assembly on an IBM 360/30 in 1969-70. Never used the training, as I couldn't get a job with it. Everyone wanted 2 years experience, but how to get experience without a job? Catch-22. Forgot about computers for years, until I got into PC's in 1994, just as a hobby.

Those BESM-6 terminals look very much like the computer terminals of the silo missions in Goldeneye on the N64. First time I ever saw what they were based on.

Fascinating. I lived through most of this and have been in computers fo half a century but you taught me some new history and tied some loosens together in my understanding. Thank you.

Good video. Great research. I lived in the USSR, saw and worked on Soviet made computers. Planned Economy sucks. Genuine competition is the thing that creates progress.

Make a video about metals that are used for high tech manufacturing of electronics and vehicles. How metals etc prices affect the product price at point of sale and what to do with all the fluctuation there. Should be useful. Thanks.

I worked on computer graphic equipment at Ford Motor in Dearborn MI from 1978 to 1989. One of the techs I worked with was a German who's brother had just come over from East Germany. My co worker from Germany lit a cigarette in the computer room at Ford Research and his brother freaked out, dragging him out of the room into the hall. Smoke particles can crash a disk drive and that would be a big problem for the Soviets, not so much here. We had drives crash but mostly from power failures.

I laughed about how you pronounce "Big Electronic Calculating Machine" in Russian, also, you show "Pionerskaya Pravda" (Pioneer's Truth) newspaper when speaking about "Pravda" (they were two different newspapers), but anyway, great video!

End of the 1970s I was working at Siemens and one of my colleagues there, a mathematician and physicist, was an immigrant from the Soviet Union. Calculators by then were standard issue for all engineers, some where even programmable, and were a common sight between the desktop clutter of most of my colleagues. One big exception was my Russian colleague, he didn't even own a calculator. Instead he used an abacus. No kidding, he used a simple abacus with coloured wooden beads to do his calculations with. And this guy was fast. When he was using his abacus the beads shot across the frame at blurring speed. We once pitted him against someone with a calculator to solve a mathematical problem and he won! The only problem with this abacus was the clatter of the beads hitting each, it could get very loud. I think that's why the guy had his own room.

Fantastic content!

Excellent video - many thanks - appreciated. I'm reminded of the moment in Soviet history when the Politburo realised the game was over - the aftermath of Operation Mole Cricket 19 (June 1982), when the Israeli Air Force slaughtered the Syrian Air Force and air defences in the Bekaa Valley. The Syrians lost 85 Soviet-built MiG fighter jets; the Israelis lost none of their US-built fighter jets. The MiGs were faster, more manoeuvrable, faster climb rate, cheaper to produce, easier to maintain in the field... but their electronics were primitive, no match for the sophisticated computer-controlled radar guidance systems the American planes had. A few days later, the Politburo met to discuss the debacle - the largest jet-to-jet aerial battle in history - and concluded that the reasons behind the technological gap were systemic. In a Second Wave economy, you can herd workers into factories to build more and more tanks, artillery and aircraft - but you can't build good computers or force IT guys to write write good code in the same top-down, hierarchical way. This 'got-it' moment eventually led to Perestroika, Gorbachev - and ultimately to the breakup of the USSR. It was not a system that could survive the Third Wave of human development.

Tragic when you consider that Victor Shestakov (re)discovered the possible application of Boolean logic to relay circuits in 1935--three years before Claude Shannon

@:45 according to many authroratyive sources the world first electronic digital programmable computer was Colosuss . ENIAC was similar (but improved over Colosuss) and wasthe first in the US. The first stored program digital computer (i.e. without having to reste plugs and wires to reprogram) was Manchester University 'Baby' 1948 and then sold commercially as Ferranti type 1 in 1953

Good old days. I used two of those BESM-6 for my diploma project. It was done in the same company developing S-300 and later counter-missile systems.

I’m somehow amazed at 10,000 calculations per second while watching this video on a phone with a 5nm soc with 15 billion transistors.