History of computer hardware in Soviet Bloc countries
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The history of computing hardware in former Soviet Bloc is somewhat different from that of Western countries. Since Communist party propaganda maintained that western construction was next to useless, and the West had strict export restrictions on this technology, everything had to be constructed from scratch or tacitly studied and reproduced.
This led to adaptations such as the use of metric inches when interpreting Western blueprints.
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[edit] MESM
The first universal programmable computer in continental Europe was created by a team of scientists under direction of Sergei Alekseyevich Lebedev from Kiev Institute of Electrotechnology, Soviet Union (now Ukraine).
The computer MESM (МЭСМ, Малая Электронно-Счетная Машина, Small Electronic Calculating Machine) became operational in 1950. It had about 6,000 vacuum tubes and consumed 25 kW of power. It could perform approximately 3,000 operations per second.
[edit] Strela
The Strela computer 1953–1956, used 43-bit floating point words, with a signed 35-bit mantissa and a signed 6-bit exponent.
Seven Strelas were manufactured in Moscow by a factory in the Ministry of Instrument Making and Automation Means of the USSR; they were the primary debugging platforms for computing, the most productive computers in the Soviet Union during this period. Strelas could process 2000 instructions per second. The last version of Strela used a 4096-word magnetic drum, rotating at 6000 rpm.
[edit] Odra
One of the original constructions were the first Odra computers. They were manufactured in Poland and exported to other communist countries.
[edit] Robotron and ESER
In East Germany the main manufacturer of computer hardware was Robotron. They were involved in the ESER development of a standard across Comecon countries.
[edit] Bulgarian computers
In the 80s Bulgaria manufactured computers according to agreement within the COMECON:
- mainframes: ISOT series and ES EVM series (abbreviation from Edinnaya Sistema Elektronno Vichislitelnih Machin, or Unified Computer System — created in 1969 by USSR, Bulgaria, Hungary, GDR, Poland and Czechoslovakia).
- personal computers: IMKO, Pravetz-82/8M/8A/8E/8C/8D — an 8-bit machine, based on Bulgarian-made 6502 variants, ISOT 1030 — based on Czech-made U880 (a Z80A clone), Pravetz-16/16A/16H/286 (16-bit) — based on Bulgarian clones of 8086/186/286.
For example, Pravetz-8M featured two processors (Primary: Bulgarian-made 6502 at 1.018 MHz, secondary: Z80A at 4 MHz), 64KB DRAM and 16KB EPROM.
The largest computer factory was some 60 km from Sofia, in Pravetz. Another big facility was plant "Electronika" in Sofia. Smaller plants throughout the country produced monitors and peripherals, notably DZU (Diskovi Zapametyavashti Ustroistva — Disk Memory Devices) — Stara Zagora made hard disks for mainframes and personal computers.
At its peak, Bulgaria supplied 40 percent of the computers in COMECON. The electronics industry employed 300,000 workers, and it generated 8 billion rubles a year (US$13.3 billion). Since the democratic changes in Eastern Europe in 1989 and the chaotic political conditions afterward former booming computer industry has been abruptly and irreversibly destroyed.
[edit] See also
- History of computing hardware
- List of Soviet computer systems
- BESM
- HRS-100 — a hybrid computer jointly designed by engineers from USSR and Mihajlo Pupin Institute and deployed in Russian Academy of Sciences in 1971.
[edit] External links
- Pioneers of Soviet Computing
- Details of Bulgarian computers
- Steal The Best, a microphotography of a Digital CVAX microprocessor used in the MicroVAX 3000 and MicroVAX 6200 series. It contains "VAX — when you care enough to steal the very best" translated in broken Russian as a message to Soviet reverse engineers.
- Communist Block Computers with references to Romania
