Why the Soviet Computer Failed

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.

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.

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

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 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.

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.

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.

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:)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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).

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.

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).