Urban Explorers Discover A Treasure Trove Of Soviet Computing Power (rusue.com) 65
"The building did not stand out. Unremarkable industrial building, which was built in hundreds of Soviet cities," explains a web site called Russian Urban Exploration.
Hackaday describes what happened next: It's probably a dream most of us share, to stumble upon a dusty hall full of fascinating abandoned tech frozen in time as though its operators walked away one day and simply never returned. It's something documented by some Russian urban explorers who found an unremarkable office building with one of its floors frozen sometime around the transition from Soviet Union to Russian Federation. In it they found their abandoned tech, in the form of a cross-section of Soviet-era computers from the 1970s onwards...
As you might expect, in a manner it mirrors the development of civilian computing on the capitalist side of the Iron Curtain over a similar period, starting with minicomputers the size of several large refrigerators and ending with desktop microcomputers. The minis seem to all be Soviet clones of contemporary DEC machines. with some parts of them even looking vaguely familiar. The oldest is a Saratov-2, a PDP/8 clone which we're told is rare enough for no examples to have been believed to have survived until this discovery. We then see a succession of PDP/11 clones each of which becomes ever smaller with advancements in semiconductor integration, starting with the fridge-sized units and eventually ending up with desktop versions that resemble 1980s PCs.
Hackaday describes what happened next: It's probably a dream most of us share, to stumble upon a dusty hall full of fascinating abandoned tech frozen in time as though its operators walked away one day and simply never returned. It's something documented by some Russian urban explorers who found an unremarkable office building with one of its floors frozen sometime around the transition from Soviet Union to Russian Federation. In it they found their abandoned tech, in the form of a cross-section of Soviet-era computers from the 1970s onwards...
As you might expect, in a manner it mirrors the development of civilian computing on the capitalist side of the Iron Curtain over a similar period, starting with minicomputers the size of several large refrigerators and ending with desktop microcomputers. The minis seem to all be Soviet clones of contemporary DEC machines. with some parts of them even looking vaguely familiar. The oldest is a Saratov-2, a PDP/8 clone which we're told is rare enough for no examples to have been believed to have survived until this discovery. We then see a succession of PDP/11 clones each of which becomes ever smaller with advancements in semiconductor integration, starting with the fridge-sized units and eventually ending up with desktop versions that resemble 1980s PCs.
DEC Clones? (Score:5, Insightful)
Fitting that a defunct country would stockpile defunct clone hardware.
I guess they figured out what I figured out. VAX was a dead end.
Re:DEC Clones? (Score:4, Interesting)
Where I went to university, a student club had a VAX server called Kremvax. The club was KGB (supposedly Keeping Geeks Busy), and the server name got them a visit from the FBI. Or at least a visit by federal counterintelligence agents who claimed to be from the FBI.
Re:DEC Clones? (Score:5, Interesting)
The 1984 kremvax announcement may well be the best April 1 prank of all time . . .
I was laughing as I read it, but the number of people that took it seriously was amusing . . . and it became hysterical as some became outraged at missing the "opportunity for peace" . . .
hawk
Re:DEC Clones? (Score:5, Insightful)
In retrospect, DEC set up a complicated business with interlocking proprietary focuses: midrange computers, networking, storage, printers, consoles, etc. This was like a line of dominoes, because problems selling in one area created risks in other areas. If the minicomputer business is stalled, then your proprietary networking business isn't going to grow. They faced unexpectedly tough competition in the minicomputer market from IBM's AS/400, they were late out of the gate in the workstation market where they also faced tough competition.
But if you're running a planned economy, copy the VAX ecosystem made a lot of sense. You wouldn't be worried about vendor lock-in, and many of the DEC products were quite advanced for their time. The VAX ISA was really easy to work with and there was a lot of good (for the time) software for it that you weren't worried about having to pay for.
Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
Re:DEC Clones? (Score:4, Interesting)
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OpenVMS will outlive you.
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OpenVMS will outlive you.
Is that still a thing anybody uses? I'm actually a certified VAX administrator, worked as one for about 5 years and I have all the certifications to prove it. VAX was dead almost two decades ago, at least the writing was on the wall when I left that job.
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OpenVMS works right now on VAX, Alpha and Itanium architectures, which are arguably all dead, and the OS is not being developed for them anymore, but it's being ported to AMD64, and new versions are said to be underway.
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Well, if it works, it's finally a chance to play the original Soviet Zork!
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Will someone attempt salvage? (Score:3)
Re:Will someone attempt salvage? (Score:5, Insightful)
It would be a complete waste of time. Modern computers would run circles around this ancient garbage. Hell, even my smartphone probably has more compute power than everything they found there put together.
Sure, because museums only showcases the most modern and efficient things around. /s
Seriously, was that an attempt at being funny? If so, you failed miserably. If not, hand in you /. member card at the entrance and don't let the door hit you in the *** on the way out. People complain when you discuss politics on /. (despite it having a politics.slashdot.org), but people complaining on the rediscovery of old tech thought to be lost... come on! This is definitely the place to post such news.
Re:Will someone attempt salvage? (Score:5, Insightful)
It would be a complete waste of time. Modern computers would run circles around this ancient garbage. Hell, even my smartphone probably has more compute power than everything they found there put together.
Yeah, you are right. And since we are at it, let's bin all those examples of long dead tech in museums too. Modern guns can run circles around old axes or spears. Modern clothes can run circles around old woven and leather clothes. Modern cooking equipment can ran circles around old clay and iron jugs and pots. Throw them away! And why stop there? All those old paintings cannot compete with modern photographic equipment. So there goes van Gogh, Picasso, Monet et al. This will free a lot of room too, let's convert Museums to factories! Win win situation!
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Discover A Treasure Trove Of Soviet Computing Power
I didn;t RTFA but when I read the headline, I figured they found a single transistor. How hard could it be to store that??
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TERNARY, not BINARY
The russkies were pretty big on research into them,
Re:Will someone attempt salvage? (Score:5, Interesting)
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Nothing new here.
Was it a boring day today for the editors?
M1 Macs may embarrass all other PCs BUT.... (Score:1, Offtopic)
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Re:M1 Macs may embarrass all other PCs BUT.... (Score:5, Funny)
Don't worry about it. This is slashdot. Your accidental silly-in-the-wrong-context post is already not the dumbest thing someone's posted.
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Direct link (Score:5, Informative)
Direct link to all the photographic goodness [rusue.com]
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Let's make YouTube videos! (Score:3)
Captain America (Score:1)
Looks like from one of the scenes in one of the Captain America-movies that also feat. Bucky O' Hare.
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Sure you can do something online still.
Moan like fuck about shit no one else cares about. You've got that nailed down.
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You can and do still schizopost. Meanwhile the rest of us are using the internet because we're versatile enough to continuously adapt. The only cure for mental illness is suicide which more importantly than relieving the suffering of the damned relieves the rest of us from their action. The hardware requirements of an exit bag are quite simple and make a nice final hobby project.
The past you miss is fucking dead. Join it.
A PDP/8 Clone? (Score:2, Insightful)
Why would anyone have wanted to clone a PDP/8?
From memory, it was a 12-bit machine which remains the only one I have ever had to program using switches on the front panel. Our example could also read paper tape - I think - and I seem to remember someone trying to write some serious code on the thing, just because he could.
And the Soviets cloned them? Just because they could?
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Re:A PDP/8 Clone? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:A PDP/8 Clone? (Score:5, Insightful)
In its day one out of 3 computers in the world was a PDP 8.
It was the first affordable desktop computer.
And yes, the peripherals would be considered outstandingly crude by today's standards. The most common terminal was a an ASR-33 Teletype. The technology for that dated back to before World War I. (not WWII, WWI).
You should realize that the world of computing did not start when you first discovered it.
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PDP/8 was a computational unit inexpensive enough to be assigned for an individual engineer's use. In the age of timeshares and Bach jobs, that was amazing.
And when one was stolen, DEC rushed out an ad about it being the first to be small enough to be stolen!
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From memory, it was a 12-bit machine
You think that's bad the first IBM desktop can't even run Windows 10, utter trash. Why would anyone want to clone IBM PCs. From memory that was an 8bit machine!
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Because it did the job they needed? Another 5 digit account spewing "knowledge" here.
Effort (Score:2)
The hard part of designing a computer from scratch isn't actually building it. It's working out an architecture and corresponding instruction set that made sense. The Soviet Union was about a decade behind US technology in general, so as soon as they could reliably produce transistors, instead of creating a computer architecture from scratch, they cloned an existing architecture to "catch up."
As someone else pointed out, they could also use existing software and compilers, that also greatly accelerated depl
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It cost GBP 1,000 when the next most expensive computer cost GBP 100,000.
It was the first computer to sell more than 12 of the same architecture, and they ultimately sold over 12 million (probably quite a lot more - that figure probably dates from 1980, and it excludes Soviet clones). Many were still in use in Y2K embedded in ATE machines - even in the west.
If you want to understand how a CPU works, it is the best design to study - because it is as minimalist as you can g
Ah the Memories (Score:4, Interesting)
Now, decades latter, I really wonder if the Russian DEC clones used the same instruction sets as the PDP-8 and PDP-10. This inquiring mind would really like to know.
Hallo? Putin on the line (Score:1)
Most people in the U.S. don't realize that a major mission section of the KGB in the cold-war era ran agents in the U.S. specifically for the purpose of stealing computer (and other) technology.
Most if not all of Soviet designs were clones and most often of Digital Equipment Corporation products. The usual method was to bribe some person, usually an engineer, who worked there. You will never know how many people around Maynard were able to buy their first houses with Russian money.
They didn't stop wit
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I cut my teeth on DEC machines. But, that was back when there were more than 2 system architectures (x86/ARM) and 4 OSes (Windows/MacOS/Linux/Android) prevalent in the wild. Knowing all of those odd architectures and OSes (CDC Cyber 175 running NOS, anyone?) arguably made me a better software engineer today.
Re:Hallo? Putin on the line (Score:4, Informative)
There were the BESM series of computers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
There were the Elbrus series of computers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
They were used simultaneously with clones of American systems till the collapse of USSR.
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BESM-1 was probably a clone of the IAS machine, and BESM-6, the "powerhouse of the Soviet computing" was probably a clone of CDC-1604.
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Are you sure? DEC would send you details of the architecture adequate for cloning free of charge. If you actually bought one, you got a full set of schematics (I still have my set for a PDP11/60). No need for spies.
My first time (Score:3)
I never thought this would happen to me.
I was 17 and got a job working for the city at the wastewater treatment plant.
It was painting pipes, mowing, maintenance stuff. Bad stuff with hoses. Nothing fun.
Early on, I was summoned to the front office for I don't remember what.
Behind glass, there was a PDP-8/E. All brown and yellow and blinky lights and switches.
She was used to monitor pumps and valves throughout the city.
The |d|I|g|I|t|a|l| logo. Dramatically staged and lit. The ASR33 next to it. Just beautiful.
It was the first computer that I ever saw. I had read books and IBM had sent me
promotional material that I read over and over, but this was the first for real.
I visited the office as often as I could, but the job didn't last and I never knew
where she ended up. Probably sold off for cheap at Newman's Computer Exchange.
You never forget your first time.
Hey editors! (Score:3, Insightful)
You know that DIGITAL logo you constantly use for the wrong stories. Well now is the correct fucking time!
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Technically these machines are clones -- but you're absolutely right that this is as close as we've gotten to a story that's actually about Digital in a while...
Thanks for the suggestion...
best slashdot story in a long time! (Score:3)
This is truly geek heaven.
HL:4 (Score:2)
Those pictures all make me feel like I'm looking at screenshots from Half Life.
Look at those old panels and think... (Score:4, Insightful)
At some point, somebody flipped those switches and carefully checked the lamps for input after input. It was important. It was the future. It was *their* future. They were no doubt the USSR's brightest and most educated people. They were doing so in a building that was clean. Now it is what it is. Some of them are probably still alive. It reminds me of how we went to visit my father's old school, and it had turned in to "the hood".
What happened to all the DEC swag? (Score:3)