Computers in the USSR. From leadership to imitation

In our previous post cWe see how Soviet scientists finally got rid of the ideological control that impeded the development of computers in Russia and in what way they were able to convince the Communist Party to bet on computers. Even came to anticipate the idea of ​​a network of interconnected computers but designed for inexpensive applications instead of just military.

Russian scientists had an enormous capacity, Unfortunately, the politicians in your country refused to give up their privileges and the bureaucrats were not willing to do things differently. In fairness, it's nothing that politicians and bureaucrats around the world won't do.

Russia had a centrally planned economy. This planning was in the hands of various government agencies that did not want to share their information and decision-making capacity with their colleagues.. Thus, each of them had their own computer system and was opposed to interconnecting it with the others. Even in communist countries, computers were expensive at that time.

Computer systems began to generate a mountain of data that in many cases was already elsewhere and in others never reached those who needed it.. By the 70s, the bureaucracy in charge of the Soviet economy generated 4 billion documents a year. Ten years later, a plan to reduce them by increasing the use of technology brought them to 800 billion documents. The chronicler we are following tells us that the authorization to produce an electrical appliance required 60 signatures.

Many times the procedures were delayed in dependencies that acted as a bottleneck.

Computers, instead of becoming the solution became part of the problem. It was not only the sheer amount of information generated, but also its inaccuracy. The lower-level officials made up the numbers to make them believe that they had reached the established goals. From this data, the computers produced new information that in turn was complemented with new false data until arriving late and badly to those who had to make decisions.

Computers in the USSR. The end of innovation

These problems made it impossible for Soviet scientists to maintain developmental parity with the West.. The delay in obtaining replacement parts forced users to improvise their own repairs and to develop programs in machine code to make better use of available storage. This further reduced the compatibility between teams. Most of the available models were variations of the original equipment.

The Soviet Academy of Sciences, which had been the engine of Soviet computer development, was not able to counterbalance the political influence of the powerful ministries. and was relegated to a decorative role. Research and hardware development became the responsibility of research institutes attached to ministries.

To reduce the technological gap andThe government decided to abandon the development of its own industry and pirate Western designs.

The first result of this inadvertent collaboration was the ES EVM, Russian acronym for Unified Electronic Computer System

The ES EVM was a clone mainframe of the IBM / 360 that the Russians were able to develop thanks to IBM having published a description of the system architecture.

According to specialists, the hardware was mostly original and reverse-engineered. In fact, it seems that IBM itself showed interest in it. As for the software, it was IBM's with some minor modifications.

The first models were launched between 1979 and 1978. They came to operate at 700 kips, have 1 MB of RAM and 64-bit floating point registers.

The operating system was called OC EC and its first versions were OS / 360 with some modifications. Over time the Russians began to increase their own content, although the IBM code was still present. Today, it is still supported in Russian research centers and works on both ES EVM and IBM equipment.

In addition to various Russian citiesThis model was manufactured in other Eastern Bloc countries such as Bulgaria, Hungary, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Romania and East Germany. Cuba produced peripheral devices.

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