Subject: Re: YKYBHTLW...
From: [email-masked] (Vadim Antonov)
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers

In article <[email-masked]> [email-masked] (Andy Holyer) writes:
>I was told last night by  my russian visitor  (who is [email-masked]
>in real life, and [email-masked] for this  summer, in case you're
>interested) that at the  moment in  Russia  one   of the most  popular
>machines is a russian-sourced clone of the Spectrum.....

Well, Peter Brusilovskiy (i know the guy very well) has a bit biased
perception.  His PhD is in computer-aided education and, sure, various
cheap keyboard-only :-) computers are prominent in educational/hobbyist
circles.  Those machines were never regarded as deserving any attention
by professionals and sure never were most popular.

The most ubiquotus micros before influx of IBM PC clones were LSI-11
clones (Elektronika-60) and later micro-PDPs. There was a number of
DVK-2/3s (E-60 with 56Kb RAM, two 5" 400 Kb floppies and rather good
alphanumeric display (Elektronika IE-15-003 if i remeber correctly)).
The first Soviet personal computer with winchester was Electronika-85
(DEC Pro 350; with 512Kb RAM, 1024x240 graphic display, two 400/800Kb
floppies (DEMOS's first product was the controller ROM upgrade allowing
to double floppy capacity) and 10Mb (sometimes 5Mb) hard disk (SM-5401)).
It wasn't exactly reliable -- the DEC's ZIF edge connectors of Soviet
make were quite loosy and power supply fan was pumping air from power
supply block to inside! I had such beast at home (ser no. 101 :-) and
ported DEMOS/P 2.09 (BSD 2.9-based) to it.  Other available OSes were
RT-11 and P-OS and a research "cluster" OS (CLOS). Later a semi-compatible
mahine was introduced (DVK-4). There also were SM-1300 (LSI-11) and SM-1301
(PDP-11/23) but they weren't popular. The last micro-PDP was SM-1425
(PDP-11/73). The one at DEMOS was in tower case and had 2 20Mb HDs
and 2Mb RAM.  Sure, at that time we acquired first 25MHz 486 with
120Mb HD (jumbo.hq.demos.su) which was the RELCOM's first backbone
so 1425 was virtually forgotten (well, Mike Korotaev ported DEMOS/P 2.2
to it).

Another wide-spread PCs were Iskra-226 (kinda Wang with 8" floppies;
they were around since mid-80s) and later IBM PC/XT clones of various
brain-deadness.  Another industrially-produced micro was Besta-88 
(68010, VME, Unix Sys V).

Contrary to the popular misconception Apples (and their clones)
weren't produced in Soviet Union in any significant quantities.
Some amateurs built them "on knees" prompting the article in Byte
with colorful picture of Apple on Red Square. We got a good laugh
over it :-)  For now, there apparently more NeXTs than Macintoshes
in Russia (though one my friend makes a good business developing
software for Macs for European markets).

>Apparently there's quite an industry producing software for it...

Nah. I wouldn't call amateur clubs "an industry".

--vadim