History of computing in the Soviet Union
The history of computing in the Soviet Union began in the late 1940s, when the country began to develop its Small Electronic Calculating Machine at the Kiev Institute of Electrotechnology in Feofaniya. Initial ideological opposition to cybernetics in the Soviet Union was overcome by a Khrushchev era policy that encouraged computer production.
By the early 1970s, the uncoordinated work of competing government ministries had left the Soviet computer industry in disarray. Due to lack of common standards for peripherals and lack of digital storage capacity the Soviet Union's technology significantly lagged behind the West's semiconductor industry. The Soviet government decided to abandon development of original computer designs and encouraged cloning of existing Western systems.
Soviet industry was unable to mass-produce computers to acceptable quality standards and locally manufactured copies of Western hardware were unreliable. As personal computers spread to industries and offices in the West, the Soviet Union's technological lag increased.
Nearly all Soviet computer manufacturers ceased operations after the breakup of the Soviet Union. A few companies that survived into the 1990s used foreign components and never achieved large production volumes.
History
Early history
In 1936, an analog computer known as a water integrator was designed by Vladimir Lukyanov. It was the world's first computer for solving partial differential equations.The Soviet Union began to develop digital computers after World War II. A universally programmable electronic computer was created by a team of scientists directed by Sergey Lebedev at the Kiev Institute of Electrotechnology in Feofaniya. The computer, known as MESM, became operational in 1950. By some authors it was also depicted as the first such computer in continental Europe, even though the Zuse Z4 and the Swedish BARK preceded it. The MESM's vacuum tubes were obtained from radio manufacturers.
Government rhetoric portrayed cybernetics in the Soviet Union as a capitalist attempt to further undermine workers' rights. The Soviet weekly newspaper Literaturnaya Gazeta published a 1950 article strongly critical of Norbert Wiener and his book, Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine, describing Wiener as one of the "charlatans and obscurantists whom capitalists substitute for genuine scientists". After the publication of the article, his book was removed from Soviet research libraries.
The first large-scale computer, the BESM-1, was assembled in Moscow at the Lebedev Institute of Precision Mechanics and Computer Engineering. Soviet work on computers was first made public at the Darmstadt Conference in 1955.
Post-Stalin era
As in the United States, early computers were intended for scientific and military calculations. Automatic data processing systems made their debut by the mid-1950s with the Minsk and Ural systems, both designed by the Ministry of Radio Technology. The Ministry of Instrument Making also entered the computer field with the ASVT system, which was based on the PDP-8.The Strela computer, commissioned in December 1956, performed calculations for Yuri Gagarin's first crewed spaceflight. The Strela was designed by Special Design Bureau 245 of the Ministry of Instrument Making. Strela chief designer received the Hero of Socialist Labor title for his work on the project. Setun, an experimental ternary computer, was designed and manufactured in 1959.
The Khrushchev Thaw relaxed ideological limitations, and by 1961 the government encouraged the construction of computer factories. The Mir-1, Mir-2 and Mir-3 computers were produced at the Institute of Cybernetics of the Academy of Sciences of Ukrainian SSR during the 1960s. Victor Glushkov began his work on OGAS, a real-time, decentralised, hierarchical computer network, in the early 1960s, but the project was never completed. Soviet factories began manufacturing transistor computers during the early years of the decade.
At that time, ALGOL was the most common programming language in Soviet computing centers. ALGOL 60 was used with a number of domestic variants, including ALGAMS, MALGOL and Alpha. ALGOL remained the most popular language for university instruction into the 1970s.
The MINSK-2 was a solid-state digital computer that went into production in 1962, and the Central Intelligence Agency attempted to obtain a model. The BESM-6, introduced in 1965, performed at about 800 KIPS on the Gibson Mix benchmark—ten times greater than any other serially-produced Soviet computer of the period, and similar in performance to the CDC 3600. From 1968 to 1987, 355 BESM-6 units were produced. With instruction pipelining, memory interleaving and virtual address translation, the BESM-6 was advanced for the era; however, it was less well known at the time than the MESM.
The Ministry of the Electronics Industry was established in 1965, ending the Ministry of Radio Technology's primacy in computer production. The following year, the Soviet Union signed a cooperation agreement with France to share research in the computing field after the United States prevented France from purchasing a CDC 6600 mainframe. In 1967, the Unified System of Electronic Computers project was launched to create a general-purpose computer with the other Comecon countries.
Soyuz 7K-L1 was the first Soviet-piloted spacecraft with an onboard digital computer, the Argon-11S. Construction of the Argon-11S was completed in 1968 by the Scientific Research Institute of Electronic Machinery. According to Piers Bizony, lack of computing power was a factor in the failure of the Soviet crewed lunar programs.
Semiconductor industry
The Soviets realized the strategic implications of semiconductors already in the late 1950s, and new facilities were set up to manufacture them in cities like Leningrad and Riga. Soviet scientists took advantage of student exchange agreements with the US to study the technology, attending lectures by pioneers of the field such as William Shockley. The first Soviet integrated circuit was produced in 1962, under the direction of.Joel Barr, an American-born Soviet spy who had previously infiltrated US-based technology companies, successfully lobbied Khrushchev to build a new city devoted to the production of semiconductors. The new city was given the name of Zelenograd.
As a local semiconductor industry began to develop in the 1960s, Soviet scientists were increasingly ordered to copy Western designs without any changes. In hindsight, the approach was poorly suited to the fast-evolving world of chip manufacturing, which continued to change according to Moore's Law.
1970s
By the early 1970s, the lack of common standards in peripherals and digital capacity led to a significant technological lag behind Western producers. Hardware limitations forced Soviet programmers to write programs in machine code until the early 1970s. Users were expected to maintain and repair their own hardware; local modifications made it difficult to share software, even between similar machines.According to the Ninth five-year plan, Soviet computer production would increase by 2.6 times to a total installed base of 25,000 by 1975, implying about 7,000 computers in use as of 1971. The plan discussed producing in larger quantities the integrated circuit-based Ryad, but BESM remained the most common model, with ASVT still rare. Rejecting Stalin's opinion, the plan foresaw using computers for national purposes such as widespread industrial automation, econometrics, and a statewide central planning network. Some experts such as Barry Boehm of RAND and Victor Zorza thought that Soviet technology could catch up to the West with intensive effort like the Soviet space program, but others such as Marshall Goldman believed that such was unlikely without capitalist competition and user feedback, and failures of achieving previous plans' goals.
The government decided to end original development in the industry, encouraging the pirating of Western systems. An alternative option, a partnership with the Britain-based International Computers Limited, was considered but ultimately rejected. The ES EVM mainframe, launched in 1971, was based on the IBM/360 system. The copying was possible because although the IBM/360 system implementation was protected by a number of patents, IBM published a description of the system's architecture.
The Soviet Academy of Sciences, which had been a major player in Soviet computer development, could not compete with the political influence of the powerful ministries and was relegated to a monitoring role. Hardware research and development became the responsibility of research institutes attached to the ministries. By the early 1970s, with chip technology becoming increasingly relevant to defense applications, Zelenograd emerged as the center of the Soviet microprocessing industry; foreign technology designs were imported, legally or otherwise.
The Ninth five-year plan approved a scaled-back version of the earlier OGAS project, and the EGSVT network, which was to link the higher echelons of planning departments and administrations. The poor quality of Soviet telephone systems impeded remote data transmission and access. The telephone system was barely adequate for voice communication, and a Western researcher deemed it unlikely that it could be significantly improved before the end of the 20th century.
In 1973, Lebedev stepped down from his role as director of the Institute of Precision Mechanics and Computer Engineering. He was replaced by Vsevolod Burtsev, who promoted development of the Elbrus computer series.
In the spirit of detente, in 1974 the Nixon administration decided to relax export restrictions on computer hardware and raised the allowed computing power to 32 million bits per second. In 1975, the Soviet Union placed an order with IBM to supply process-control and management computers for its new Kamaz truck plant. IBM systems were also purchased for Intourist to establish a computer reservation system before the 1980 Summer Olympics.