Those working on regular expression matching or related tasks should be well aware of some of the names here, especially Victor Glushkov. We still use Glushkov's NFA construction (which dates to 1961 or earlier) in our regular expression matcher (Hyperscan). It was interesting to hear about what a major figure Glushkov was beyond his work on automata, which was all I really knew about.
> By the late 1960s Lebedev, Glushkov,and their followers believed that Soviet scientists had accumulated a significant amount of experience in computer technology and had a considerable production potential. They wanted to collaborate with large Western European computer manufacturers in developing a fourth-generation machine before the Americans did. Lebedev’s political adversaries proposed a different option – to duplicate the American third-generation IBM-360 system, created several years earlier. Although no scientists of Lebedev’s caliber were among them, they were the political figures who had decision-making power. The Soviet government passed a resolution to develop a Unified System of Computers, reverse - engineered from the configurations of the IBM - 360.<p>The history there takes a turn and after 70s they just started mostly copying Western machines. It was interesting how they would justify it to themselves copying the product of the "decadent and failing Western capitalism" while they also had to attend parades and sing songs to Lenin about how their country was at the forefront and leading the world to better and brighter future.<p>However, to be fair, I also learned computers by using a crapy Soviet ZX Spectrum clone. So on a practical level copying became an obvious choice perhaps. At least it would have been soon enough.<p>Also, I always liked Setun, the ternary computer. It ends in kind of a sad story though:<p>> Unfortunately, after the Setun-70 project, Brusentsov’s lab was relocated from the Computer Center at Moscow University to a windowless attic in a student dormitory and was deprived of any serious support. The new university rector considered computer design a pseudo-science. Brusentsov’s original Setun computer, an experimental prototype that had faithfully worked for seventeen years, was barbarically destroyed and carted off to the dump.
Kind've post-Soviet but there was a link between Elbrus (Boris Babayan) and Transmeta.<p><a href="https://www.theregister.co.uk/1999/10/24/russian_merced_killer_firm_confirms/" rel="nofollow">https://www.theregister.co.uk/1999/10/24/russian_merced_kill...</a><p>I believe that Babayan was the originator of the Code Morphing idea. However, Ditzel had also done something earlier with CRISP at Bell Labs where complex instructions were translated/decoded into horizontal microcode instructions and cached, the precursor to the x86 μ-store. Translated != Compiled.<p><a href="https://www.technologyreview.com/s/400837/the-software-chip/" rel="nofollow">https://www.technologyreview.com/s/400837/the-software-chip/</a><p>Babayan went on to work for Intel where he is now an Intel Fellow.<p><a href="https://newsroom.intel.com/biography/boris-a-babayan/" rel="nofollow">https://newsroom.intel.com/biography/boris-a-babayan/</a>
Read this years ago and loved it. Among the most memorable portions of the book for me is still the forward:<p>"Bringing this manuscript to publication was an epic adventure in itself, so we decided to share our experience here, along with some commentary on academic publishing today and its inevitable demise."<p>I've also quoted it before on Hacker News:<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4059080" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4059080</a>
See the Agat, a Soviet Apple II clone
<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agat_(computer)#Reception" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agat_(computer)#Reception</a>
<a href="https://archive.org/stream/byte-magazine-1984-11/1984_11_BYTE_09-12_New_Chips#page/n135/mode/2up" rel="nofollow">https://archive.org/stream/byte-magazine-1984-11/1984_11_BYT...</a>