Just to be clear, this article is about an attempt to reimagine the <i>peripherals</i> (so that several people in a household could use the same computer at the same time), not the computer itself, as in balanced-ternary SETUN, or the ferrite/diode systems in which the Soviets held the lead in the early 01960s until they were finally obsoleted by transistors getting cheaper.<p>The article doesn't touch on the architecture of the actual computer at all, but we can presume that, like most designs of the era (both Soviet and non-), it followed industry standards.
I love this design. Reminds me of the Esslinger's desk-integrated Snow White Mac, with a touch of the Jonathan's modular design, with a tiny bit of Bibdesign's geometric purity.<p>Maybe we can take some inspiration on the design utopias of the past.
Sadly, the article and anything else I can find with cursory google search leaves out an real specs or capabilities.<p>The article just talks about design and only briefly mentions capabilities.<p>The Soviets did have computers and did have a semiconductor industry. It was a bit behind the west but not terribly so. For example the Intel 8080 was launched in 1974 and The Soviets were able to fab clones starting in 1979.
I'll just leave it here for anyone interested in the topic.
<a href="https://translate.yandex.ru/translate?url=https%3A%2F%2Fhabr.com%2Fru%2Fpost%2F554916%2F&lang=ru-en" rel="nofollow">https://translate.yandex.ru/translate?url=https%3A%2F%2Fhabr...</a>
Minor nitpick:<p>"This picture of a parade in Berlin in 1987 shows one of the very few original PCs ever produced in a Socialist State, the VEB Robotron PC 1715 manufactured in East Germany"<p>The PC1715 was actually a run-of-the-mill CP/M compatible office computer and fairly common (together with the higher end IBM PC compatible EC 1834: <a href="https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/EC_1834" rel="nofollow">https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/EC_1834</a>).<p>For some actually 'original' computers, check out the KC85/2../4 computers (<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KC_85" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KC_85</a>) and the extremely rare "Mansfeld MPC": <a href="https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mansfeld_MPC" rel="nofollow">https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mansfeld_MPC</a><p>Nothing "revolutionary" of course, but also not straight clones of Western designs (like the PC 1715 or EC 1834).
Those who are interested in the esoteric computers of the USSR might be interested in the Setun 70. [0][1]<p>[0](pdf) <a href="https://hal.inria.fr/hal-01568401/document" rel="nofollow">https://hal.inria.fr/hal-01568401/document</a><p>[1] <a href="http://ternary.3neko.ru/setun70.html" rel="nofollow">http://ternary.3neko.ru/setun70.html</a>
Off topic, but, the USSR had a brutal education system (as in "good"), and lots of stellar talent. It was too poor to have the proper tools to widely cultivate that talent. At least the world got Tetris out of it.
> The system was intended to replace all the technological devices in a house, computers, telephone, television, radio, audio system, and so on.<p>Wow, amazing vision considering the early tech.<p>I love the design too. I had no idea that size flat panels were a thing back then.
Everyone here saying that the soviets didn't/couldn't build computers, there's literally a wikipedia list of Soviet-manufactured computers (<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Soviet_computer_systems" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Soviet_computer_system...</a>), including this PDP-11 microcomputer:<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DVK" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DVK</a>
A surprisingly advanced concept for the 80s, and from the USSR no less.<p>I take it half (or none) of those peripherals didn't work or were really bad?<p>Like, I can say the flat speakers using the tech available at the time would've sounded absolutely horrible. And the flat screen was very likely just a mockup.
What you see at the pictures is all USSR industrial complex was capable of. And I don't mean the computer. I mean single instance of wooden/paper "device" representing how the concept would look like.