Soviet Mainframe Computers

Ural-1 Control Unit

The world of Soviet tech is an interesting one, they frequently were forced to resort to workarounds as they attempted to compensate for their lagging technological development when compared to the West. This does not detract from their very real accomplishments in areas such as the space race, where they led the West for years before finally irrevocably falling behind after the untimely death of their leading designer, Sergei Korolev in 1966.

I recently purchased an entire book on eBay called The Technological Level of Soviet Industry, (archived 1978 review here, there is no direct link to buy it as even Amazon doesn't seem to have it). This isn't a full book, rather it is a collection of different author's papers all bound together. I purchased the book specifically to get Chapter 8, Computer technology which is an extremely good resource on the state of Soviet computing in the late 70s. At the time of publication in 1977, personal computers such as the Apple II, TRS-80, and Commodore PET were just starting to be released to the public, starting a seismic shift that wouldn't fully manifest itself for some years.

In the Soviet Union on the other hand, computer technology lagged about ten years behind America. And even this is undoubtedly being charitable as most contemporary comparisons relied on Soviet published figures, which were notorious for being unreliable indicators of the actual state of things.

Soviet computers seem to start off in the early 1950s, some years after the West. At this point they were already lagging behind the West, a situation that only worsened as the years passed on. By 1964, if we accept Soviet figures at face value, the Soviet Union seemed to have about two percent as many computers as the United States did, and these were considerably inferior in performance and software.

BESM-6

Soviet attempts to close the gap resulted in systems such as the Ural, Minsk, and of particular significance, the BESM-6, which was the first transistor based Soviet system,  released in 1966, four years after the first comparable American system, the IBM 7094 was released commercially.

When IBM revolutionized the world with the first family of computers, the 360 series in 1964 (released commercially in 1965), the Soviets were unable to respond with their own comparable system until the ES series in the early 1970s.

The Soviet Union also made heavy use of stolen or covertly acquired computer technology, especially from IBM, to advance its own systems. Without this, they would have fallen even further behind. But ultimately, this could only get them so far. They simply could not match the rapid pace of innovation and advance that characterized the American computer industry at this time, which frequently developed new products that obsoleted the old ones. While the Soviet Union was still working on developing their own transistor based systems, the American computer companies were pushing forward with integrated circuits, obsoleting entire factories and systems, both of which were replaced at a frantic pace. 

Does any of this really matter today? Not really, it's just an interesting footnote in computing history. Sometime I plan to do a post on Soviet personal computers. They did exist in the 1980s, and were primarily copies of western personal computers like the Apple II and the Sinclair Spectrum. But they were built entirely differently in order to be manufactured by the extant Soviet technology of the day.


Credits

Ural-1 Control Unit
By Panther - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=6358233

BESM-6
By Victor R. Ruiz - https://www.flickr.com/photos/rvr/21836713154/in/photolist-zgCS3o, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=70714402