The Lost World of Soviet PCs

In the American mind, the Soviet Union in the Cold War era easily conjures images of stealthy submarines lurking in the deep, nuclear missiles poised to launch, and columns of soldiers marching in lockstep. Among those, add a picture of Russian kids pecking away at a tiny home version of the DEC PDP-11 minicomputer. Wait, what?

Commercial isolation from the U.S. produced a strange parallel universe of technology in the Soviet Union, and computers were no exception. Platforms and architectures that were popular in the United States and its allied countries were not necessarily popular in the Soviet Bloc countries, and vice-versa.

In the Soviet Union, personal computers were very expensive, while most workers' wages were low. So PCs never became a mass-market item like they did in the U.S. during the 1980s. In the slides ahead, we'll take a short stroll through this rare and forgotten world of Soviet personal computers—a world that is still mostly unknown to Westerners today.

1. Mera CM 7209 (ca. 1986)

While the U.S. got hooked on IBM PC compatible machines, the Soviet Union took a strange turn toward DEC PDP-11 compatible PCs after cloning them for military purposes. (PDP-11 was a long-running series of minicomputers created in the U.S.)

While exploring an abandoned power plant in Pripyat, Ukraine, urban explorer Jean Andersen came across this disintegrating Soviet-era computer terminal, which would have been used with a PDP-11-compatible desktop PC. Pripyat became a ghost town in the late 1980s due to its proximity to Chernobyl, which suffered a nuclear power plant disaster in 1986.

(Photo: Jean Andersen)

2. Tetris on EC 5300 (ca. mid-1980s)

In 1984, Alexey Pajitnov wrote the first version of Tetris for an Elektronika 60 computer (not pictured), which was also based on DEC's PDP-11 architecture. Here we see this version of Tetris running on a later PDP-11-compatible desktop machine called the EC 5300.

(Photo: The Tetris Company)

3. Microsha (ca. 1987)

The Microsha was a small home computer that came equipped with an Intel 8080-compable CPU called the KP580BM80A and 32 kilobytes of RAM. The machine itself was a derivative of the earlier Radio-86rk machine, a popular Soviet homebrew computer whose construction plans were published in a 1986 magazine article.

(Photo: Andras Dotsch)

4. Agate-4 (1984)

The Agate-4 was an Apple II compatible machine designed for use in Soviet schools. Its brilliant red color stood in stark contrast to its mostly gray and brown Soviet contemporaries. Despite this colorful and fanciful print advertisement for the machine, its exact relationship to precision eyeball surgery remains unknown.

(Photo Scan: Andreas Doms)

5. EC 1841 (1987)

Deep in the command bunker of the Latvian Soviet Command in Skalupes,visitor Sigurd Rage snapped this photo of a Soviet-era EC 1841 PC (and a nice blue printer as well). The EC1841 was an IBM PC clone, using an 8086-compatible CPU running at 4.77 MHz and anywhere between 512 and 640 kilobytes of RAM. It even ran a Soviet clone of MS-DOS called Alpha DOS, and no doubt helped Latvian Soviet officials keep track of their missile collection.

(Photo: Sigurd Rage)

6. Elektronika MK-90 (1986)

Near the end of the Soviet era, the USSR produced a portable "pocket" computer called the Elektronika MK-90. It shipped with built-in BASIC programming language and a 120-by-64-pixel LCD. Not surprisingly, it cost the equivalent of $22,000 when adjusted to modern U.S. currency. Today it is a rare and highly prized item sought by calculator and pocket computer collectors around the world.

(Photo: Keith Midson)

7. BK 0010-01 (ca. 1986)

The BK 0010 series was one of the most popular Soviet home computer platforms; for a time, it was also the only official government-sanctioned home computer on the market. As with several previously seen computers, this machine packed a PDP-11-compatible CPU (which was fairly powerful for its time) and very limited graphical capabilities.

For more on Soviet computer history, check out this wonderful online museum.

(Photo:Tobias Eikenhorn)