In a letter that CRASH, the British Spectrum magazine, printed in February 1989, a 15-year-old in Arkhangelsk explained how Soviet teenagers got hold of a computer. “Because there is a shortage of good computers in our country, almost all Soviets who like computer games and programming must make little computers themselves,” he wrote. His own had an 8080 processor, 2K of EPROM and 32K of RAM, built to a design “taken from a Soviet hobby magazine”. He was writing the letter on a home-built ZX Spectrum, “in ‘Russian style’”, made by a friend. Personal computing in the Soviet Union grew up like that: from circuit diagrams in magazines, a few factory machines that were hard to buy, computer clubs that charged by the hour, and a school subject that most schools had no computers to teach.
Fast facts
- Hobbyist designs: the Micro-80 (published in Radio, 1982–83) and the Radio-86RK (Radio, 1986), both built round the KR580 processor, a Soviet copy of Intel’s 8080.
- Factory machines: the Agat (shown at a Moscow trade fair in July 1983), modelled on the Apple II; the Elektronika BK-0010 (described in 1985), with the instruction set of the Elektronika 60 minicomputer.
- Schools: a nationwide course in the “Fundamentals of Informatics and Computing Technology” was ordered from 1985–86, with individual schools permitted to start in 1986–87.
- Spectrum clones: home-built and factory-made, among them the Pentagon 128, the Scorpion and the Byte.
- Best-known program: Tetris, written by Alexey Pajitnov at the Computer Centre of the USSR Academy of Sciences, 1984 by most accounts.
Computers from a magazine
The monthly Radio, the magazine for the Soviet Union’s radio amateurs, started a series on microprocessors and microcomputers in September 1982. Its introduction came from the rector of the Moscow Institute of Electronic Engineering, and the editors wrote that they meant to bring radio amateurs into the field “since the specialists say: the future belongs to microprocessors!” Over 1982 and 1983 the magazine published a complete personal computer, the Micro-80.
Few were built. When Radio introduced its successor in April 1986, it explained why: the Micro-80 needed more than 200 chips, the magazine had published no drawings of its circuit boards, and, above all, the chips were not on sale in the shops. The new design, the Radio-86RK, cut the count to 29 chips on a single board, whose layout the editors had tested by building one in the office. It used a KR580 processor, a 2K ROM holding the monitor program and 16K or 32K of RAM, with a cassette recorder for storage and a television for a screen. Even then, the editors admitted, it was “still difficult to obtain these 29 chips”, and they hoped industry would sell them as a kit.
The letter to CRASH shows what happened next. Its writer’s machine, with its 8080, 2K EPROM and 32K of RAM and an 8275 video controller, matches the Radio-86RK, and he found it worked “pretty well, but has poor graphics”. So, he wrote, “many of us are looking for a design with better graphics, and containing components available in Russia. A year ago many chose the Sinclair ZX Spectrum model”, although “some rare special ICs like the ULA controller are not available here”.
Factory computers
Soviet factories made personal computers too, but they were expensive and hard to find.
The Agat. BYTE published an American eye surgeon’s account of the Agat in November 1984. Leo Bores had used one for a week in August 1983, after a prototype was shown at a Moscow trade fair that July. Its operating system and ROM, he wrote, “seemed to be a direct lift from the Apple computer, with only a few minor differences”, and he dubbed it the “yablocka (Russian for apple)”. BYTE’s standfirst was less polite: “a bad copy of the Apple”. It was a big machine with a disk drive built in, a Russian typewriter keyboard and a SECAM colour television for a monitor.
The Elektronika BK-0010. The journal Mikroprotsessornye sredstva i sistemy described the BK-0010 in its first issue of 1985 as a “household personal microcomputer”, meant to be a home information centre for games, calculations, reference files and educational programs, and to prepare schoolchildren to work with computers. It plugged into a household television and cassette recorder, had a 16-bit K1801VM1 processor, 32K of RAM and 32K of ROM, and ran the language FOCAL from a plug-in ROM. Its instruction set and architecture were compatible with the Elektronika 60, the minicomputer on which Pajitnov wrote Tetris; Amiga Format later called its processor “a PDP-11 clone, based on DEC’s minicomputer design”. It was made from 1985 into the early 1990s.
What they cost. In 1989 the Polish magazine Bajtek visited Agat, a computer club in Moscow on Dmitrovskaya Street, founded in 1986 and owned by the Lianozovo works, a factory that assembled about 3,000 Agats a year. An hour in the room of Mikroshas, a factory-made version of the Radio-86RK, cost 50 kopecks; an hour on an Agat cost 1 rouble 20 kopecks. The club also hired computers out by the day. A Mikrosha cost about 500 roubles in the shops, “if it gets there at all”, and Agats had recently sold officially for 4,900 roubles. A Soviet survey quoted in the article found that only 14.6 per cent of computer-club members had a computer at home, most often a BK-0010 or a Japanese Yamaha.
Informatics without computers
A resolution of the Communist Party’s Central Committee and the Council of Ministers, dated 28 March 1985, called for “Fundamentals of Informatics and Computing Technology” to be taught across Soviet secondary education from the 1985–86 school year. It allowed republic education ministries, with the USSR Ministry of Education’s agreement, to defer individual schools until 1986–87. Radio reported it alongside a story about schoolboys at a young technicians’ station in Kiev, who had adapted the simplest and cheapest pocket calculator, the B3-23, into timers and other gadgets.
The machines did not follow quickly. When the American “Information USA” exhibition toured the Soviet Union from June 1987, Family Computing sent a writer, Steve Morgenstern, to Moscow. An expert told him that computers for schools were scarce, “with little prospect for short-term improvement”. “Computer science is taught,” Morgenstern wrote, “but it is largely an abstract, conceptual topic; the students lack machines to try their hands at programming.” A Moscow editor had managed to get his 13-year-old son into an after-school computer class that used half a dozen Yamaha MSX computers. Blank 3.5-inch floppy disks sold on the black market for 20 to 50 roubles each, and visitors argued over whether you could really walk into a shop and buy a computer: some said yes, others quoted waits “from six months to a lifetime”.
The Spectrum takes over
Western home computers came in through tourists and the black market. The letter to CRASH reported that Spectrums bought abroad were resold “for more than 2,000 roubles”, which the magazine reckoned at about nine months’ average wages, and that the authorities had “banned or limited the purchase of computers abroad”. A year and a half later, Your Sinclair printed a far higher figure from Dmitri Michailov, one of two Leningrad designers who had built a Spectrum-compatible school computer, the Hobbit: a Western PC cost 60,000 roubles, he said, “and even a Spectrum costs 40,000! At 250 roubles a month, that’s just too much.” Alessandro Grussu’s history of the Spectrum describes the same pattern across the Eastern bloc: Spectrums “often smuggled from the West” spread “due to their low cost and ease of use”, until “local microelectronics companies made ‘their’ versions of the machine”.
The ULA, the Spectrum’s one custom chip, could not be bought in the Soviet Union, so clones such as the Byte did its work with ordinary TTL logic chips instead. Looking back in 2005, Retro Gamer’s John Szczepaniak found that the Pentagon 128 had been the most popular of the first Soviet clones, often hand-built and sometimes “little more than a collection of circuit boards and wires”, with the Scorpion 256 and the Kay 1024 following. About 80 per cent of the clones, he wrote, had a Beta Disk floppy interface built in and ran the TR-DOS disk system rather than loading from tape. Factories made clones too: the Byte (Байт, also transliterated Bayt) came from the Brest electromechanical works in Byelorussia from about 1990, and is not the Moldovan clone of the same name from the Dnestr factory in Bender. The TZX format, used to preserve Spectrum tapes, still gives the Pentagon 128 and the Scorpion their own hardware codes.
Tetris and after
The best-known Soviet program came out of a research institute, not a hobby magazine. Pajitnov wrote Tetris on an Elektronika 60 at the Computer Centre of the USSR Academy of Sciences, where the machine could draw the pieces only with square brackets; a 16-year-old, Vadim Gerasimov, ported it to the IBM PC, and it spread from there. The Vault’s entries on Tetris and the Tetris legal battles tell how the rights, held by the Soviet state, were sold in the West.
The machines outlived the Soviet Union. In 2005 Retro Gamer found the Russian Spectrum scene “still big”, alongside the Dendy, a Famicom clone whose name, the magazine wrote, “would become synonymous with gaming”. Russian developers kept making puzzle games: in 1995 the Moscow Games Magazine listed Tetris, Biprolex and Color Lines among Russia’s successes. Color Lines, a PC game, travelled as far as Yugoslavia, where two Amiga programmers released Lineae Coloris, “based on the PC game: Color Lines”. Amiga Format described it in 1997: counters of the same colour lined up in fives on a 9×9 board, and three new ones arriving after every move that did not complete a line.
Sources
- Radio (USSR), September 1982: “Радиолюбителю о микропроцессорах и микро-ЭВМ”, the opening of the microprocessor series, with E. V. Armensky’s introduction (in Russian). https://archive.org/details/1982-02
- Radio (USSR), April 1986, p. 24: “Персональный радиолюбительский компьютер «Радио-86РК»”: the Micro-80 of 1982–83 and why it was not built in numbers; the Radio-86RK’s 29 chips, single board, KR580 processor, 2K ROM, 16K or 32K RAM, cassette and television; the difficulty of buying the chips (in Russian). https://archive.org/details/1986-01
- CC CPSU and Council of Ministers of the USSR, Resolution No. 271, 28 March 1985, clause 1; reproduced in Voprosy obrazovaniya 2005 no. 3, pp. 341–346 (p. 341): the 1985/86 introduction target and the permitted 1986/87 start for individual schools. https://vo.hse.ru/article/download/14930/13985/
- Radio (USSR), June 1985, p. 33, “«Радио» — начинающим” section, “Новые «профессии» микрокалькулятора Б3-23”: the resolution’s planned introduction of “Основы информатики и вычислительной техники” from the new school year; the Kiev young technicians and the B3-23 (in Russian). https://archive.org/details/1985-03
- Radio (USSR), November 1985: informatics and computing “introduced this year as an independent course in the school curriculum” (in Russian). https://archive.org/details/1985-03
- S. M. Kosenkov and others, “Бытовая персональная микроЭВМ «Электроника БК-0010»”, Микропроцессорные средства и системы, 1985 no. 1, pp. 22–25: purpose, schools, television and cassette, K1801VM1 processor, 32K RAM and ROM, FOCAL, compatibility with the Elektronika 60 (in Russian). https://archive.org/details/MPSIS-1985-1
- Leo D. Bores, “AGAT: A Soviet Apple II Computer”, BYTE volume 9 issue 12, November 1984, pp. 134–136 and following: the July 1983 trade fair, his week with the machine in August 1983, the “direct lift” from the Apple, the standfirst, the keyboard and SECAM monitor. https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1984-11
- CRASH issue 61, February 1989, p. 30: letter from a 15-year-old reader in Arkhangelsk and the magazine’s reply (the home-built 8080 machine, the shortage of computers, the move to the Spectrum, the 2,000 roubles, the restrictions on buying abroad).
- Keith Pomfret, Your Sinclair issue 57, September 1990, p. 37: Michail Osetinskij and Dmitri Michailov of Leningrad and their Hobbit; Michailov on the prices of a Western PC and a Spectrum.
- Bajtek (Poland), 4/1989, p. 20: “Korespondencja własna z Moskwy”, the Agat computer club (founded 1986, Lianozovo works, 3,000 Agats a year, hourly and daily charges, Mikrosha about 500 roubles, Agat 4,900 roubles, the survey of club members) (in Polish).
- “Radio-86RK”, Wikipedia (web, secondary): the Mikrosha as an industrial version of the Radio-86RK. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio-86RK
- Steve Morgenstern, “USA Computers Tour the USSR”, Family Computing volume 6 issue 6, June 1988, pp. 50–53: the “Information USA” exhibition; schools, the Yamaha MSX class, black-market floppy disks, buying a computer.
- Amiga Format issue 107, February 1998, p. 24: BKemul, the BK-0010 “launched in Moscow in 1985”, made until 1993, its PDP-11-style processor.
- Alessandro Grussu, Spectrumpedia volume 1 (English edition, 2022), p. 38: Spectrums smuggled into the Eastern bloc and local clones, among them the Pentagon, Scorpion and Sprinter; pp. 407–408: the Bayt, from Russian bayt (“byte”), built in Brest and sold from the end of 1989; p. 410: the Moldovan Byte, “not to be confused with the Bayt”, from the Dnestr factory in Bender.
- John Szczepaniak, “Russia”, Retro Gamer issue 15, 2005, pp. 68–69: the Pentagon 128, Scorpion 256 and Kay 1024; Beta Disk and TR-DOS; the Dendy; the scene “still big”.
- TZX tape format specification, version 1.13, hardware type table: hardware codes for the Pentagon 128 and ZS Scorpion. https://worldofspectrum.net/TZXformat.html
- “BEMZ Byte (Байт)”, oldcomputer.info (web, secondary), and “List of ZX Spectrum clones”, Wikipedia (web, secondary): the Byte, Brest Electromechanical Plant, mass production from around 1990; “no ULA there but lots of TTL chips”. https://oldcomputer.info/8bit/bajt/index.htm and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ZX_Spectrum_clones
- Games Magazine (Moscow, Computerra), March 1995, p. 42: interview listing Tetris, Biprolex and Color Lines as Russian successes (in Russian).
- Amiga Format issue 103, November 1997, p. 52: Lineae Coloris, by two Yugoslav Amiga programmers, “based on the PC game: Color Lines”, and its rules.
- For Tetris, the Elektronika 60, Vadim Gerasimov and the dates, see the Tetris and Alexey Pajitnov entries and their sources.