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Comment by efoto | Hacker News Reader

It was hopelessly behind in hardware. The processors were cloned by thinly slicing them and making pictures. This is how i8086 was "designed" anyway. http://www.cpushack.com/soviet-cpus.html

There was very little original software written at the time, multiple teams were tasked with reverse-engineering popular software tools and programs and translating them into Russian for internal consumption.

The gap in software development is somewhat harder to quantify. Overall the software was rather decent in those rare cases when it was original.

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I assume you've seen this. http://micro.magnet.fsu.edu/creatures/pages/russians.html

Neat, though that phrase makes no sense in Russian. It's not even a properly formed sentence.

I think it's good enough for the target audience to have gotten the message if they ever saw it though.

Speaking of things that the soviets reverse-engineered, I think the B-29 Superfortress is worth mentioning: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tupolev_Tu-4

Did they use a microtome with a diamond knife? Floating slices on water, to grids or slides?

Might grinding yield better resolution?

Such technology might be useful in the process of developing open-source hardware.

As far as I understand, common practice was lapping. Yield was always acceptable.

It is still being done now, for open-source hardware too, like here : http://zeptobars.ru/en/read/KR580VM80A-intel-i8080-verilog-r...

Were they so far behind in VLSI design that decapping and reverse engineering was a better option than re-implementing the processor from a published spec?

I suspect yes, that was one of the reasons. They were likely lacking CAD tools for VLSI design.

They were much less behind than it is now (1-2-5 years max). The problem is that leadership of USSR wanted to take advantage of using existing software - hence demanded 100% exact copy of hardware (starting from IBM-360). By many these actions were considered a treason, especially in retrospective.

There were independent developments, they worked but never went widespread (because they needed an "order" from the state).

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