Comment by mm321 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mm321 | Hacker News Reader

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Russian wikipedia https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/ЕС_ЭВМ#cite_note-.D0.B8.D1.81.... says that second generation soviet systems were oriented towards numerical computations and that they had a real problem with system software (no OS, even no assembler).

Now the architecture/os/system of the IBM S360 took some money to develop - here it says it was 5 billion $ (comparable in magnitude to the moon program - that was 25 billion $) http://www.smashcompany.com/business/cost-overruns-and-the-i... . So I guess that Kosygin was trying to avoid this expenditure.

Therefore a major point is that software development costs a lot, and they could just pirate that by copying the OS360.

On the other hand they could have done a similar thing as Amdahl/Siemens/Hitachi - copy the architecture while producing a hardware design of their own, so go figure.

They did do exactly that in many cases - the ES systems were not transistor-by-transistor copies of the IBM systems. The original article (PDF link) has a letter from Andrei Gagarin which mentions that the ES1065 had entirely original hardware design and architecture (while presumably being ISA-compatible with the IBM systems). Also, not all ES systems were IBM 360 compatible - the ES project was an overall scheme for improving and modernizing the computer industry of the Socialist block (the name ES was in fact created when Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary and other countries joined the project, which grew out of a USSR-only project called "Ryad"), and although the IBM 360 architecture was central to ES, there were completely incompatible systems in the ES line.

Incidentally Lebedev didn't want to have anything to do with the cloning project (ES), I wonder if that was a mistake as he could have done a better job of preserving his project by doing a similar thing like Amdahl.

Actually that would have been better for the Soviet Union, as they would have been able to export a competing IBM compatible design for hard currency (opposed to just copying it down to every detail).

East Germany and other socialist countries were producing licensed IBM machines and they could no longer export these machines after the ES system got adopted.

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