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Comment by c-smile | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, that's where Open Source was born - in USSR.

I do remember that each consumer device was sold there with its schematics, assembly/disassembly and installation instructions. And that was the law.

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While selling devices with schematics was a common practice everywhere, you are, interestingly, correct. The USSR had the government organization, GosFAP(ГосФАП, National Fund of Algorithms and Programs), which was enforcing sharing of code in the country. I recall reading in some memoirs that it effectively shunted software development as you had to register any software with it and it involved printing source code, filling forms and traveling to the physical location of the office and interacting with a number of officials for a number of days. And even if something got registered there it was for the version 1.0 and never had been updated.

> "I do remember that each consumer device was sold there with its schematics, assembly/disassembly and installation instructions. And that was the law."

That's interesting. I wonder if there's a archive of those schematics/documents for Soviet consumer devices somewhere.

I guess you can just do image search for [принципиальная электрическая схема].

A lot of western instrumentation and test equipment used to come with full circuit diagrams and assembly info. The understanding was that your HP spectrum analyser or Tektronix scope cost so much money that if it broke then you would have it repaired, and to do the repair you need the circuit diagram.

Not any more, of course. It also deserves to be mentioned that lots of higher-end equipment used a lot of custom parts, and not always out of necessity (like custom µPs in HP multimeters, or stuffing solenoid drivers into unrelated hybrids ... and of course anything handling higher frequencies almost always used some custom chips or selected transistors hidden behind opaque part numbers).

Sometimes there are still schematics, Agisight still does it e.g. for low-end power supplies.

Yes, similar information used to be made available for Western electronics. In addition to engineering equipment, consumer electronics such as TVs and radios, and even computers had full schematics at one point.

As an example, can see hardware schematics in the Apple II Reference Manual found here:

http://www.applelogic.org/UserManuals.html

I'm mostly interested in the Soviet material as I'm assuming that because it was a legal requirement the types of documented designs will be more broad, but if you know of an archive of old Western schematics also, I would be interested in taking a look.

At least for home computers, much of the schematics and manuals have been preserved through the dark ages of the 90's by home computer enthusiasts and put on the internet thankfully.

For instance (not Soviet, but East German): here are a few links to manuals and schematics for the East German KC85 computers:

http://floooh.github.io/virtualkc/p060_links.html

But this sort of detailed schematics 'coming in the box' was also common for Western home computers, and it's all preserved. The same for reference manuals of CPUs, and especially support chips. Without these, writing emulators would be much, much harder.

There are websites created by enthusiasts of different categories of equipment: audio amplifiers, radio receivers, home computers, synthesizers. Easy to google "device_name схема".

I think it was the norm at the time. Even toy Amstrad computers in the 80s came with Basic manuals. Manufacturers expected a lot more from the consumers, I guess because tech at that time was more a beautiful new thing rather than a product to sell regularly.

The Apple II also had schematics, and a listing of the Monitor ROM. Quite a contrast from the sealed-box-no-serviceable-parts-inside philosophy that they went to starting with the Mac.

I wonder if Lenovo keeps the service manual tradition alive for thinkpads.

You know it's all consumer dynamics. People buy even without, then why bother.

Yes, they do. Just google "thinkpad nnnnn hmm" for the Hardware Maintenance Manual, or "thinkpad nnnnn psref" for the "tbook-style" datasheet, where nnnnn is the model number.

I got a service manual for an old camera and it is a fine, complete piece of technical writing, literally all the information one would need to fix any problem with the camera.

It dawned on me that in the 70s things needed to be that comprehensive because ... no internet!

In college a teacher told us that before internet they had to wait a month just to have a reply with a catalog of papers from another university; then more months to get a print of their selection. Now they have the whole series in an hour. But for the consumer market this went the opposite way.

> Even toy Amstrad computers in the 80s came with Basic manuals

You're likely talking about the Amstrad CPC, I'm not sure why "toy" should apply to it : it was the best selling 8-bit in several European countries, and by far the most capable of all (the C64 had better sound but much worse graphics, and the ZX Spectrum well... let's be charitable and say that it had at least price going for it.)

For some reason, the Amstrad was underrated in parts of northern Europe (and especially the UK, its homeland), usually in favour of the C64 (fair), and the ZX Spectrum (IMO inexplicable)

Compare screenshots of Operation Wolf, Gryzor, Barbarian side by side on CPC/C64/ZX and you'll see what I mean.

it was marketed as a game machine for children, hence the toy, sure it's a full fledged computer but it wasn't really sold as a programmable device, yet it came with a basic manual

Wasn't every 8-bit home computer marketed as such though?

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