Cemetery of Soviet Computers | Hacker News Reader

Cemetery of Soviet Computers

rusue.com

138 pointsdetaro15 comments

I was taking a break from looking things up for my Ural motorcycle and was looking up the Soviet clone of the IBM S/360 and 370s to see if they had ever made a microprocessor version. Instead of finding that I found... the Ural Mainframe! Variable word length (1-48 bits). There's very little in English on them, but I made a digitization request for two US government reports on them. Maybe implement in an FPGA so I can put a Ural in my Ural.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ural_(computer)

There are thousands of places like this[1] on post soviet union territory, goldmines for urban explorers, one guy even got in abandoned nuclear power plant, although someone up top didn't liked it and now he is in prison for disclosing government secrets [2]

[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Aurban3p.ru+эвм [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=er1l0wdl-ZM

No, he got into trouble because he has trespassed into territory of an active military radar installment [0] (for obvious reasons he filmed only the defunct part). Try to get into a similar US military base, film it, publish results and see for yourself how "someone up top" would like your actions.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YFNqsBaIWk0

I'd like to see a report on finding Setun[1]. Ternary computer is a real marvel.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Setun

Came here to post the same thing. Glad I'm not the only one interested in Ternary systems. About a year ago, I found and old used book on Amazon titled "Ternary Systems". I was really excited for it's arrival, but I was disappointed. When looking online, I didn't look closely enough - it was a book on metal alloys comprised of three metals.

Edit: If you (or anyone) has any good links/resources/recommendations for learning about ternary (logic) systems/computers, I'm all ears!

Venerable EnglishRussia.com is looking at "Computer Center of 1980-90s"

https://englishrussia.com/2010/10/05/computer-center-of-1980...

The gentleman who took those photos actually has a LiveJournal page in Russian where he posts these urban explorations, you can find his urban explorations of Russia and Japan. There are several interesting places he's written about: https://ralphmirebs.livejournal.com/

Super interesting read. Thanks for sharing.

Interesting to see that many are PDP-8 and -11 clones.

"CVAX... When you care enough to steal the very best."

I've read a fair amount about soviet computing history, and this always struck me as odd - they poured so much effort into trying to copy/clone/reverse-engineer western computing equipment, pretty much ensuring that they were always a few generations behind. I read an incredibly depressing account of the Elektronika SSBIS - an effort that started in 1980 to clone the (then ~3-year old) Cray-1, and which managed to eventually produce a handful of prototypes by ~1991 or so (at which point the Cray C90 had just come out - a computer capable of hitting 16 GFLOPS).

Can you tell me where you read this? I'd love to read the sources on this!

I've long time wondered how big of a factor silicon valley was in US pulling ahead in many areas in cold war. Computers seem such an economic and technological amplifier, and of course also other (e.g. analog) electronics advances were also important and they all happened pretty much in US or at least in West.

Whatever happened to that one keyboard looked bad. Is that paint? Perhaps they could carefully uncover the keys (but be careful in case they were covered as a quick-and-dirty biohazard prevention): https://i1.wp.com/rusue.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/18.jp...

Also check the place with a geiger counter. It's that old.

Looks like soot. The post mentions there was a fire.

On Ebay parts of Saratov-2 are sold at incredible prices:

https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_from=R40&_trksid=p2047675.m...

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