*An article from sixteen years ago, but entropy requires no maintenance. "Make and take," comrade.
http://www.cs.manchester.ac.uk/other/CCS/res/res09.htm#f
Russian computing: back from Siberia
Doron Swade
During the Cold War scientific collaboration between the West and the Eastern-bloc countries was officially prohibited. With the recent collapse of state communism as the official ideology of the former Soviet Union the West now has unprecedented access to centres of excellence and to the communities of scientists and engineers that people them.
The newly lowered ideological guard was one factor favouring a visit to our new and tentative allies in a Western-styled market economy. The determining stimulus was a range of extraordinary tales told by the growing trickle of Westerners returning from the former Soviet Union.
There were tales of Russian-designed machines built into DEC consoles that outperformed their Western equivalents by several orders of magnitude - Volkswagens with V8 engines; tales of ternary logic computers for which there was no Western counterpart (MIR); and finally, a tale of a winking monster - a Cold War supercomputer - that occupied an entire floor. It was rumoured to have thousands of flashing console lights, was operated in near darkness in the heart of Siberia, and was said to be the last working version of the legendary Besm-6 supercomputer.
The prospect of verifying travellers' tales of this kind was irresistible. I went to Russia to forage for historic computers for acquisition by the Science Museum, profoundly intrigued by these apocryphal yarns.
In preparation for what was to be my first trip to the former Soviet Union I read what I could find on Russian computers. The literature search was both baffling and revealing. In British computer culture names such as Edsac, Elliott, Pegasus, Deuce, ACE, and LEO have rich resonances for their designers, technicians and users.
I found that Russian computer culture has its own tribal icons - Ural, Mesm, MIR, Riad, Nairi, Strela, Besm, Elbrus - acronymic tags as rich in shared history and personal associations to the Soviet computer community as our acronymic mantras are to us. Yet these machines are practically unknown to Western historians of computing and barely feature in the historical canon.
A second striking feature of the literature search was how little public domain material has been published in English. A large part of what little there is has its origins in the US military. This material, written for the most part during the Cold War years, goes to extraordinary lengths to establish the 'backwardness' of Russian computer hardware. A central feature of the propaganda war was the issue of technological supremacy.
The triumphalist spirit in which Russian 'backwardness' is trumpeted appears to us now insensitive and even brutal. The trouble taken to convince ourselves of our own supremacy cannot be seen outside the context of threat and insecurity of the Cold War. The challenge to modern computer history is to evaluate the extent to which Cold War historiography is propagandist.
In the West, Russian programmers command respect and even awe. One reason advanced for the excellence of Soviet software is that the originality of their algorithms and the efficiency of their code was an enforced compensatory response to inferior hardware.
Others advanced more ominous reasons. Developments in science and technology that offered any prospect of practical application were appropriated and controlled by the state, and abstraction into theory was posited as a refuge from centralised control. The more abstract and theoretical the research the less manifest was its practical value and the greater the immunity from unwelcome controls.
The major strategic conflict in the development of Soviet hardware centred on the choice between 'make and take', ie. whether to maintain indigenous independent Soviet design, or whether to copy from the West. The tension came to a head in the late Sixties. The temptation to bypass long and costly hardware development cycles by copying Western hardware won the day. Sergei Lebedyev (1902-1974), an influential protagonist of independent development, was defeated by the copyist lobby. From then on Russian machines adopted Western architectures.
Hardware based predominantly on IBM, Burroughs and DEC machines was cloned, reverse engineered, pirated and sometimes even directly purchased. But the time-lag involved in cloning or reverse engineering proved to be an unforeseen handicap, and the performance gap in the hardware platforms apparently widened. The period of particular interest to the history of computing is the period of indigenous development starting in the late 1940s and which predates the era of cloning.
If the early Soviet computers, particularly the Mesm (1951/2), the M-20 (1958/9) and the Besm series (1953-1967), developed during the isolationist years of the Cold War, are similar in architecture and performance to Western contemporary machines, then this either says something significant about the uniqueness of the solutions, or that the official prohibition against technological exchange was not as complete as is publicly perceived. On the other hand, if Soviet machines are significantly different, then the Soviet computing community is something of a lost tribe. Either way the history of computing now faces a challenging new chapter.
In this abbreviated account I propose to omit discussion of particular machines, their development (technical and political), and the figures responsible for their design and production. (I am happy to provide sources for anyone interested.) Instead I propose to add to the growing corpus of travellers' tales that I found deeply revealing about Soviet computing culture. (((This is the part where it starts getting good.)))
Doron Swade is Senior Curator (Computing and Information Processing) at the Science Museum. This article is a condensed and edited version of the talk given by him to the Society at the Museum on 30 September 1993. Technical material and discussion of particular Soviet computers has been omitted. (((Because Dr. Swade is The Guru of Dead Computation, that's why.)))
