Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!bloom-beacon!usc!orion.cf.uci.edu!balboa.eng.uci.edu!dlawyer From: dlawyer@balboa.eng.uci.edu (David Lawyer) Newsgroups: comp.misc Subject: USSR Microcomputers: How far behind US? Message-ID: <1805@orion.cf.uci.edu> Date: 28 Apr 89 22:51:02 GMT Sender: news@orion.cf.uci.edu Reply-To: dlawyer@balboa.eng.uci.edu (David Lawyer) Organization: University of California at Irvine. Lines: 51 I have just received several books (in Russian) on Soviet microcomputers. I don't have time to read them all and would be willing to loan them to anyone who wants to read them (you must know Russian). By 1991 the USSR expects to have about one million microcomputers (MC) in use. Not only are there far fewer MC's in the USSR than in the US, but the capabilities are also much lower. As of a year or so ago, they were still making 8-bit MC's with 64K of memory (maximum). These would be considered to be obsolete in the US. It wasn't until 1986 that they started making 16-bit MC's. 32 bit MC's are discussed but the only examples of them shown in these Russian books are for US MC's. One might expect that the USSR would standardize on one or two families of MC's but this is not the case. The families include: Agat, Elektronika-60, DVK, Elektonika-K1, EC-1840, CM-1800, Neyron, and Iskra. Books that cover only one MC make few (if any) comparisons with US MC's but the books which cover MC's in general make many comparisons between Russian (and East block) MC's and US MC's. For example, I read in another magazine about certain MC's being installed in Soviet railroad offices. When I checked the results of benchmark tests (in a Russian MC book which contains comparisons of Soviet and US computers) one of the newly installed models was 50 times slower than an IBM-AT at 6 MHz. In fact all of the Russian MC's tested fared worse than the IBM-XT. Glasnost! :-) This was a couple of years ago so today they likely have improved somewhat. Roughly speaking, one might say that they are making the transition from 8 to 16 bit MC's while we are going from 16 bits to 32. Many of the East-block computers are IBM-PC compatible with CPU chips which are analogs of Intels 8080A or 8086. Thus they could use US software. As of a year ago little software was available in the USSR except for that developed for special purposes by individual industries. A section of the Academy of Sciences was established a year or so ago to develop general purpose software. I don't know what they have released so far. Operating systems on some of their MC's are similar to CP/M, MS-DOS, or Unix (rare). One of their Unix-like system is called Demos and my books give no information about it. Of course there are many other Russian computer books which I don't have --one of which likely describes it. If Russians use our software, why shouldn't we use theirs? One problem is the alphabet: ascii vs "rascii" :-) used by the Russians. All three versions of "rascii" (=Russian-American Standard Code for Information Interchange :-) ) put the Cyrillic characters into "above ascii" codes (128-256 dec.). The lower codes (32-127) are the same as ascii. Thus US software will work on Soviet computers but not conversely unless the "above ascii" codes have been modified to display (or print) the appropriate Cyrillic characters (3 "standards" for this).