“If we consider the samples of weapons of different types of troops, and even in the historical aspect, how many samples of Soviet military equipment were the best in comparison with the same American ones? Where was there more money, modern research and production equipment, scientists? Maybe the USSR was the leader in creating computers, software?"
I want to say a special thank you to sevtrash, who encouraged me to write this article, and whose phrases from the comments I used as an epigraph.
The phrases “Russian processor” or “Soviet computer”, unfortunately, evoke a number of specific associations introduced by our media, thoughtlessly (or, on the contrary, deliberately) replicating Western articles. Everyone is accustomed to thinking that these are antediluvian devices, bulky, weak, inconvenient, and in general, domestic technology is always a reason for sarcasm and irony. Unfortunately, few people know that the USSR at certain moments in the history of computer technology was "ahead of the rest of the planet." And you will find even less information about modern domestic developments in this area.
The Soviet Union is called the country that possessed one of the most powerful scientific schools in the world, not only "leavened" patriots. This is an objective fact based on a deep analysis of the education system by experts from the British Association of Educators. Historically, in the USSR, special emphasis was placed on training specialists in the field of natural sciences, engineers and mathematicians. In the middle of the 20th century, there were several schools for the development of computer technology in the country of the Soviets, and there was no shortage of qualified personnel for them, which is why there were all the prerequisites for the successful development of the new industry. Dozens of talented scientists and engineers have participated in the creation of various systems of electronic calculating machines. Now we will only talk about the main milestones in the development of digital computers in the USSR. Work on analog machines was started even before the war, and in 1945 the first analog machine in the USSR was already in operation. Before the war, research and development of high-speed triggers, the main elements of digital computers, began.
Sergei Alekseevich Lebedev (1902 - 1974) is reasonably called the founder of the development of computer technology in the Soviet Union - under his leadership, 15 types of computers were developed, from the simplest lamp to supercomputers on integrated circuits
In the USSR, it was known about the creation by the Americans in 1946 of the ENIAC machine - the world's first computer with electronic tubes as an element base and automatic program control. Despite the fact that Soviet scientists knew about the existence of this machine, nevertheless, like any other information that leaked into Russia during the Cold War, this data was very scarce and indistinct. Therefore, the talk that Soviet computer technology was copied from Western models is nothing more than innuendo. And what kind of "samples" can we talk about if the operating models of computers at that time occupied two or three floors and only a very limited circle of people had access to them? The maximum that domestic spies could get was fragmentary information from technical documentation and transcripts from scientific conferences.
At the end of 1948, Academician S. A. Lebedev began work on the first domestic machine. A year later, the architecture was developed (from scratch, without any borrowing), as well as schematic diagrams of individual blocks. In 1950, the computer was assembled in record time by the efforts of only 12 scientists and 15 technicians. Lebedev called his brainchild "Small electronic calculating machine", or MESM. "Baby", which consisted of six thousand vacuum tubes, occupied an entire wing of a two-story building. Let no one be shocked by such dimensions. Western designs were no less. It was fiftieth year in the yard and radio tubes still ruled the ball.
It should be noted that in the USSR MESM was launched at a time when there was only one computer in Europe - the English EDSAK, launched just a year earlier. But the MESM processor was much more powerful due to the parallelization of the computational process. A similar machine to EDSAK, TsEM-1, was put into operation at the Institute of Atomic Energy in 1953, and it also surpassed EDSAK in a number of parameters.
When creating MESM, all the fundamental principles of creating computers were used, such as the presence of input and output devices, coding and storing a program in memory, automatic execution of calculations based on a program stored in memory, etc. The main thing was that it was a computer based on the binary logic that is currently used in computing (the American ENIAC used the decimal system (!!!), and in addition, the principle of pipeline processing, developed by S. A. operands are processed in parallel, it is now used in all computers in the world.
The small electronic calculating machine was followed by a large one - BESM-1. The development was completed in the fall of 1952, after which Lebedev became a full member of the USSR Academy of Sciences.
In the new machine, the experience of creating MESM was taken into account and an improved element base was applied. The computer had a speed of 8-10 thousand operations per second (against only 50 operations per second for MESM), external storage devices were based on magnetic tapes and magnetic drums. Somewhat later, scientists experimented with accumulators on mercury tubes, potentioscopes and ferrite cores.
If in the USSR they knew little about Western computers, in Europe and the USA they knew practically nothing about Soviet computers. Therefore, Lebedev's report at a scientific conference in Darmstadt became a real sensation: it turned out that the BESM-1 assembled in the Soviet Union is the most productive and powerful computer in Europe.
In 1958, after another modernization of the BESM RAM, which had already received the name BESM-2, it was mass-produced at one of the factories of the Union. The result of the further work of the team under the leadership of Lebedev was the development and improvement of the first BESM. A new family of supercomputers was created under the brand name "M", whose serial model M-20, performing up to 20 thousand operations per second, became at that time the fastest operating computer in the world.
1958 was another important, albeit little-known, milestone in the development of computing. Under the leadership of V. S. distances up to 200 km. At the same time, it is officially believed that the world's first computer network began to work only in 1965, when the TX-2 computers of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Q-32 of the SDC corporation in Santa Monica were connected. Thus, contrary to the American myth, the computer network was first developed and implemented in the USSR, as much as 7 years earlier.
Specially for the needs of the military, including for the Space Control Center, several computer models based on the M-40 and M-50 were developed, which became the "cybernetic brain" of the Soviet anti-missile system, created under the leadership of V. G. Kisunko and shot down a real missile in 1961 - the Americans were able to repeat this only 23 years later.
The first full-fledged second-generation machine (on a semiconductor basis) was the BESM-6. This machine had a record speed for that time - about a million operations per second. Many of the principles of its architecture and structural organization became a real revolution in computing technology of that period and, in fact, were already a step into the third generation of computers.
BESM-6, created in the USSR in 1966, had a record speed for that time - about a million operations per second
In BESM-6, the stratification of random access memory into blocks was implemented, allowing simultaneous retrieval of information, which made it possible to dramatically increase the speed of access to the memory system, the principle of combining instruction execution was widely used (up to 14 machine instructions could be simultaneously in the processor at different stages of execution). This principle, named by the chief designer of BESM-6, academician S. A. Lebedev, the "water pipeline" principle, later became widely used to increase the productivity of general-purpose computers, having received the name "command conveyor" in modern terminology. For the first time, a method for buffering requests was introduced, a prototype of a modern cache memory was created, an efficient system of multitasking and access to external devices was implemented, and many other innovations, some of which are still in use. BESM-6 turned out to be so successful that it was serially produced for 20 years and effectively worked in various state structures and institutions.
By the way, the International Center for Nuclear Research, created in Switzerland, used BESM machines for calculations. And one more indicative fact, striking the myth about the backwardness of our computing technology … During the Soviet-American space flight Soyuz-Apollo, the Soviet side, using the BESM-6, received processed results of telemetry information in a minute - half an hour earlier than the American side …
In this regard, an article by the curator of the Museum of Computer Science in Great Britain, Doron Sweid, about how he bought one of the last working BESM-6 in Novosibirsk is interesting. The title of the article speaks for itself: "The Russian BESM series of supercomputers, developed more than 40 years ago, may testify to the lies of the United States, which declared technological superiority during the Cold War years."
There were many creative collectives in the USSR. The institutes of S. A. Lebedev, I. S. Bruk, V. M. Glushkov are only the largest of them. Sometimes they competed, sometimes they complemented each other. And everyone worked at the forefront of world science. So far, we have talked mainly about the developments of Academician Lebedev, but the rest of the teams in their work were ahead of foreign developments.
So, for example, at the end of 1948, employees of the Power Engineering Institute. Krizhizhanovsky Brook and Rameev receive an inventor's certificate on a computer with a common bus, and in 1950-1951. create it. In this machine, for the first time in the world, semiconductor (cuprox) diodes are used instead of vacuum tubes.
And in the same period when S. A. Lebedev created BESM-6, Academician V. M. Glushkov completed the development of the "Ukraine" mainframe, the ideas of which were later used in American mainframes in the 1970s. The MIR family of computers created by Academician Glushkov was twenty years ahead of the Americans - these were the prototypes of personal computers. In 1967, IBM bought MIR-1 at an exhibition in London: IBM had a priority dispute with competitors, and the machine was bought in order to prove that the principle of stepwise microprogramming, patented by competitors in 1963, has long been known Russian and is used in production vehicles.
The pioneer of computer science and cybernetics, academician Viktor Mikhailovich Glushkov (1923-1982) is known to specialists all over the world for his scientific results of world significance in mathematics, computer science and cybernetics, computer technology and programming
The next stage in the development of computer technology in the USSR was work on the creation of a supercomputer, the family of which was named "Elbrus". This project was started by Lebedev, and after his death it was headed by Burtsev.
The first multiprocessor computer complex "Elbrus-1" was launched in 1979. It included 10 processors and had a speed of about 15 million operations per second. This machine was several years ahead of the leading Western computers. Symmetric multiprocessor architecture with shared memory, the implementation of secure programming with hardware data types, superscalarity of processor processing, a unified operating system for multiprocessor complexes - all these capabilities implemented in the Elbrus series appeared much earlier than in the West, the principle of which is used to this day. day in modern supercomputers.
"Elbrus" generally introduced a number of revolutionary innovations into the theory of computers. These are superscalarity (processing more than one instruction per cycle), implementation of secure programming with hardware data types, pipelining (parallel processing of several instructions), etc. All these features first appeared in Soviet computers. Another main difference of the Elbrus system from similar ones previously produced in the Union is its focus on high-level programming languages. The basic language ("Autocode Elbrus El-76") was created by V. M. Pentkovsky, who later became the chief architect of Pentium processors.
The next model in this series, Elbrus-2, already performed 125 million operations per second. "Elbrus" worked in a number of important systems associated with the processing of radar information, they were counted in the license plates of Arzamas and Chelyabinsk, and many computers of this model still provide the functioning of anti-missile defense systems and space forces.
The last model in this series was Elbrus 3-1, which was distinguished by its modular design and was intended for solving large scientific and economic problems, including modeling of physical processes. Its speed reached 500 million operations per second (on some teams), twice as fast as the most productive American supercar of the time, the Cray Y-MP.
After the collapse of the USSR, one of the Elbrus developers, Vladimir Pentkovsky, emigrated to the United States and got a job at Intel. He soon became a senior engineer of the corporation and under his leadership in 1993 Intel developed the Pentium processor, rumored to be named after Pentkovsky.
Pentkovsky embodied in Intel's processors the Soviet know-how that he knew, and by 1995 Intel released a more advanced Pentium Pro processor, which came close in its capabilities to the Russian El-90 microprocessor in 1990, but never caught up with it., although it was created 5 years later.
According to Keith Diffendorf, editor of the Microprocessor Report, Intel has adopted the vast experience and advanced technologies developed in the Soviet Union, including the fundamental principles of modern architectures such as SMP (symmetric multiprocessing processing), superscalar and EPIC (Explicitly Parallel Instruction Code - code with explicit instruction parallelism) architecture. On the basis of these principles, computers were already produced in the Union, while in the USA these technologies were only "hovering in the minds of scientists (!!!)".
I want to emphasize that the article spoke exclusively about computers embodied in hardware and mass-produced computers. Therefore, knowing the actual history of Soviet computer technology, it is difficult to agree with the opinion about its backwardness. Moreover, it is clear that in this industry we have consistently been at the forefront. Unfortunately, we do not hear about this either from TV screens or from other media.
