"USSR/Soviet Military Computing Device"

SRAM is volatile. If somebody turns the power off SRAM forgets.

The original PDP8 had magnetic core memory, and you rarely had to key in the RIM loader with the front panel switches.

I never lived in a world without solid state ROM and RAM. I can't tell if that's a full computer/processing unit or if that's just the magnetic core driver/readout circuitry. Dark ages stuff! It would be a lot of circuitry to store...1 kbit maybe?

bitrex wrote in news:b%v1E.50639$ snipped-for-privacy@fx32.iad:

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If that is "Russian", it is full of stolen US parts. It looks like something they designed in the '80s using '70s components.

I see some "K155" labels on the dips looks like that is a functional equivalent to a regular (non-LS) 7400-series IC:

So not physically stolen just functional equivalents with the same pinouts. Unlike an 8080 CPU which they surely reverse-engineered and copied I figure they could come up with a TTL NAND gate on their own

At that time Morre's low wasn't exactly working in this part of the world. This kind of technology used to be stolen by the spies, decapped and sent to Bulgaria for analysis. The problem was what to do next with that knowledge.

The former Soviet bloc truly excelled at many technologies, but microelectronics wasn't one of the fields.

Best regards, Piotr

Yes, in my country: the MCY7880.

Why bother if you can steal the masks? Best regards, Piotr

bitrex wrote in news:3fy1E.74495$ snipped-for-privacy@fx19.iad:

No. I mean like the canned transistors look like GE jobs.

The resistors look better made than the gear it is on too.

I just do not think they had the manufacturing expertise to make quality components like that. I still have doubts. Where are the hot russian logic chips or analog products for that matter? Oh that's right... never was a free country, so folks could never enjoy things like hobbies like we do. Nothing to drive innovation.

Was anything in the 7400 series under any kind of IP protection by the time the Soviets cloned them in the late 60s/early 70s? If not I guess it's not "stealing" then the ICs themselves were probably not hard to come by, de-cap and examine. It would be interesting to see if anyone has ever done a compare and contrast between a Western and Eastern bloc logic IC from the same period to see what's what.

A lot of musicians think Behringer making clone chips from the masks of long OOP Curtis ElectroMusic ICs is "theft" cuz it pisses off Doug Curtis' widow, or something.

I heard a joke one time that Communism fell in part cuz the Soviet youth were pissed off at the limited availability of Beatles and Rolling Stones LPs. Ironically rock and roll is somewhat unfashionable with "the kids the days", electronic music is hip, which is what the Soviets supposedly favored due to its "ideological purity." There was as small industry in manufacturing analog synthesizers for domestic and export use e.g. the Polivoks:

Which was a unique Soviet design and not a clone of any Western product at the time, they made a number of synthesizer designs very few of which were knock-offs.

In the 80s apparently there was a decent-sized home computer userbase with indigenously made Z80 and 8088 machines and I think they even made some variants of those processors with extra features and upgrades, more registers and opcodes, larger address space, higher clock speeds, etc. that were not based on any Western variants.

I think they had engineers who could innovate when they had the resources but they were just broke most of the time in the way most de-facto dictator-states are; no funds to do anything very exciting on the consumer front it's all going to the military

Anyone ever try stealing a whole semiconductor fab and sneaking it out of the West bit by bit in tubs of ice cream or boxes of gourmet chocolates?

Might be a while before anyone noticed some of the polysilicon crystals had been replaced with genuine Folgers coffee crystals instead..HEY what's the big idea

The Soviet bloc, not only the Soviets. Poland, a satellite state at the time, has been producing them since the early 70. Their quality was very low -- the chips themselves were OK, but the packaging/epoxy potting technology caused the bondings to break quickly. It took them some time to fix it.

Of course, and, as I said, Bulgaria was chosen to be our (at the time) rev-eng centre. Stellar experts. But the manufacturing part was seriously lagging.

Best regards, Piotr

Diplomatic bags have always been used for that purpose. Things got a bit more compicated when e.g. the Polish military intelligence managed to steal a brand new NATO tank with ammo (it was an Abrams, IIRC) but they invented a creative use of a ship. :-)

Best regards, Piotr

Why bother if you can get the latest superior to US stuff from China? I remember repairing some small Russian Rigonda all transistor portable TVs a bit like the Sony first all transistor TVs, Europe and US had nothing like it. And that was sooo long ago:

I also had a Werra 35 mm camera, was very cheap:

Do not underestimate what Russia has, after all the astron[a]uts of US and Europe and other places still need a Russian taxi to the ISS. The Chinese play on the backside of the moon, and Russia-China is a strong alliance. US only has sales pitches and phantasy weapons, Reagan smoke clouds (and real smoke clouds in California). snake oil like F35 nothing material.

Just like the MINIC 1 designed by micro Computer Systems in Woking Surrey (UK) back in the early 70s...

What is wrong with core memory, especially if you need non-volatility, rad-hardening or a reasonable temperature range ?

DRAM vs SRAM: The DRAM density is higher and in normal situations consumption is lower. However, in one western military application DRAM was specified, but the maximum specified temperature was so high that the DRAMs required very frequent refresh rates, increasing power consumption above SRAM :-).

Regarding core memory vs DRAM for real computers, the dividing line was in the late 1970's. The later PDP-11 machines with 4 Mib physical address space could not be configured by that amount of core memory due to memory bus physical length limits. One memory box contained 256 KiB of core, one cabinet 1 MiB.

Around 1977 Intel offered DRAM boxes with up to 1 MiB ECC capacity and thus the full 4 MiB physical address space could be stored in a single cabinet, avoiding the memory bus limitations. The memory box was made of 8 kilobit DRAM chips, that were actually failed 16 kilobit chips, with permanent hard errors in the other half of the chip :-)

It's dated 1982, so they had SRAM. And it's not a processing unit, it's som e other kind of useless crap that has to store some small number of bits pe rmanently but can be changed by operator. Maybe some kind of comm crypto ge ar and the stored bits are a key.

wrote in news:q26k3p$16k2$1 @gioia.aioe.org:

Not just cite, but LIST.

Draft a list of "superior" Chinese military hardware.

I'm betting the length of that list is exactly ZERO.

What bullshit website do you spend all of your time on? Come back when you are not even more fact free that Donald J. Trump.

snipped-for-privacy@downunder.com wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com:

Give one good reason WE do not still use mag core memory?

Oh... yeah... physical size and weight per bit. Absolutely means it will be EXCLUDED from ANY design.

Speed? Oh yeah... slower than dripping tar.

Rad hard? NOT. The drivers that exite the bit states of each cell could get fired and 'throw' a bit off.