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Ehm... The author of the article barely scratches the surface. He has no information on Soviet military networks, especially those decentralised ones introduced in anti-air missile system in the last decades of the USSR. КСА «Рапира-Ц» for those who really wants to know. And that guys, was the thingy. Also search for АСУ «Пирамида» if interested.



Unfortunately, that's how all discussions of Soviet technology inevitably end up: but ooh it's space or ooh it's military. This mindset is well captured in the famous track "Аквалангисты" by Mango-Mango.

Most of it was pretty mundane and touchingly backwards, just less shoddily built than civilian equipment. I took apart a fair quantity of BMP-2 and T-72 instrument panels; call it my contribution to arms reduction and the world peace. My first joystick was converted from an ATGM control station. I've been with ZGV in East Germany while it's equipment and supplies were hustled away by entrepreneurial NCOs and officers. I worked with some of the guys who copied ЕС ЭВМ series from IBM products with cracking stories about realities on the ground.

There's no secret sauce, despite no shortage of impressive Cyrillic acronyms and chest thumping.


So you admit, you never served you duty at ПВО. While you had been getting dirty selling diesel from T72 for Marlboro blocks in East Germany, other guys invented proper original communication systems and did their best. АСВТ designed and developed fully automatic Искра network, of which you probably never heard, listening to Mango Mango and other jazz.


"у нас есть такиииие приборы.. но мы вам о них не расскажем!"

Well, neither you served in air defence, so other than some bizarre personal attack am not sure what your point was here. It is however remarkable how you paint me a greedy traitor for bringing a dose of realism to your unrestrained pioneer enthusiasm.

I worked with a bunch of people from NII SA, the principal developer of ES series. Some of them ended up as mobile mounted C&C elements for the military and on relay com stations, including strategic networks. They were equally shoddy however (and clones of the Western architectures to begin with). The shortest guy in the team once had to sit inside a panel fanning an overheating assembly with a piece of plywood during military acceptance test.

Soivet computing in 1980s was pretty stale. And it simply doesn't happen that people making sad shit for civilian side become sudden geniuses when switching to defence orders. Computing systems were inadequate on factories, research bureaus, power grid, they simply could not not suck in the military too. There were no separate research institutes designing computer architectures for military only, no factories producing separate component base just for military. If anything, the civilian production was a side business at most enterprises and were manned by same people. General state of research, production culture and scientific effort determines the baseline, and USSR was behind on all three in CS.




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