[HN Gopher] Soviet Calculator History (1998)
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Soviet Calculator History (1998)
Author : Tomte
Score : 90 points
Date : 2024-07-14 18:11 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (xnumber.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (xnumber.com)
| artemonster wrote:
| Fun fact, since soviet calculators were copied from western
| designs, when an error happened it was displayed also a "error"
| on a 7seg display. if you squint hard enough you can read it as
| EGGOG (eggog, total nonsense gibberish) in russian, which was
| explained in manuals as a "keyword signaling an error condition".
| There is an article in russian wikipedia on studying the error
| codes and undocumneted features - "eggogology"
| https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%95%D0%B3%D0%B3%D0%BE%D0%B3...
| saagarjha wrote:
| Were there no Cyrillic characters that could be thrown up on a
| 7-segment display to signal failure?
| artemonster wrote:
| The usual word for this is "oshibka" which is hard to spell
| on 7seg, but the main reason was that designs were copied
| layer by layer from chips and not reverse engineered (with
| few rare exceptions) to be able to change something like
| that.
| xattt wrote:
| What's lost to history is the lore of Soviet calculator
| design. These were made by real people who made design
| decisions based on the constraints they had, even when it
| came to cloning Western tech.
| ansgri wrote:
| Best I can come up with is OLL|6, a crude rendering of OShB,
| abbreviation of "oshibka", error. Or maybe PROB, as "prob" in
| "problem"
| Aspos wrote:
| I see several words which could fit but all of them are
| obscene.
| culebron21 wrote:
| Just like Latin, some Cyrillic characters can be displayed,
| but the words that mean an error, unambiguously, have letters
| that don't fit, even if you shorten the word. Oshibka (sh & k
| are problematic), sboi (i won't fit).
| Swizec wrote:
| > which was explained in manuals as a "keyword signaling an
| error condition"
|
| Fun side-note: As someone who learned programming in parallel
| with learning English, my brain still thinks of many
| programming constructs as keywords that have no real meaning.
| 20+ years later it still surprises me sometimes when something
| clicks and my mind goes _"Oh wait that concept is named after a
| real world analogy!! Whoa"_
| tgv wrote:
| It's been argued that this makes programming easier for
| starters not fluent in English: they see a token to which
| they can attach a single meaning, instead of having
| interference from their linguistic intuition. There's some
| evidence backing that up, but it wasn't much.
| pvg wrote:
| I read ?TYPE MISMATCH ERROR as mishmash (mish-mash,
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mish-mash_(food) ) error and it
| made perfect sense. Was a while before I learned what
| 'mismatch' actually meant.
| timonoko wrote:
| English is a programming language with short immutable tokens
| and sequential ramification.
|
| When you see something else like Python's list comprehensions
| or Common Lisp Loop-macroes, you become confused and very
| angry.
| vbezhenar wrote:
| Error is a very convenient word in a sense that it could be
| displayed on the 7-digit display. I guess it's hard to come up
| with better indicator.
| asddubs wrote:
| seems like you wouldn't have to squint at all, the shapes are a
| better match than for ErrOr
| pvg wrote:
| A lot of them were heavily influenced by western designs but
| they were not clones or copies by any stretch, unlike many
| Warsaw-pact-made personal computers. There are probably more
| detailed comparisons out there but this gives a decent idea:
|
| http://www.rskey.org/b3-21
| orbital-decay wrote:
| Only a few were domestic designs. Most of them were copied
| almost 1:1 from HP and Casio calculators, and adjusted for
| the inferior production capability. B3-38 in particular,
| MK-51 etc. Die shots almost match each other, and even the
| microcode was 99% copied with some fixes. [1] That likely was
| the reason they never updated the firmware.
|
| The "Eggog" message was likely copied too, although I can't
| think of a good way to display an error in Cyrillic in 7
| segments.
|
| Home computers is another story, in particular the 1801
| series which was a domestic PDP-11 compatible design
| underpinning most of the Soviet personal computing boom of
| the late 1980s. (it was slow though, holy hell)
|
| [1] https://habr.com/ru/news/765316/
| pvg wrote:
| Have you come across something similar about the
| programmable ones? The fact the basic models involved more
| copying seems more or less as-expected to me (the B3-38
| kind of reminds me of the _Nu Pogodi!_ Nintendo Game &
| Watch clones, just by appearance) but the programmable ones
| look tweaked far beyond just changing the names of things.
| opencl wrote:
| No die shots but the Wikipedia articles of all things on
| the MK61 and MK52 are surprisingly thorough including
| photos of the PCBs, schematics, and the External Links
| sections contain most of the interesting articles I'm
| aware of about these.
|
| They're quite interesting and quirky machines, definitely
| HP-inspired but unique in a lot of ways. Especially the
| MK52 with the built in EEPROM (though other than the
| EEPROM and connector for an external ROM it is
| functionally identical to the MK61). They're also still
| readily available and cheap on eBay if you want to play
| with one.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elektronika_MK-61
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elektronika_MK-52
| pvg wrote:
| Thanks, the one in your first Wikipedia link
| http://www.alfredklomp.com/technology/mk-61/ apparently
| also had a brief HN thread
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12632803
|
| It seems odd there isn't more first-hand/primary-source-
| ish information about these - people who worked on ICBMs
| or nerve agents or whatnot have written about their
| experiences, you'd think calculator designers would pop
| up as well. Like, where is something like this for Soviet
| calculators https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39962737
| hulitu wrote:
| > Most of them were copied almost 1:1 from HP and Casio
| calculators, and adjusted for the inferior production
| capability
|
| Of course. /s
|
| But some of them were better.
| NikkiA wrote:
| The B3 series appear to _mostly_ be copies of Sharp
| designs.
|
| Hell, the whole -= += x/ nonsense was something Sharp
| introduced in 1970.
|
| edit: interestingly enough, the Sharp QT-8 also had the
| funky 8-segment display.
| mzs wrote:
| That article begins by stating the display was very likely a
| HP part or copy and how it was poorly utilized.
| smsm42 wrote:
| That was my introduction to hacking . The realization that you
| can make the system to do things that the designers didn't
| intend it to do, and open the whole new would of possibilities,
| was what got me hooked and probably made me choose the path
| that led to going into computer technology.
| tristramb wrote:
| Museum of Soviet Calculators: https://elektronika.su/en/all/
| specproc wrote:
| Slowly on the way out, but the abacus and school-type notebook
| are still the weapons of choice for many a shopkeeper across the
| FSU.
| galkk wrote:
| Prevailing theory even in my childhood was that abqcus is a way
| to sneak shortchange in calculations
| orphean wrote:
| "The first models of the Elektronika B3-21 had a red LED display.
| The comma used one full position in the display. Later the
| display was changed to green fluorescent but this made its
| operation slower by 20 %"
|
| The red ones go faster after all (waaagh).
| dboreham wrote:
| They're only red when they're going away from you...
| 486sx33 wrote:
| My grandmother came from Soviet Ukraine, she still manually
| verifies calculator outputs by re doing the math long hand. She
| doesn't trust those things!
|
| Hopefully she will one day give up this habit, but I guess habits
| die hard when you're in your 90s
| thriftwy wrote:
| These were sufficiently expensive that many people got some form
| of Spectrum/PC before their first calculator, bang for the buck
| it made more sense.
|
| Then there was a post-soviet wired phone design with Z80 in it
| which had a built-in calculator among other apps, which it had
| half dozen. Alarm clock, phone book, etc, etc. The killer feature
| was Caller ID variant - it could read caller's number from the
| PSTN and display that one. A feat that required accepting the
| call and then emulating the beeps.
| galkk wrote:
| Funny fact.
|
| I guess for the rest of my life I will remember amount of digits
| in PI that fit screen of my MK-52: "3.1415926"
|
| There was another topic about pi digits on front page:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40943437, that remind me of
| it
| bvrmn wrote:
| > Soon the cost of microcircuits started to decrease, and it
| became possible to consider the development of pocket size
| calculators with prices accessible to the wide consumer.
|
| Most of calculator models cost like 30%-50% of monthly salary of
| engineer who developed such devices. Scientific ones were up to
| 100%. It was quite far from accessible.
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