The birth of the Soviet missile defense system. Long road to integrated circuits

38

Standardization


As for the first task - here, alas, as we mentioned in the previous article, there was no smell of standardization of computers in the USSR. This was the greatest scourge of Soviet computers (along with officials), which it was just as impossible to overcome. The idea of ​​a standard is an often underestimated conceptual discovery of humanity, worthy of being on a par with the atomic bomb.

Standardization provides unification, pipelining, tremendous ease and cost to implement and maintain, and tremendous connectivity. All parts are interchangeable, machines can be stamped in tens of thousands, synergy sets in. This idea was applied to firearms 100 years earlier. arms, 40 years earlier to the car - the results were breakthrough everywhere. It is all the more striking that it was only in the USA that it was thought of before applying it to computers. As a result, we ended up borrowing the IBM S / 360 and stole not the mainframe itself, not its architecture, not the breakthrough hardware. Absolutely all of this could easily be domestic, we had more than enough straight arms and bright minds, there were plenty of genius (and by Western standards, too) technologies and machines - series M Kartseva, Setun, MIR, you can list for a long time. Stealing the S / 360, we, first of all, borrowed something that we did not have as a class in general all the years of development of electronic technologies up to that moment - the idea of ​​a standard. This was the most valuable acquisition. And, unfortunately, the fatal lack of certain conceptual thinking outside of Marxism-Leninism and the "genius" Soviet management did not allow us to implement it in advance on our own.



However, we will talk about the S / 360 and the EU later, this is a painful and important topic, which is also related to the development of military computers.

Standardization in computer technology was brought by the oldest and greatest hardware company - naturally, IBM. Until the mid-1950s, it was taken for granted that computers were built piece by piece or in small series of machines of 10-50, and no one guessed to make them compatible. That all changed when IBM, spurred on by its eternal rival UNIVAC (which was building the LARC supercomputer), decided to build the most complex, largest, and most powerful computer of the 1950s - the IBM 7030 Data Processing System, better known as Stretch. Despite the advanced element base (the machine was intended for the military and therefore IBM received a huge number of transistors from them), Stretch's complexity was prohibitive - it was necessary to develop and mount more than 30 boards with several dozen elements each.

Stretch was developed by such greats as Gene Amdahl (later S / 360 developer and founder of Amdahl Corporation), Frederick P. Brooks, Jr also S / 360 developer and author of software architecture concept) and Lyle Johnson ( Lyle R. Johnson, author of the concept of computer architecture).

Despite the enormous power of the machine and a huge number of innovations, the commercial project completely failed - only 30% of the announced performance was achieved, and the president of the company, Thomas J. Watson Jr., proportionally reduced the price by 7030 several times, which led to large losses ...

Project Stretch was later named by Jake Widman (Jake Widman's Lessons Learned: IT's Biggest Project Failures, PC World, 09.10.08/10/360) as one of the top 1964 IT industry management failures. Development leader Stephen Dunwell was punished for the commercial failure of Stretch, but soon after the phenomenal success of System / 7030 in 1966 noted that most of its core ideas were first applied in the XNUMX. As a result, he was not only forgiven, but also in XNUMX, he was officially apologized and received the honorary position of IBM Fellow.

The 7030's technology was ahead of its time - instruction and operand prefetching, parallel arithmetic, protection, interleaving, and RAM write buffers, and even a limited form of re-sequencing called Instruction pre-execution — the grandfather of the same technology in Pentium processors. Moreover, the processor was pipelined, and the machine was able to transfer (using a special channel coprocessor) data from RAM to external devices directly, unloading the central processor. It was a kind of expensive version of DMA (direct memory access) technology that we use today, although Stretch channels were controlled by separate processors and had many times more functionality than modern poor implementations (and were much more expensive!). Later, this technology migrated to the S / 360.

The scope of the IBM 7030 was huge - the development of atomic bombs, meteorology, calculations for the Apollo program. Only Stretch could do all of this, thanks to its massive memory size and incredible processing speed. Up to six instructions could be executed on the fly in the indexing block, and up to five instructions could be loaded at once into the prefetch blocks and parallel ALU. Thus, at any given time, up to 11 commands could be at different stages of execution - if we ignore the outdated element base, then modern microprocessors are not far from this architecture. For example, Intel Haswell processes up to 15 different instructions per clock, which is just 4 more than the 1950s processor!

Ten systems were built, the Stretch program caused IBM 20 million in losses, but its technological legacy was so rich that it was immediately followed by commercial success. Despite its short life, the 7030 brought many benefits, and architecturally it was one of the five most important machines in stories.

Nevertheless, IBM saw the unfortunate Stretch as a failure, and it was because of this that the developers learned the main lesson - designing hardware was never an anarchic art anymore. It has become an exact science. As a result of their work, Johnson and Brooke wrote a fundamental book published in 1962, "Planning a Computer System: Project Stretch."

The design of computers was divided into three classical levels: the development of a system of instructions, the development of a microarchitecture that implements this system, and the development of the system architecture of the machine as a whole. In addition, the book was the first to use the classic term "computer architecture". Methodologically, it was a priceless work, a bible for hardware designers, and a textbook for generations of engineers. The ideas outlined there have been applied by all computer corporations in the United States.

The tireless pioneer of cybernetics, the already mentioned Kitov (not only a phenomenally well-read person, like Berg, who constantly followed the Western press, but a true visionary), contributed to its publication in 1965 (Designing ultrafast systems: Stretch Complex; ed. By A.I. Kitova. - M .: Mir, 1965). The book was reduced in volume by almost a third and, despite the fact that Kitov especially noted the main architectural, systemic, logical and software principles of building computers in the extended preface, it passed almost unnoticed.

Finally, Stretch gave the world something new that had not yet been used in the computer industry - the idea of ​​standardized modules, from which the entire industry of integrated circuit components later grew. Every person who goes to the store for a new NVIDIA video card, and then inserts it in place of the old ATI video card, and everything works without problems, should at this moment offer mental thanks to Johnson and Brook. These people invented something more revolutionary (and less noticeable, and immediately appreciated, for example, the developers in the USSR did not even pay attention to it at all!) Than the conveyor and DMA.

They invented the standard compatible boards.

SMS


As we already said, the Stretch project had no analogues in terms of complexity. The giant machine was supposed to consist of more than 170 transistors, not counting hundreds of thousands of other electronic components. All this had to be mounted somehow (remember how Yuditsky pacified the rebellious huge boards, breaking them into separate elementary devices - unfortunately, for the USSR this practice did not become generally accepted), debug, and then support, replacing faulty parts. As a result, the developers proposed an idea that was obvious from the height of our today's experience - first, develop individual small blocks, implement them on standard maps, then assemble a car from the maps.


Central processor IBM 7030 (rows of cabinets behind a huge console) and a block from BM 1401 with SMS cards (photo https://blog.hnf.de/t and https://en.wikipedia.org)

This is how the SMS - Standard Modular System was born, which was used everywhere after Stretch.

It consisted of two components. The first was, in fact, the board itself with basic elements 2,5x4,5 inches in size with a 16-pin gold-plated connector. There were single and double width boards. The second was a standard card rack, with the busbars spread out in the back.

Some types of card boards could be configured using a special jumper (just like motherboards are tuned now). This feature was intended to reduce the number of cards that the engineer had to take with him. However, the number of cards soon exceeded 2500 due to the implementation of many families of digital logic (ECL, RTL, DTL, etc.), as well as analog circuits for various systems. Nevertheless, SMS did their job.

They were used in all second-generation IBM machines and in numerous peripherals of third-generation machines, as well as served as a prototype for more advanced S / 360 SLT modules. It was this "secret" weapon, which, however, no one in the USSR paid much attention to, and allowed IBM to increase the production of its machines to tens of thousands a year, as we mentioned in the previous article.

This technology was borrowed by all participants in the American computer race - from Sperry to Burroughs. Their total production volumes could not be compared with the fathers from IBM, but this made it possible in the period from 1953 to 1963 to simply fill up not only the American, but also the international market with computers of their own design, literally knocking out all regional manufacturers from there - from Bull to Olivetti. Nothing prevented the USSR from doing the same, at least with the CMEA countries, but, alas, before the EU series, the idea of ​​a standard did not visit our state planning heads.

Compact packaging concept


The second pillar after standardization (which played a thousand times in the transition to integrated circuits and resulted in the development of the so-called libraries of standard logic gates, without any special changes used from the 1960s to the present day!) Was the concept of compact packaging, which was thought about even before integrated circuits. circuits and even to transistors.

The war for miniaturization can be divided into 4 stages. The first is pre-transistor, when lamps were tried to standardize and reduce. The second is the emergence and introduction of surface-mounted printed circuit boards. The third is the search for the most compact package of transistors, micromodules, thin-film and hybrid circuits - in general, the direct ancestors of ICs. And finally, the fourth is the ISs themselves. All these paths (with the exception of miniaturization of lamps) of the USSR passed in parallel with the USA.

The first combined electronic device was a kind of "integral lamp" Loewe 3NF, developed by the German company Loewe-Audion GmbH in 1926. This warm tube sound fan's dream consisted of three triode valves in one glass case, along with two capacitors and four resistors needed to create a full-fledged radio receiver. Resistors and capacitors were sealed in their own glass tubes to prevent vacuum contamination. In fact, it was a "receiver-in-a-lamp" like a modern system-on-chip! The only thing that needed to be purchased to create a radio was a tuning coil and capacitor, and a loudspeaker.

However, this miracle of technology was not created in order to enter the era of integrated circuits a few decades earlier, but to evade German taxes levied on each lamp socket (a luxury tax of the Weimar Republic). Loewe receivers had only one connector, which gave their owners considerable monetary preferences. The idea was developed in the 2NF line (two tetrodes plus passive components) and the monstrous WG38 (two pentodes, a triode and passive components).


Tsar-lamp Loewe 3NF and ALU element IBM 701 (photo https://www.worthpoint.com/ and https://en.wikipedia.org)

In general, lamps had tremendous potential for integration (although the cost and complexity of the design increased exorbitantly), the pinnacle of such technologies was the RCA Selectron. This monstrous lamp was developed under the leadership of Jan Aleksander Rajchman (nicknamed Mr. Memory for the creation of 6 types of RAM from semiconductor to holographic).

John von Neumann


After the construction of ENIAC, John von Neumann went to the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS), where he was eager to continue work on a new important (he believed that computers are more important than atomic bombs for the victory over the USSR) scientific direction - computers. According to the idea of ​​von Neumann, the architecture he designed (later called von Neumann) was supposed to become a reference for the design of machines in all universities and research centers in the United States (this is partly what happened, by the way) - again a desire for unification and simplification!

For the IAS machine, von Neumann needed memory. And RCA, the leading manufacturer of all vacuum devices in the United States in those years, generously offered to sponsor them with Williams tubes. It was hoped that by including them in the standard architecture, von Neumann would contribute to their spread as a RAM standard, which would bring huge revenues to RCA in the future. In the IAS project, 40 kbit RAM was laid, the sponsors from RCA were a little saddened by such appetites and asked Reichman's department to reduce the number of pipes.

Raikhman, with the help of the Russian émigré Igor Grozdov (in general, many Russians worked at RCA, including the famous Zvorykin, and President David Sarnov himself was a Belarusian Jew - émigré) gave birth to a completely amazing solution - the crown of vacuum integrated technology, an RCA SB256 Selectron RAM lamp for 4 kbit! However, the technology turned out to be insanely complicated and expensive, even serial lamps cost about $ 500 apiece, the base, in general, was a monster with 31 contacts. As a result, the project did not find a buyer due to delays in the series - there was already a ferrite memory on the nose.


Probably the most complex electric vacuum device is the same RCA SB256 Selectron, its operation diagram and a monstrous power supply for them (photo https://computerhistory.org/)

Tinkertoy project


Many computer manufacturers have made deliberate attempts to improve the architecture (you can't tell the topology here yet) of lamp modules in order to increase their compactness and ease of replacement.

The most successful attempt was the IBM 70xx series of standard lamp units. The pinnacle of lamp miniaturization was the first generation of the Project Tinkertoy program, named after the popular children's designer of 1910-1940.

Not everything goes smoothly for the Americans either, especially when the government gets involved in contracts. In 1950, the Navy's Bureau of Aeronautics commissioned the National Bureau of Standards (NBS) to develop an integrated computer-aided design and production system for modular-type universal electronic devices. In principle, at that time, this was justified, since no one yet knew where the transistor would lead and how to properly use it.

NBS poured over $ 4,7 million into development (about $ 60 million by today's standards), enthusiastic articles were published in the June 1954 issue of Popular Mechanics and the May 1955 issue of Popular Electronics and ... The project was blown away, leaving behind only a few technologies spraying, and a series of 1950s radar buoys made from these components.

What happened?

The idea was cool - to revolutionize the automation of production and turn huge blocks a la IBM 701 into compact and versatile modules. The only problem was that the entire project was designed for lamps, and by the time it was completed, the transistor had already begun its triumphant gait. They knew how to be late not only in the USSR - the Tinkertoy project absorbed huge sums and turned out to be completely useless.


Tinkertoy blocks, an article about them in Popular Mechanics and a sonar buoy for hunting Soviet submarines is the only application of the original project (photo https://1500py470.livejournal.com/)

Standard boards


The second approach to packaging was to optimize the placement of transistors and other discrete components on standard boards.

Until the mid-1940s, point-to-point construction was the only way to secure parts (by the way, well suited for power electronics and in this capacity today). This scheme was not automated and not very reliable.

Austrian engineer Paul Eisler invented the printed circuit board for his radio while working in Britain in 1936. In 1941, multilayer printed circuit boards were already used in German magnetic naval mines. The technology reached the United States in 1943 and was used in the Mk53 radio fuses. Printed circuit boards became available for commercial use in 1948, and automatic assembly processes (since the components were still attached to them in a hinged way) did not appear until 1956 (developed by the US Army Signal Corps).

Similar work, by the way, at the same time in Britain was carried out by the already mentioned Jeffrey Dahmer, the father of integrated circuits. The government accepted its printed circuit boards, but the microcircuits, as we remember, were shortsightedly hacked to death.

Until the late 1960s and the invention of planar housings and panel connectors for microcircuits, the pinnacle of the development of printed circuit boards of early computers was the so-called woodpile or cordwood packaging. It saves significant space and was often used where miniaturization was critical - in military products or supercomputers.

In the cordwood design, axial lead components were installed between two parallel boards and either soldered together with wire straps or connected with a thin nickel tape. To avoid short circuits, insulation cards were placed between the boards, and the perforation allowed the component leads to pass to the next layer.

The drawback of cordwood was that to ensure reliable welds, it was necessary to use special nickel-plated contacts, thermal expansion could distort the boards (which was observed in several modules of the Apollo computer), and in addition, this scheme reduced the maintainability of the unit to the level of a modern MacBook, but before the advent of integrated circuits, cordwood made it possible to achieve the highest possible density.


A standard surface-mounted PCB from the first commercial transistor mainframe Philco NTANSAC 2000 Model 212 (1960), part of the processor from the most powerful machine of the 60s, the legendary CDC6600, made using cordwood technology (photo https://computerhistory.org/, https: //cds.cern.ch)


Elements of the processor of the banking mainframe Burroughs B5000 (1961), assembled in cordwood-blocks, photo from the author's collection.

Naturally, the optimization ideas did not end on the boards.

And the first concepts for packaging transistors were born almost immediately after the start of their serial production. BSTJ Article 31: 3. May 1952: Present Status of Transistor Development. (Morton, JA) first described a study on "the feasibility of using transistors in miniature packaged circuits." Bell developed 1752 types of integral packaging for its early M7 types, each of which contained a board embedded in transparent plastic, but this did not go beyond prototypes.

In 1957, the US Army and NSA became interested in the idea a second time and commissioned Sylvania Electronic System to develop something like miniature sealed cordwood modules for use in secret military vehicles. The project was named FLYBALL 2, several standard modules were developed containing NOR, XOR, etc. Created by Maurice I. Crystal, they were used in the cryptographic computers HY-2, KY-3, KY-8, KG-13 and KW-7. The KW-7, for example, consists of 12 plug-in cards, each of which can accommodate up to 21 FLYBALL modules, arranged in 3 rows of 7 modules each. The modules were multi-colored (20 types in total), each color was responsible for its function.


The packaging of the transistors from the first Bell article and the laboratory model of the device assembled on them. D4a and board from it (https://de.wikipedia.org, https://www.robotrontechnik.de). FLYBALL 2, a patent for it and a board of a secret NSA cryptocomputer KW-7 (https://www.cryptomuseum.com)

Similar blocks with the name Gretag-Bausteinsystem were produced by Gretag AG in Regensdorf (Switzerland).

Even earlier, in 1960, Philips manufactured similar Series-1, 40-Series and NORbit blocks as elements of programmable logic controllers to replace relays in industrial control systems; there was even a timer circuit in the series, similar to the famous 555 microcircuit. Modules were produced by Philips and their branches Mullard and Valvo (not to be confused with Volvo!) And were used in factory automation until the mid-1970s.

Even in Denmark, in the manufacture of the Electrologica X1 in 1958, miniature multi-colored modules were used, so similar to the Lego bricks loved by the Danes. In the GDR, at the Institute for Computing Machines at the Technical University of Dresden, in 1959, Professor Nikolaus Joachim Lehmann built about 10 miniature computers for his students, labeled D4a, they used a similar package of transistors.

The prospecting work proceeded continuously, from the late 1940s to the late 1950s. The problem was that no amount of corpding tricks could get around the tyranny of numbers, a term coined by Jack Morton, vice president of Bell Labs in his 1958 Proceedings of the IRE article.

The trouble is that the number of discrete components in the computer has reached the limit. Machines from more than 200000 individual modules simply turned out to be inoperative - despite the fact that transistors, resistors and diodes at this time were already highly reliable. However, even the probability of failure in hundredths of a percent, multiplied by hundreds of thousands of parts, gave a significant chance that something would be broken in the computer at any given time. The wall-mounted installation, with literally miles of wiring and millions of solder contacts, made matters even worse. The IBM 7030 remained the limit of complexity of purely discrete machines, even the genius of Seymour Cray could not make the much more complex CDC 8600 work stably.

Hybrid chip concept


In the late 1940s, Central Radio Laboratories in the United States developed the so-called thick-film technology - traces and passive elements were applied to a ceramic substrate by a method similar to the manufacture of printed circuit boards, then open-frame transistors were soldered on the substrate and all this was sealed.

This is how the concept of the so-called hybrid microcircuits was born.

In 1954, the Navy poured another $ 5 million into the continuation of the failed Tinkertoy program, the army added $ 26 million on top. The companies RCA and Motorola got down to business. The first improved the idea of ​​CRL, developing it to the so-called thin-film microcircuits, the result of the work of the second was, among other things, the famous TO-3 package - we think anyone who has ever seen any electronics will immediately recognize these hefty rounds with ears. In 1955, Motorola released its first XN10 transistor in it, and the case was selected so that it would fit the mini-socket from the Tinkertoy tube, hence the recognizable shape. It also entered the free sale and has been used since 1956 in car radios, and then everywhere, such cases are still used now.

The birth of the Soviet missile defense system. Long road to integrated circuits

Motorola's developments culminated in the creation of a classic case for the transistor (photo https://1500py470.livejournal.com/)


And the US Army in the late 1950s used thin-film hybrid RCA circuits (photo https://1500py470.livejournal.com/)

By 1960, hybrids (in general, whatever they called them - micro-assemblies, micromodules, etc.) were steadily used by the US military in their projects, replacing the previous clumsy and hefty packages of transistors.

The finest hour of micromodules came already in 1963 - IBM also developed hybrid circuits for its S / 360 series (sold in a million copies, which founded a family of compatible machines, produced to date and copied (legally or not) everywhere - from Japan to the USSR). which they called SLT.

Integrated circuits were no longer a novelty, but IBM rightly feared for their quality, and was accustomed to having a complete production cycle in its hands. The bet was justified, the mainframe was not only successful, it came out as legendary as the IBM PC, and made the same revolution.

Naturally, in later models, such as the S / 370, the company has already switched to full-fledged microcircuits, albeit in the same branded aluminum boxes. SLTs became a much larger and cheaper adaptation of tiny hybrid modules (measuring only 7,62x7,62 mm), developed by them in 1961 for the IBM LVDC (ICBM on-board computer, as well as the Gemini program). What's funny is that the hybrid circuits worked there in conjunction with the already full-fledged integrated TI SN3xx.


SLT modules from IBM and S / 360 board on them, below - Gemini on-board computer, white chips - IBM hybrids, gold - ICs from TI (photo https://www.ibm.com/, http: //www.lichtbildwerkstatt .net /, https://1500py470.livejournal.com/)

However, flirting with thin-film technology, non-standard packages of microtransistors and others was initially a dead end - a half-measure that did not allow moving to a new quality level, making a real breakthrough.

And the breakthrough was to consist in a radical, by orders of magnitude, reduction in the number of discrete elements and compounds in a computer. What was needed was not tricky assemblies, but monolithic standard products, replacing whole placers of boards.

The last attempt to squeeze something out of classical technology was the appeal to the so-called functional electronics - an attempt to develop monolithic semiconductor devices that replace not only vacuum diodes and triodes, but also more complex lamps - thyratrons and decatrons.

In 1952, Jewell James Ebers of Bell Labs created a four-layer "steroid" transistor - a thyristor, an analogue of a thyratron. Shockley in his laboratory in 1956 began work on fine-tuning the serial production of a four-layer diode - a dinistor, but his quarrelsome nature and beginning paranoia did not allow the case to be completed and ruined the group.

Works of 1955-1958 with germanium thyristor structures did not bring any results. In March 1958, RCA prematurely announced the Walmark ten-bit shift register as a "new concept in electronic technology," but actual germanium thyristor circuits were inoperable. In order to establish their mass production, exactly the same level of microelectronics was needed as for monolithic circuits.

Thyristors and dinistors found their application in technology, but not in computer technology, after the problems with their production were resolved by the advent of photolithography.

This bright thought was visited almost simultaneously by three people in the world. The Englishman Jeffrey Dahmer (but his own government let him down), the American Jack St. Clair Kilby (he was lucky for all three - the Nobel Prize for the creation of IP) and the Russian - Yuri Valentinovich Osokin (the result is a cross between Dahmer and Kilby: he was allowed to create a very successful microcircuit, but in the end they did not develop this direction).

We'll talk about the race for the first industrial IP and how the USSR almost seized priority in this area next time.
  • Alexey Eremenko
  • https://www.ibm.com/, http://www.lichtbildwerkstatt.net/, https://www.cryptomuseum.com, https://1500py470.livejournal.com/, https://computerhistory.org/, https://cds.cern.ch, https://www.worthpoint.com/, https://en.wikipedia.org
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38 comments
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  1. +6
    July 1 2021
    Difficult to understand, but interesting! You can see a specialist in this field! hi
    1. +2
      July 1 2021
      Quote: Thrifty
      Difficult to understand, but interesting! You can see a specialist in this field! hi

      I agree! While everything for me personally is a dense forest, but I read with pleasure!
      1. +1
        July 2 2021
        I join the Cat! For me, a dark forest! Respect to the author, interesting, entertaining, informative! good
    2. ANB
      +4
      July 1 2021
      ... Difficult to understand, but interesting!

      Someone is not difficult, but still interesting.
      I found both lamp technology and micro-assemblies and the 155/133 series.
      And on the ferrite memory I passed the test 2 times. The first one flunked. :(
  2. -4
    July 1 2021
    No need, neither about electronics, nor about photolithography.
    It's a shame ...... even more than for space.
    1. +5
      July 1 2021
      Are you ashamed of your current state, or in principle?
      No matter how ornate paths the USSR went, it ultimately solved all the tasks set for both missile defense and space (the USA and the USSR - all the others at that time in deep opera). So it is more correct to be proud and not ashamed.
    2. +2
      July 1 2021
      Quote: prior
      No need, neither about electronics, nor about photolithography.
      It's a shame ...... even more than for space.

      It is necessary! Learn from mistakes !!! Let it happen once or twice, but it is better to step over puddles than to sit in them !!!
    3. +2
      July 1 2021
      According to the text, they didn't even get to the PFL.
      1. 0
        July 2 2021
        Quote: Tochilka
        According to the text, they didn't even get to the PFL.

        Considering that for me the beginning of practical application from childhood Zx-Spectrum, Lviv and the EU (I don't remember the number of two hefty blocks and a small 12-inch black-and-white monitor), then PFL is somewhere far away at the dawn of the revolution !!!
        1. 0
          July 2 2021
          Precision photolithography even at dawn? Enough for you))) Maybe we thought about different things?
  3. +1
    July 1 2021
    How many dredges of materials went into the products, neither in a fairy tale, nor to describe with a pen !!!
    You go, it happened on the site, once ... the shoes suddenly clattered on the floor, as if they were shod !!! Lo and behold, and you have a "gold product" with their conclusions dug into the sole !!! That is why they did not use thin-soled shoes, because it HURTS!
    "joke", but there is a hint in it ....
    1. +1
      July 1 2021
      Quote: rocket757
      Lo and behold, and you have a "golden product" with their conclusions dug into the sole !!!

      If it's not a secret, what was the name of this marvelous enterprise with a high production culture?
      1. +5
        July 1 2021
        Do you think something good was lying around? No, no, suitable was under the report .... this is rejection, after thermal cycling, for example. It was also under the reporting, but only later, when everything that "survived" went for editing. And again, this was the very beginning of the production of products, when the marriage was ... too much. Although, as I recall the components from Yerevan ... brrr, so much marriage was never seen from anywhere ... by the way, the microcircuits became not very gold, after the "rationalization" by the local "craftsmen"!
        And yes, I had to work at more than one enterprise, bardachex was everywhere, to one degree or another.
        Oh yes, joke, how many times the name of my native plant has changed, I can't remember, but I applied to VENT SYSTEMS FACTORY! So guess where I worked.
        1. +3
          July 2 2021
          Our input control also plowed without unbending, everything had to be within the upper tolerance limits. At one time, I developed a lot of bench equipment for incoming control.
          1. +2
            July 2 2021
            Unfortunately, the incoming inspection was not a guarantee of the product's trouble-free operation.
            Much depended on the component manufacturer ...
            1. +1
              July 2 2021
              Well, yes - incoming control, testing the unit at the stand, testing the product (climate and dynamics are added), testing the system (adding an EMP simulator) and to the next plant, where again everything starts with incoming control ...
              Our overhead costs (God forbid lying) ranged from 300 to 740% at different times
              1. +1
                July 2 2021
                The Soviet economy was not so economical.
                Some, not profitable, were done because it is NECESSARY.
                And so, they tried to reduce a debit with a credit, always ... at the expense of what? this is a separate topic.
                We, several, not very "monetary" sites (manufacturing of measuring stands, etc.) were attached to the main site, "earning" the main profit! covered the costs, t.s. Essno, the salary on the main section sagged a little, but it still was not so ... noticeable, like the work shifts "for that guy" and other "initiatives" of party activists.
        2. +2
          July 2 2021
          as I remember components from Yerevan

          Just do not remember it at night! belay It was just some kind of zvizdets. Especially because of them, we have organized an entrance acceptance.
          IP usability was 10-20%
          1. +1
            July 2 2021
            We opened a batch of Rushek from Yerevan .... most of all, I was struck by the "rationalization" of replacing the gold jumpers with LUMINIUM ones !!! We had a joke for a long time that all their gold teeth were made from the "saved" on our microcircuits!
            So it was a scandal .... quiet, quiet, they just stopped buying microcircuits from them !!! and this is with a systematic deficit of a planned economy!
          2. 0
            July 6 2021
            I remember Armenian electrolytes - 100% marriage !!!
    2. +1
      July 1 2021
      Looks like you worked at LEMZ. Their VP complained strongly about the fees from Yerevan. Have you guessed?
      1. +3
        July 1 2021
        Only on business trips, in Moscow, the Moscow region had to go to many places ... and so, we are from the periphery, if Stalingrad can be called such. We also have / have been enterprises of the defense industry. My plant is from the category WAS, at all.
        By the way, in the next article, the author will get to our product, for sure. It was very significant, or rather it still exists, in some places it still stands. The machine was powerful, "ELBRUS".
      2. 0
        July 6 2021
        "..See you worked at LEMZ. Their VP complained a lot about payments from Yerevan. Guess you? ..."
        LEMZ supplied CNC systems, in particular, to the Lviv Milling Machine Plant. I was on it on a business trip. The incoming inspection of the plant rejected 80% of the CNC systems. From LEMZ at the plant, a specialist lived almost constantly (he left for St. Petersburg for the weekend), correcting LEMZ's jambs. Including everyone checked in ... And there was a song with the IC in the USSR. I remember that in a certain device RU1 in ceramics they worked fine, and the same RU1, but they refused to work flatly in plastic !!! And the device was not so complicated.
        1. 0
          July 7 2021
          Good hour of the day. Probably not the LEMZ I meant. I'm talking about Lianozovsky EMZ, which is in Moscow. It was renamed several times. He makes radars, different. My college friend worked there in the VP. I've been there too.
          1. 0
            July 8 2021
            Perhaps you are right and under the same abbreviation we mean different companies
  4. 0
    July 1 2021
    An interesting series of articles. There are, however, features of the presentation, but generally readable. Respect to the author.
  5. +4
    July 1 2021
    The article is great! The author clearly showed the ways of development of the element base of computers. I myself had to master computer technology based on Minsk 22, Minsk 32, EC series machines. And also to study the computing systems of the ACS of the air defense Asurk, Vector, Senezh, Polyana D4; air defense system S-200, s300. All stages of miniaturization of electronic components from ferrite-transistor cells, micromodules and printed circuit boards on transistors to integrated microcircuits have been mastered in practice. He saw our backwardness in EKB in 1980, when a lieutenant of the Hungarian Armed Forces showed a microprocessor and a board assembled on it, which replaced the VK ASU Vector processor, which consisted of several cabinets on transistor boards. True, I did not see this board in operation, since it was forbidden to connect it to military equipment. But, the performance was visible on the oscilloscope. Since then I have been tracking the development of integrated circuits, devices on them, and the work is connected with them. The Russian Federation lags behind in this area, although it solves combat missions.
  6. -2
    July 2 2021
    Standards. Many had a lot of money before adopting it. Remember phone chargers, each phone has its own charger. Although the filling is the same. Somehow they came to a single standard.
  7. 0
    July 2 2021
    That's interesting.
    Thank you.
  8. 0
    July 2 2021
    And now the radio-electronic industry of Russia, alas, about ... is lost, almost completely ...
    1. 0
      July 3 2021
      Losing Baku microcircuits and Armenian electrolytes was a great idea.
  9. +2
    July 2 2021
    Quote: rocket757
    How many dredges of materials went into the products, neither in a fairy tale, nor to describe with a pen !!!
    You go, it happened on the site, once ... the shoes suddenly clattered on the floor, as if they were shod !!! Lo and behold, and you have a "gold product" with their conclusions dug into the sole !!! That is why they did not use thin-soled shoes, because it HURTS!
    "joke", but there is a hint in it ....

    Once we arrived in the city on the Dnieper to erect a mast on the building.
    It turned out that the antenna feeder of the calculated length is short and
    you need to lower it down the slope along one of the guys. Here to tie up
    would be a dozen times. Neon signs on the building, letters the size of a man,
    there are hundreds of neon tubes on them and each one is tied in several places
    wire. Well, we weaved (through one) a dozen and a half procrastination
    and tied up. We went downstairs, lunch, a smoke break, and the wire is interesting, soft,
    but durable, does not rust - we discuss it out loud. And local hard workers are for us
    nitinol (nickel-titanium alloy!). Yes, we have in every yard in the whole city
    we tie the grapes with it. What do you mean! But here you run the butt over the glass -
    e-my- writes on the glass of the window, like a 3M pencil !. Now watch another trick -
    we make a volumetric figure out of wire - a horse, put it in a mug and fill it
    boiling water from a kettle. We immediately take out and cool. Next, crush and roll
    between the palms and put this flagellum into an empty bottle. Pour into a bottle
    boiling water from a kettle, and lo and behold - in the bottle the flagellum turns into a horse again!
    Nitinol is an alloy with thermal memory. The city has a strategic object - Svetlovodsky
    plant of pure metals. Smelting some - several kilograms. This is the defense industry,
    semiconductor industry, expensive strategic raw materials.
    And they have grapes in every yard, hundreds of meters of nitinol wire in dachas ...
    But how did this USSR even reach the 91st!
    1. 0
      July 3 2021
      There was a saying - everything for the house is made of nichrome. All Pearly. There is information that they stole an entire nuclear power plant - Yuzhnouralskaya.
      I am surprised that the forty still does not glow at night.
      1. 0
        July 4 2021
        Unfortunately, there was another saying further on -
        the whole apartment is shabby - telly sharp, refrigerator sharp,
        microwave sharp, blender sharp ......
  10. 0
    July 3 2021
    Knowing nothing about the woodpile method, we reinvented it. And in 89 they created a monstrous device - the Krappenstrofel multimeter. I managed to shove the scheme half a table into a box measuring 10x3x5 cm, and the dimensions were determined by a miniature biscuit. The device included four wildly packed boards, hand-wired. In the future, he continued this lesson.
    And we soldered the getinax bast shoes from "Minsk" and the wonderful EU-ovsky TEZs. Some sold them to the Tozher-Russians for precious metals, but such were anathematized and reprimanded.
  11. 0
    July 6 2021
    And, unfortunately, the fatal lack of certain conceptual thinking outside of Marxism-Leninism and the "genius" Soviet management did not allow us to realize it in advance on our own.

    How did Marxism-Leninism hinder the creation of integrated circuits in the USSR?
    In China, for example, the ML did not interfere in any way and the first IS machine started working there in 1971.
  12. +1
    July 6 2021
    Great material on the history of the development of electronics !!!
  13. 0
    February 3 2023
    "Some types of card boards could be configured using a special jumper (just like they tune motherboards now)"
    It seems that the article is not from 2021, but from 2001 .. motherboards have long been "tuned" at the software level (either through the BIOS, or directly from the OS with various utilities, both from the motherboard vendor and third-party ones), and the jumpers have remained far away past

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