Wikipedia Sucks!

https://habr.com/company/ua-hosting/blog/413733/
(translation from Ukrainian)

Great information--it skips over the mainframe days but discusses machines very few non-Soviets even know about.

The best part:

From the speech of the deputy minister of radio industry of the USSR:

Guys, it's enough to do nonsense. There can not be a personal computer. There can be a personal car, a personal pension, a personal cottage. Do you know what a computer is like? Computer is 100 square meters of space, 25 people of service personnel and 30 liters of alcohol every month!

What, ONLY 30 liters for the whole operation? It should be 30 liters per service person.....if I had to maintain a monstrosity like a BESM-6 I would want to be drunk all the time.

ericbarbour wrote:https://habr.com/company/ua-hosting/blog/413733/
(translation from Ukrainian)

Great information--it skips over the mainframe days but discusses machines very few non-Soviets even know about.

The best part:

From the speech of the deputy minister of radio industry of the USSR:

Guys, it's enough to do nonsense. There can not be a personal computer. There can be a personal car, a personal pension, a personal cottage. Do you know what a computer is like? Computer is 100 square meters of space, 25 people of service personnel and 30 liters of alcohol every month!

What, ONLY 30 liters for the whole operation? It should be 30 liters per service person.....if I had to maintain a monstrosity like a BESM-6 I would want to be drunk all the time.

A BESM-6 is like an IBM mainframe of the period (1964-1972), it's all transistors on big boards, no chips, some power rectifier tubes. It's only larger because Soviet electronics was behind in micronization. By the late 1970s they had copied the Digital PDP-8 and were beginning to use chips in calculators - by the 1980s it was all about making 8-bit computers for the educational market.

Strelnikov wrote:A BESM-6 is like an IBM mainframe of the period (1964-1972), it's all transistors on big boards, no chips, some power rectifier tubes. It's only larger because Soviet electronics was behind in micronization. By the late 1970s they had copied the Digital PDP-8 and were beginning to use chips in calculators - by the 1980s it was all about making 8-bit computers for the educational market.

Supposedly it was better than comparable IBM machines. One of the world's fastest machines for a time. It was so beloved there is a BESM "fan club" in Russia, still active today. (Even fan sites--very difficult to find with Western search engines and all in Russian) Still, it had reliability issues thanks mostly to the poor quality of Soviet-made transistors in the 1960s.