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History of Computing Soviet Edition


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I thought this was absolutely fascinating, a really great overview on the history of Soviet computing. it successfully refutes the belief that the Soviets could not build computers the near equal of the west, and subsequent failures were politically created. And it was absolutely hilarious to learn that a computer I used in the 1980's was reverse engineered and found itself in numerous households, namely the ZX Specturm. Id love to know what  Soviet Schoolkids made of stolen copies of 'Raid over Moscow'....

https://player.fm/series/the-eastern-border-1269338/history-of-computing-ussr-edition

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Mine at 12, too. With six original games. Few other bought, rest copied. Raid over Moscow wasn't a fascinating game. One adult once told us we should not "advertise" we have it, but no problem getting it or giving it away. As a movie - game connection Commando or Rambo (loading screen 1:1 movie poster) was more interesting.

Once in history moment: BESM-1

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2 hours ago, Adam Peter said:

Mine at 12, too. With six original games. Few other bought, rest copied. Raid over Moscow wasn't a fascinating game. One adult once told us we should not "advertise" we have it, but no problem getting it or giving it away. As a movie - game connection Commando or Rambo (loading screen 1:1 movie poster) was more interesting.

Once in history moment: BESM-1

I had Rambo too.  Kids today don't know what their missing 😀

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Local DJ (also airliner pilot and journalist, pretty fascinating personality overall...) pirated games back in '80s by emitting tapes with them over radio, all you had to do was record screeching to the tape (and hope there was no interference).

 

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1 hour ago, TrustMe said:

Kids today don't know what their missing 😀

I still missing Laser Squad. The many adventure games where the environment was described rather than shown, so I was able to translate them with a medium dictionary. So learnt some English, while the only available foreign language was Russian (small town, then city).

There were experiments with broadcast via radio, too, but meetings and cassette exchange was easier. Like in the joke, never underestimate the bandwidth of a truck loaded with cassette tape :) (I was wondering why a lot of my cassettes were produced in Baghdad, Iraq)

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Also, the Fuse Spectrum emulator emulates several of the old Soviet Spectrum clones. It can be downloaded here:

https://emutopia.com/index.php/emulators/item/364-sinclair-zx-spectrum/1639-fuse

 

Here's a copy of Laser Squad for it:

https://emutopia.com/index.php/emulators/item/364-sinclair-zx-spectrum/1639-fuse

 

 

ISTR downloading a .zip file a while ago which claimed to contain every piece of software ever written for the Spectrum. IIRC it took about 10 minutes to download :). Sadly I can't seem to find it now.

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12 hours ago, Adam Peter said:

Mine at 12, too. With six original games. Few other bought, rest copied. Raid over Moscow wasn't a fascinating game. One adult once told us we should not "advertise" we have it, but no problem getting it or giving it away.

Raid over Moscow was fascinating for causing an embarrassing political crisis in Finland:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raid_over_Moscow#Political_crisis_in_Finland

Year earlier, Milius' Red Dawn was banned in Finland due to it being 'damaging to foreign policy'.

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13 hours ago, Adam Peter said:

Mine at 12, too. With six original games. Few other bought, rest copied. Raid over Moscow wasn't a fascinating game. One adult once told us we should not "advertise" we have it, but no problem getting it or giving it away. As a movie - game connection Commando or Rambo (loading screen 1:1 movie poster) was more interesting.

Once in history moment: BESM-1

Raid over Moscow was pretty rubbish. I only had it because, A, it was very contentious, and I liked doing contentious even then. B, the nuclear scenes looked pretty cool. But for the most part, I didnt find it even as good as say, Beach Head, which was excellent for its day. There were far more contentious games I think. I remember theatre europe from PSS, where you had to ring up a hotline to get the release code to employ tactical nuclear weapons. Drove the CND mob wild.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theatre_Europe

Yeah I had Commando, I loved the arcade machine. I think it was based on that rather than the Movie. I did get Rambo, but there was a problem with the version I had, I think the game crashed when you nicked the Helicopter. Did any of you get Spyhunter? I absolutely loved that.

Its refereshing to learn the original soviet computer industry was quite so advanced, they seem to have recovered remarkably quickly from Stalin's relative disinterest.

13 minutes ago, Yama said:

Raid over Moscow was fascinating for causing an embarrassing political crisis in Finland:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raid_over_Moscow#Political_crisis_in_Finland

Year earlier, Milius' Red Dawn was banned in Finland due to it being 'damaging to foreign policy'.

I know fins loathe the term 'Finlandization', but I guess this is whats implied by it.

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9 hours ago, Adam Peter said:

I still missing Laser Squad. The many adventure games where the environment was described rather than shown, so I was able to translate them with a medium dictionary. So learnt some English, while the only available foreign language was Russian (small town, then city).

There were experiments with broadcast via radio, too, but meetings and cassette exchange was easier. Like in the joke, never underestimate the bandwidth of a truck loaded with cassette tape :) (I was wondering why a lot of my cassettes were produced in Baghdad, Iraq)

There was at least limited attempts with that in Britain. My local radio station had a computer programme (I met the producer years later and told him how good it was which was nice) and they broadcast programmes over the radio. I never personally got that to work, though the rest of the show made up for it.

 

Incidentally, if anyone wants a trip down memory lane, there are archived copies of 'Personal Computer Games', probably the best computer review magazine available in the UK, on Archive.org.

https://archive.org/details/Personal_Computer_Games_Issue12/page/n3/mode/2up

Broke my heart when they went bust. :(  

 

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On 9/11/2021 at 7:38 AM, Adam_S said:

Also, the Fuse Spectrum emulator emulates several of the old Soviet Spectrum clones. It can be downloaded here:

https://emutopia.com/index.php/emulators/item/364-sinclair-zx-spectrum/1639-fuse

Yes, I know it. I have a low priority project of reverse engineering an old project with it. It was written in a very clever, mixed BASIC and assembly way, even using the last bytes, like the video memory as cache during calculations. Nothing beats seeing how your program works :) (I look at you, memtest86+ with your fake hardware-blinking + sign)

But it is not the same. IDK the correct words, but their art design used all the flaws of the CRT, from the messy pixel edges to the badly mixed colors. On TFT, it is too sterile, art falls apart due to too good pixel separation and stable color rendering. It is too awful to magnify it to screen size, and too small to play in a window for me.

Also, I grew old, and everything was better past then ;) (more to the fantasy and imagination than to the eye)

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17 hours ago, Adam Peter said:

Yes, I know it. I have a low priority project of reverse engineering an old project with it. It was written in a very clever, mixed BASIC and assembly way, even using the last bytes, like the video memory as cache during calculations. Nothing beats seeing how your program works :) (I look at you, memtest86+ with your fake hardware-blinking + sign)

But it is not the same. IDK the correct words, but their art design used all the flaws of the CRT, from the messy pixel edges to the badly mixed colors. On TFT, it is too sterile, art falls apart due to too good pixel separation and stable color rendering. It is too awful to magnify it to screen size, and too small to play in a window for me.

Also, I grew old, and everything was better past then ;) (more to the fantasy and imagination than to the eye)

I know what you mean. I had a Spectrum +2 - the one with the built in tape drive and a massive 128kb of RAM but my first love of computing really was the Commodore Amiga. The display just doesn't look right on a modern monitor somehow.

 

Sensible Soccer is still the best game ever created though.

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4 hours ago, Adam_S said:

I know what you mean. I had a Spectrum +2 - the one with the built in tape drive and a massive 128kb of RAM but my first love of computing really was the Commodore Amiga. The display just doesn't look right on a modern monitor somehow.

 

Sensible Soccer is still the best game ever created though.

I remember a cover tape called insensible soccer. Where you take on the Dutch football team with a grenade launcher. If you know anything about Dutch English football rivalry you will know why.

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23 hours ago, Adam Peter said:

Yes, I know it. I have a low priority project of reverse engineering an old project with it. It was written in a very clever, mixed BASIC and assembly way, even using the last bytes, like the video memory as cache during calculations. Nothing beats seeing how your program works :) (I look at you, memtest86+ with your fake hardware-blinking + sign)

But it is not the same. IDK the correct words, but their art design used all the flaws of the CRT, from the messy pixel edges to the badly mixed colors. On TFT, it is too sterile, art falls apart due to too good pixel separation and stable color rendering. It is too awful to magnify it to screen size, and too small to play in a window for me.

Also, I grew old, and everything was better past then ;) (more to the fantasy and imagination than to the eye)

The BASIC programming language is archaic compared to modern ones. GOTO's having to use line numbers, no OO and no indentation. Yet I spent hours typing away to make computer programs.

Ah, youth.

EDIT: I had an Amiga too 😀

Edited by TrustMe
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Peasants all. The BBC Micro was it. And its BASIC was superior, too, with procedures and functions and a superb built-in assembler.

I even had an Acorn Archimedes, the ancestor to just about every mobile phone in the world because of ARM.

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Nothing wrong with BASIC, in the right context. In the mid-1980s I sold my beloved HP 41CV calculator and bought a Sharp scientific calculator with BASIC interpreter. Much easier to write code to crunch formulae with the Sharp than with the HP.

Of course, the Sharp didn't come with the Naugavinyl holster, so I wasn't going to win any quickdraw calculator fights.

 

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15 hours ago, DB said:

And its BASIC was superior, too, with procedures and functions and a superb built-in assembler.

In Sinclair-speak, GOSUB and RETURN, DEF FN, and who needs an assembler when you can POKE the machine code into a given address, and use the contraption RANDOMIZE USR xxxxx to start it ;) (Don't forget decimal 201 RET at the end)

 

And well, the world progress backwards. Try to use PRINT AT [the horror] or INKEY$ [the horror] in Python, OS-independent way.

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I remember when i was able to brake into the apparently Basic version of Psion flight simulator. it was incredibly easy to alter the colour of the terrain and the screen, making it look less like you are flying over the sea.

Which I had stuck with Basic more, it was an interesting subject.

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12 hours ago, Adam Peter said:

In Sinclair-speak, GOSUB and RETURN, DEF FN, and who needs an assembler when you can POKE the machine code into a given address, and use the contraption RANDOMIZE USR xxxxx to start it ;) (Don't forget decimal 201 RET at the end)

 

And well, the world progress backwards. Try to use PRINT AT [the horror] or INKEY$ [the horror] in Python, OS-independent way.

DEF PROC(a, b, c)

       LOCAL x, y, z

END PROC

With the input variables coped to local scope and any defined as LOCAL also having scope only within the procedure. DEF FN operated similarly, but terminated differently with an equation. These could be called recursively.

You could also PEEK and POKE (using the "?" operator), but it was only generally necessary for some low-level stuff like reading the ADC for the analogue (joystick) inputs.

For the use of an assembler, it was common practice to assemble into screen memory and then move the lot down to the normal program memory, scribbling over the source as you went.

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On 9/15/2021 at 8:28 PM, TrustMe said:

The BASIC programming language is archaic compared to modern ones. GOTO's having to use line numbers, no OO and no indentation. Yet I spent hours typing away to make computer programs.

Ah, youth.

EDIT: I had an Amiga too 😀

Some later Basics had no line numbers, as I recall Amiga Basic did not.

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I never did any programming on my Amiga 500. After I sold my 500 I bought my first IBM-PC. It had a 80486SX CPU which was much more advanced them the 500 Motorola 68000 CPU.

I did some assembler programming in university, but I hated it 😀

Edited by TrustMe
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