My Novels Take You into the Provocative Depths of Historic Soviet Fiction

Konrad Zuse completes the electromechanical Z3 in Berlin, a machine whose existence complicates the MESM's later claim to be continental Europe's first stored-program computer.

Over 30 tons and more than 17,000 vacuum tubes manage about 5,000 additions per second, yet every program is entered by rewiring the machine by hand.

Bardeen, Brattain and Shockley invent the transistor at Bell Labs, opening the second computer generation and, eventually, everything that follows.

Lebedev's team of twenty starts building the MESM in a war-damaged monastery near Kiev, chopping wood for heat and living above the round-the-clock lab.

Wilkes' EDSAC in Cambridge, running on mercury delay lines at about 650 instructions per second, becomes the first practically usable stored-program computer in continuous operation.

Eckert-Mauchly and Remington Rand deliver UNIVAC I, the first commercial computer in the USA, a category that simply does not exist in the East.

Keldysh's commission accepts the MESM, continental Europe's first stored-program electronic computer; from 1952 it runs secret rocket and nuclear calculations until 1957.

The dictator's death opens the way to rehabilitate cybernetics, condemned since 1948 as bourgeois pseudoscience.

Bashir Rameev builds the Ural computer family in Penza; in 1962 he receives a doctorate without a dissertation, having once said it was easier to build a computer than to give a talk.

The first artificial satellite triggers a science and education panic in the USA, and indirectly the founding of ARPA, whose network projects will later produce the ARPANET.

At Moscow State University, Brusentsov's team completes the world's only modern ternary computer: balanced trits of -1/0/+1, 18-trit words, ferrite cores instead of tubes, assembled and running in ten days.

About 50 Setun machines are built at the Kazan mathematics plant, becoming popular teaching computers at over 30 universities, with state acceptance following in April 1960.

The American National Exhibition in Moscow's Sokolniki Park stages the Nixon-Khrushchev Kitchen Debate: consumer capitalism on display in the heart of the USSR.

The Soviet Union's greatest technological triumph is achieved with domestic computers like the BESM series, still designed at home, before the era of cloning.

As the world stands at the brink of nuclear war, missile defense drives Soviet computing: Kartsev's M-4 and M-10 machines serve early-warning and ABM systems.

Watson's $5 billion bet the company, more than the Manhattan Project cost, establishes the 8-bit byte; three years later the USSR decides to clone it.

The BESM-6 enters production, 355 units built through 1987, often called the last domestic machine to match the West, though the CDC 6600 came four years earlier at triple the performance.

IBM clones roll out with KGB procurement help; over 15,000 are built by 1998, each model trailing its original by about eight years, one rumored to hide a command that played the American anthem.

2,300 transistors, 4 bits, 740 kHz: Intel's first microprocessor; Soviet K580 clones appear only in the late 1970s, already five to eight years old before they run.

The cover of Popular Electronics ignites the hobbyist revolution: garages against planned cities.

Apple is founded, the Apple II following in 1977; in Bulgaria and the USSR it will be lovingly reverse-engineered as the Pravetz and the Agat.

About 160 megaflops, 5.5 tons, the iconic C shape whose short wires mean speed; after a rare Cray lecture, silent programmers ask how one talks to God.

The Elbrus-1 prototype under Burtsev uses superscalar out-of-order execution, a priority Babayan claims anticipated the West by a decade, though the CDC 6600 came eleven years earlier.

The Intel 8088 machine defines the personal computer standard; Minsk's ES-1840 clone follows around 1985 with a copied processor and a copied MS-DOS.

Pajitnov programs Tetris in Pascal on an Elektronika 60 with no graphics, its pieces built from bracket characters; he sees no royalties until 1996.

The catastrophe strikes near Kiev, cradle of Soviet computing where Lebedev built the MESM, shattering faith in Soviet technological governance.

The Eastern Bloc unravels; after COMECON ends, its hardware sectors cannot compete with foreign manufacturers and practically vanish.

The USSR ceases to exist; tens of thousands of engineers emigrate west and the once-integrated computer industry disintegrates along the new borders.

Konrad Zuse completes the electromechanical Z3 in Berlin, a machine whose existence complicates the MESM's later claim to be continental Europe's first stored-program computer.

Over 30 tons and more than 17,000 vacuum tubes manage about 5,000 additions per second, yet every program is entered by rewiring the machine by hand.

Bardeen, Brattain and Shockley invent the transistor at Bell Labs, opening the second computer generation and, eventually, everything that follows.

Lebedev's team of twenty starts building the MESM in a war-damaged monastery near Kiev, chopping wood for heat and living above the round-the-clock lab.

Wilkes' EDSAC in Cambridge, running on mercury delay lines at about 650 instructions per second, becomes the first practically usable stored-program computer in continuous operation.

Eckert-Mauchly and Remington Rand deliver UNIVAC I, the first commercial computer in the USA, a category that simply does not exist in the East.

Keldysh's commission accepts the MESM, continental Europe's first stored-program electronic computer; from 1952 it runs secret rocket and nuclear calculations until 1957.

The dictator's death opens the way to rehabilitate cybernetics, condemned since 1948 as bourgeois pseudoscience.

Bashir Rameev builds the Ural computer family in Penza; in 1962 he receives a doctorate without a dissertation, having once said it was easier to build a computer than to give a talk.

The first artificial satellite triggers a science and education panic in the USA, and indirectly the founding of ARPA, whose network projects will later produce the ARPANET.

At Moscow State University, Brusentsov's team completes the world's only modern ternary computer: balanced trits of -1/0/+1, 18-trit words, ferrite cores instead of tubes, assembled and running in ten days.

About 50 Setun machines are built at the Kazan mathematics plant, becoming popular teaching computers at over 30 universities, with state acceptance following in April 1960.

The American National Exhibition in Moscow's Sokolniki Park stages the Nixon-Khrushchev Kitchen Debate: consumer capitalism on display in the heart of the USSR.

The Soviet Union's greatest technological triumph is achieved with domestic computers like the BESM series, still designed at home, before the era of cloning.

As the world stands at the brink of nuclear war, missile defense drives Soviet computing: Kartsev's M-4 and M-10 machines serve early-warning and ABM systems.

Watson's $5 billion bet the company, more than the Manhattan Project cost, establishes the 8-bit byte; three years later the USSR decides to clone it.

The BESM-6 enters production, 355 units built through 1987, often called the last domestic machine to match the West, though the CDC 6600 came four years earlier at triple the performance.

IBM clones roll out with KGB procurement help; over 15,000 are built by 1998, each model trailing its original by about eight years, one rumored to hide a command that played the American anthem.

2,300 transistors, 4 bits, 740 kHz: Intel's first microprocessor; Soviet K580 clones appear only in the late 1970s, already five to eight years old before they run.

The cover of Popular Electronics ignites the hobbyist revolution: garages against planned cities.

Apple is founded, the Apple II following in 1977; in Bulgaria and the USSR it will be lovingly reverse-engineered as the Pravetz and the Agat.

About 160 megaflops, 5.5 tons, the iconic C shape whose short wires mean speed; after a rare Cray lecture, silent programmers ask how one talks to God.

The Elbrus-1 prototype under Burtsev uses superscalar out-of-order execution, a priority Babayan claims anticipated the West by a decade, though the CDC 6600 came eleven years earlier.

The Intel 8088 machine defines the personal computer standard; Minsk's ES-1840 clone follows around 1985 with a copied processor and a copied MS-DOS.

Pajitnov programs Tetris in Pascal on an Elektronika 60 with no graphics, its pieces built from bracket characters; he sees no royalties until 1996.

The catastrophe strikes near Kiev, cradle of Soviet computing where Lebedev built the MESM, shattering faith in Soviet technological governance.

The Eastern Bloc unravels; after COMECON ends, its hardware sectors cannot compete with foreign manufacturers and practically vanish.

The USSR ceases to exist; tens of thousands of engineers emigrate west and the once-integrated computer industry disintegrates along the new borders.