★Elara S. Novikova
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soviet computing

The machines the West never had to take seriously: Setun counting in thirds, the Iskra-226 on my desk, control rooms where the future was announced and then filed away. I read the manuals for the names on the title pages, because the men got the prizes and the women got the typography. It turns out the record keeps more than it was asked to.

20 entries, newest first.

2026

Me in black on the granite edge of the flowerbed in front of the Kazan university main building at evening, four students in white university polos beside me.
 

The credits screen

· Three names sit at line 1366 of a Soviet teaching game, behind a door almost nobody opens. I went to Kazan to stand in front of the building where they worked.

Me in the armchair late at night with the April 1991 issue of BYTE open in one hand, the yellow cover bright against the dark room.
 

The April issue

· I have wanted this one issue for years, and this morning it was lying on a folding table under a bread tin.

Me on the balcony after the release, laptop and coffee on the little table, the ridge behind the town.
 

Ghosts in the wires

· Three months of evenings are public now, along with a list of everything in the machine I still cannot read.

My grandmother's eight-inch disk in both my hands out on the balcony, label up, both lines still legible.
 

Do not erase

· Two nights ago the label stopped being the only part of my grandmother's disk that I could read.

Me on the balcony in the afternoon with the printed sheet across my knees and a coffee beside me.
 

Vedomost No. 2

· Software written in 1989 did payroll arithmetic on my desk, printed the form it was written for, and agreed with my pencil to the kopek.

Me at the screen before dawn, the dispatcher menu up in green Cyrillic, one hand at my throat.
 

The tokens come apart

· At 1:44 in the morning I stopped asking the question I had been asking since July, and everything after that fell in under three hours.

Me holding my printed copy of Ternary Dreams on launch day.
Ternary Dreams

Ternary Dreams is out

· Launch day for Ternary Dreams: what the work asked, what I am proud of, and quiet thanks to the early readers who went first.

Me as a soft reflection in the display case, out of focus, the machine sharp behind the glass.
 

Behind the glass

· An afternoon in Riga between the facades and the reading: a display case, an Iskra-226 reported there in 2016, and nobody in the house who can say whether it ever had power.

Me smoothing proofs at the desk, radio glowing.
Ternary Dreams

Two weeks out

· In two weeks Ternary Dreams meets the world. The first time the title and a real date sit together on this blog.

Me sitting on the floor beside my desk at night, the screen still lit above me.
 

Sector zero

· Six weeks of bytes in the right order, and then one line that was legible, and what that turns out to do to a person.

Me, lifting a coffee cup on an Almaty street in summer light.
Ternary Dreams

Almaty cafe corner

· Working through Kazakh-archive threads on Soviet computing history in an Almaty cafe, with mountain light on the table.

The machine against a wall in Almaty, keyboard out in front of it, the disks stacked beside it the way I found them.
 

Standing at the machine

· A private flat in Almaty, four hours of road from my kitchen: a complete Iskra-226 with two drives and a plotter, and a screen that has not held a picture in years.

Me at a library table in Moscow with three operating manuals and a request slip.
Ternary Dreams

Three and a half million

· The same gate, one floor of books, and a free form that answers strangers in two or three working days: the least glamorous door into Soviet computing.

Me at the entrance of the open collection with the visitor pass on a lanyard.
Ternary Dreams

Gate seven, then the depot

· The Polytechnic's collection now lives in an industrial park behind two checkpoints: a booked tour, a named pass, and machines that nobody switches on.

Me at the kitchen table under one lamp, tea going cold, a list in the notebook with everything crossed out but one line.
 

Nobody has written one

· A week of looking for someone else's work, an answer that came back the same from every direction, and a sentence I could not finish.

Me reading a technical book at the desk, typewriter beside.
Ternary Dreams

The only ternary computer ever built

· Notes on Setun, Brusentsov, Lebedev, and Ekaterina Shkabara, whose name recedes in the retelling.

Me arranging open notebooks under a green banker's lamp.
Ternary Dreams

Spring Light and the Kyiv Pages

· Home in Bishkek, ten days of notes spread across the table, and the slow turn from travel toward a long essay on Ternary Dreams’ real roots.

Me at the desk with a notebook of diagrams.
Ternary Dreams

A third state

· Early research notes on a new novel about Soviet computing, balanced ternary logic, and why a third state beyond yes and no feels like the right shape for hidden lives.

2025

Me at the kitchen table with a scanned Cyrillic title page open on the screen.
 

The woman on the title page

· Somebody scanned a stack of Soviet manuals and put them where anyone can have them. On one title page from 1987 there is a woman's name and almost nothing else.

2021

 

Why Longhand

· On drafting by hand in a café that let me sit for four hours over one coffee, and a stubborn cluster of Soviet computing footnotes I cannot stop reading.

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