@cinnamon moved this from private because it's a long and rich history

Welcome abroad to the somewhat abridged history of Soviet computing, it's some wiiiiiild stuff and people should give them more credit.

The USSR does have original computers (and even having set records, e.g. the Water Integrator is the first computer in the world to solve partial differential equations). Sergey Lebedev is responsible for the first digital computers, his crown jewel being the MESM (it competed with the likes of the Zuse Z4, so we're talking pre-ALGOL times) and BESM. Stalin fucked up everything so the computing industry grinded to a halt, but after him work has restarted. Minsk and Ural were 100% original and supported COBOL, Fortran and ALGAMS (a version of Algol, USSR loved to create new Russian versions of programming languages). The Ural was made using about 12k vacuum tubes and the Minsk was really weird in that the word size was 31 bits for Minsk-1 and 37 bits for the other models. Minsk-222 (an improved model of the Minsk-22) and Minsk-33 were proposed to be the base for the future unified line of mutually compatible mainframes which later became the ES EVM, buuuuut even though it was popular among users, the ES EVM lost to the proposal to clone the IBM/360 because it was deemed more important to be able to run Western software (a common theme during the 70s and 80s). BESM-6 also was a fully original Soviet computer and transistor-based, designed by none other than Lebedev himself. With instruction pipelining, memory interleaving and virtual address translation, the BESM-6 was advanced for the era, however, it was less well known at the time than the MESM (what a shame).

As for semiconductors, the USSR was smart in seeing the strategic importance of them, so Soviet scientists took advantage of student exchange agreements with the US to study the technology, attending lectures by pioneers of the field such as William Shockley.
The socialists even attempted something original, akin to ARPANET and modern Internet named OGAS which attempted to create a nationwide information network but lacked funding in the 70s. OGAS was a really big deal, the Soviets were truly invested in cybernetics, and of course the US govt regarded the project as a major threat due to the "tremendous increments in economic productivity" which could disrupt the world market (obviously, git gud US). The idea was to have a three-tier network with a computer centre in Moscow, up to 200 midlevel centres in other major cities, and up to 20,000 local terminals in economically significant locations, communicating in real time using the existing telephone infrastructure (the architect of OGAS even proposed using the system to move the Soviet Union towards a moneyless economy, using the system for electronic payments (this is some real serious stuff).

The USSR tried to keep up in the 80s with the Westerners but failed, so before Perestroika not much has happened, although the CIA was smart and put bugs that would cause the explosion of a gas pipeline after they found out the USSR piracy efforts.
A program to expand computer literacy in Soviet schools was one of the first initiatives announced by Mikhail Gorbachev after he came to power in 1985 and you get an explosion of computers and attempts to copy the West (this is when the Agat, Vector-06C, Elektronika BK-0010 (pretty much the Soviet equivalent to the BBC Micro in scope) aaaaand after a lot of pressure from human rights groups the USSR granted exit visas to experts in the field and they of course left, so huge brain drain.

Soviet academia still had some insanely impressive achievements. For example, Leonid Khachiyan's paper, "Polynomial Algorithms in Linear Programming" is very important in the field. The Elbrus-1, developed in 1978, implemented a two-issue out-of-order processor with register renaming and speculative execution; according to Keith Diefendorff, this was almost 15 years ahead of Western superscalar processors. Oh, and the Setun is perhaps one of the only ternary computers (I know the Canadian QTC-1 was never actually built and Ternac was only an emulator on a binary machine). Only Jessie Tank has recently made a ternary CPU: https://hackaday.com/2016/12/16/building-the-first-ternary-microprocessor/ (she now goes by Chiara, @chjara moment /s)

The post-USSR era essentially brought us the modern day Elbrus. As for Russia, it had some small but notable achievements (the main CPU lines being those made by MCST (Moscow Center for SPARC Technologies, which brought us the Elbrus CPUs), ELVEES, NIISI and their KOMDIV series (compatible with MIPS R3000) and also Baikal T1).

And this is it, really. Hope you enjoyed this long read and please boost this, I put a lot of work into researching this.

I am making a call to all the #USSR #Soviet #SovietUnion and #retrocomputing people (please boost)

I am interested in #Soviet computers (specifically the #Agat, #Minsk, #Poisk, #Iskra, #Setun and ES EVM + ES PEVM), however I can't find (with the aforementioned limited knowledge) much info on where I can find ROMs of the original machines. I want to emulate those and see how well they work on the cloned CPUs. I am also interested in the aforementioned CPUs (K1810VM86 mostly, but also КР580ВМ80А and КР1858ВМ) and the specific quirks these had over the Western CPUs. I am essentially looking to know all about these systems, and try to emulate them. Can someone guide me to resources and ROMs for these machines? I'll go through the hassle of translating myself, but as it stands I have no connection to Russian-speaking people.

Спасибо вам и хорошего дня!