Soviet Calculators History (1998)

Funny fact.

I guess for the rest of my life I will remember amount of digits in PI that fit screen of my MK-52: "3.1415926"

There was another topic about pi digits on front page: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40943437, that remind me of it

There is an old Soviet joke: "Soviet microprocessors are the word-biggest microprocessors!" ("Советские микропроцессоры - самые большие микропроцессоры в мире!")

Fun fact, since soviet calculators were copied from western designs, when an error happened it was displayed also a "error" on a 7seg display. if you squint hard enough you can read it as ЕГГОГ (eggog, total nonsense gibberish) in russian, which was explained in manuals as a "keyword signaling an error condition". There is an article in russian wikipedia on studying the error codes and undocumneted features - "eggogology" https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%95%D0%B3%D0%B3%D0%BE%D0%B3...

> Soon the cost of microcircuits started to decrease, and it became possible to consider the development of pocket size calculators with prices accessible to the wide consumer.

Most of calculator models cost like 30%-50% of monthly salary of engineer who developed such devices. Scientific ones were up to 100%. It was quite far from accessible.

These were sufficiently expensive that many people got some form of Spectrum/PC before their first calculator, bang for the buck it made more sense.

Then there was a post-soviet wired phone design with Z80 in it which had a built-in calculator among other apps, which it had half dozen. Alarm clock, phone book, etc, etc. The killer feature was Caller ID variant - it could read caller's number from the PSTN and display that one. A feat that required accepting the call and then emulating the beeps.

Museum of Soviet Calculators: https://elektronika.su/en/all/

I grew up in the USSR and used these things. But I find the dreamy nostalgia in some comments revolting. Ah, funny EГГОГ message! The Soviet regime killed millions of its own people and forcefully subjugated nearby nations, but hey, they made some nice calculators!

Also, as someone with knowledge of how the Soviet electronics industry worked (my father was employed there), I know all too well that the most advanced models of these calculators were copies of HP or TI calculators, using unauthorised copies of TI and other American chips. Basically stolen IP, as the USSR often did.

Slowly on the way out, but the abacus and school-type notebook are still the weapons of choice for many a shopkeeper across the FSU.

My grandmother came from Soviet Ukraine, she still manually verifies calculator outputs by re doing the math long hand. She doesn’t trust those things!

Hopefully she will one day give up this habit, but I guess habits die hard when you’re in your 90s

"The first models of the Elektronika B3-21 had a red LED display. The comma used one full position in the display. Later the display was changed to green fluorescent but this made its operation slower by 20 %"

The red ones go faster after all (waaagh).