edward | 14 comments
I once interned in a clean room, and the equivalent story was random bad batches of wafers over months traced to one of the teams going out for super greasy pizza for lunch every week.
Bit flips in RAM due to radioactive meat passing by as proven by measuring with equipment obtained from the military with the help of a few shots of vodka - it doesn't get any more Soviet than this. But, to flip a bit in a memory device from the 80s, when transistors were huge compared to today?.. I'd love to ask Sergei some questions!
Maybe a dumb question, but what kind of programming languages and operating systems were used at that time in the Soviet Union? Were c and unix a thing there as well?
SM-1800 was Intel based, not PDP-11 based. 1800 was based on Russian variant of 8080, and 1810 had both 8080 and 8086 as I remember. https://ru-m-wikipedia-org.translate.goog/wiki/%D0%A1%D0%9C_... will give overview of the SM series.
Regarding OS - PDP-based were initially on RSX, later on Soviet variants of unix. Intel based had either custom OS for 8080, or ms-dos like for x86 - Wikipedia article covers it well.
Same as everywhere: C/C++, Pascal, Fortran, BASIC. There were some exotics, like translated versions of the languages (similar to Chinese version of Python these days), but they were rare. My dad had a translated C manual printed on a matrix printer, A3-size, album orientation, with hand-made hard cover. I saw a book (made in state press) on IBM 360.
But these were 1980s. A teacher told me they were using punch cards in the '70s.
I’ve seen it posted here once or twice before, but it always brings a smile to my face.
Sergey lied to you (and likely also to the immigration officer). All cattle in that area was shot and buried, all contaminated equipment was abandoned, even the stuff that could be cleaned up. A chip with such coarse lithography would need to be _in_ Chernobyl to experience any bit flips.
don’t post this glory crap here
Please explain what you mean.
This story is at least 10 years old. I have seen it on the daily wtf .. https://thedailywtf.com/