An assembly room of a research institute in a birch forest near Moscow on a winter afternoon, on a pale grey workbench under a magnifier lamp a shallow glass dish holding two dozen tiny square packages twelve millimetres across, lacquered a deep cobalt blue, one of them turned over so that a row of fine wire legs on its underside catches the light, beside it a green circuit board with eight of the blue squares already set in rows, a hand in a white cotton glove holding the next square with tweezers above the board, behind soft in focus a window with snow-covered birches and a pale sky.
What it was used for
The hybrid integrated circuits of the "Tropa" series were developed from 1964 at the Research Institute of Precision Technology (NIITT) in Zelenograd, chief designer A. K. Katman. The institute had been founded as NII-336 on 25 June 1963 by order of state committee chairman A. I. Shokin, charged with developing hybrid circuits and handing production technology to series plants; the pilot works "Angstrem" was added on 1 May 1964. Tropa was a thick-film series with an integration level of up to 20 to 50 elements. It was the basis of the "Argon-11S" onboard computer from the Research Institute of Electronic Machines in Moscow and was later used in the control systems of planetary probes.
What was new
What marks it out is the path NIITT took in 1964: not monolithic but hybrid, with up to 20 to 50 elements per block. B. M. Malashevich's history of Angstrem attributes the outward resemblance to IBM's SLT modules to a shared model, the micromodules; the developers had magazine photos of the SLT modules. By the same account Tropa circuits flew around the Moon in the "Zond-7" spacecraft and returned to Earth.
What the sources leave open: Both texts are on the Virtual Computer Museum (computer-museum.ru), both by B. M. Malashevich: a timeline gives "1964/5 - first hybrid microcircuits of the Tropa (thick-film) and Posol (thin-film) series", while the longer text gives development starting in 1964, Katman and the Argon-11S. Neither gives production figures or prices for Tropa. Being the first microcircuits around the Moon and back does not hold: Zond 7 flew in August 1969, after Apollo flights with IC guidance computers.