1975 · Soviet General-Purpose Microcomputer · Work 892 of 1,871
A microcomputer on a grey steel table in a testing hall near Leningrad in winter, a flat wide instrument case sixty centimetres across, its top a pale blue sheet-steel hood with two rows of copper-brown connectors, the front a plain smooth black panel with a row of sixteen small lamps, several glowing orange, below them two rows of plain beige rectangular keys, one blue and one red key at the left, a block of sixteen plain beige keys at the right, a hand in a dark blue work-coat sleeve pressing a beige key, a grey cable bundle running to a steel rack of plain smooth panels, tall windows with pale winter light.
What it was used for
A Soviet microcomputer line that the Habr article, quoting Soviet documentation, describes as a "комплекс средств цифровой автоматики массового применения": data collection, process control and measuring systems. Research institutes used them to automate experiments, industry to control plant, universities to teach programming; the single-board versions, 260 by 280 mm, served as embedded controllers in instruments and laboratory rigs. The processor, memory, bus and input/output were designed by the Leningrad LKTB of the "Svetlana" association, the instruction set and operating system were developed on a BESM-6, and the Kiev Institute of Cybernetics contributed to the structure. Maslenikov dates the S5-01 to December 1975.
What was new
What marked it was 16 bits on a chip series that the Habr article says was designed specifically for this computer and made at "Svetlana" in Leningrad: the 536 series, in 24-pin metal-glass and 48-pin metal-ceramic packages. Maslenikov calls the S5-01 the first Soviet 16-bit microcomputer and judges that in system design it did not lag the American counterparts that had just appeared - that is his assessment. The Habr article regards the uniform inter-board bus as "довольно-таки революционной" for Soviet industry in the 1970s; that is a statement about the design approach, not about priority.
What the sources leave open: Thin: no source gives production figures, price, weight or power consumption. The Habr article mostly describes the later S5-11, S5-12 and S5-41, giving the K1801VM1 processor at 5 MHz for the S5-41; those values do not apply to the 1975 S5-01 and are therefore omitted. The ICFCST Kiev museum pages could not be reached.