1978 · Soviet 8080-Compatible Microprocessor · Work 901 of 1,871
A test room in a research institute in Kiev in late summer, a woman's hands in white coat sleeves lowering with fine tweezers into a black test adapter a flat light grey ceramic package two centimetres across, along two opposite sides long thin gold ribbon leads, in its centre a round silver metal lid with a fine gold stripe to the edge, plain smooth and unmarked, beside it on a folded white cloth a long dark ceramic chip with forty silver legs, plain smooth and unmarked, a valve oscilloscope with a dark round screen, a glass of tea in a filigree metal holder, tall windows onto green chestnut trees.
What it was used for
The KR580IK80A was the Soviet 8-bit microprocessor of the 580 series. The collector Sergei Frolov calls it a functional analogue ("функциональный аналог") of the Intel i8080, which Intel launched in 1974. The Hardware Museum records for its specimen the maker Kvazar in Kiev, 6 µm technology, 2 MHz clock and a DIP-40 package. Frolov quotes Andrei Rubtsov's website as saying that the first work on the microprocessor set began at the Kiev NII Mikropriborov, and considers the part - above all in its plastic KR580VM80A version - the most widespread microprocessor in the USSR.
What was new
What the chip could do, Intel's 8080 had done since 1974; what was new was that it existed from Soviet production. The dates attached to it denote different things: Frolov cites the start of work in August 1976 and the signing of the technical specifications for the KR580 series in September 1978, yet owns a specimen from 1977, that is from before the signing. The barb: the Hardware Museum shows a part date-stamped 04.83 - at 2 MHz and 6 µm the copy was still being made when its model was 9 years old.
What the sources leave open: Both accounts come from collector sites; no factory or ministry document was consulted. The years denote different things: start of work 08/1976 (quoted by Frolov), start of production 1977 (Hardware Museum), technical specifications 09/1978, date stamp of the shown specimen 04/1983. The Hardware Museum description text is marked as taken from wikipedia.org; only its data fields are used. No unit numbers or prices.