1980 · Soviet Programmable Calculator · Work 955 of 1,871
A kitchen table in a flat in Moscow on a winter evening, a broad upright calculator nineteen centimetres tall with a black casing rim and a bare pale beige-grey finely grained front plate, at its top a wide dark window with a soft green glow, two small slide switches, thirty rectangular keys in six rows of five in black, light grey and blue, one key red, every key plain, smooth and unmarked, a black cable to a small grey mains adapter, a hand in a knitted brown sleeve pressing a blue key, a squared exercise book open at a flat angle with faint pencil lines, an orange lampshade overhead, falling snow outside.
What it was used for
According to the Mytishchi Museum of Computing the Soviet programmable calculator Elektronika B3-34 was built from 1980 to 1986 at the "Kalkulator" works in Svetlovodsk in the Ukrainian SSR. It works in reverse Polish notation: 98 program steps, 4 stack registers and 14 addressable memories, a vacuum fluorescent display of 8½ plus 2½ digits, powered by 4 cells or the B2-3 adapter. IEEE Spectrum gives a price of 85 roubles. From August 1985 the magazine Tekhnika Molodezhi, with 1.5 million subscribers according to IEEE Spectrum, ran Mikhail Pukhov's serial "Kon-Tiki: A Path to the Earth" - every instalment carrying calculating tasks for this machine.
What was new
The B3-34 was not the Soviet Union's first programmable calculator. What is documented is what it could do: 98 steps, 14 addressable registers, jumps, powers, roots, logarithms and trigonometric functions in degrees and radians, in the hand for 85 roubles. What was new is rather what came of it. According to IEEE Spectrum the readers of Tekhnika Molodezhi explored the machine's undocumented behaviour and wrote to the editors about it; the error message EГГОГ gave the pursuit its own name. The barb: for the magazine's readers it was precisely the machine's undocumented quirks that became the lesson.
What the sources leave open: Production period, works and technical data come from the Mytishchi Museum of Computing, a private collection whose page is marked as work in progress; price, circulation and the Kon-Tiki serial from IEEE Spectrum. Neither source gives a production figure. IEEE Spectrum gives no introduction year for the device. Neither source claims a technical first; the museum lists the B3-34 as a second-generation programmable calculator.