1984 · Sixteen-Bit Household Computer · Work 987 of 1,871
A physics room of a school in Moscow on a frosty afternoon, on the teacher's bench a flat black wedge-shaped home computer, its cream-white keys, grey keys and one red key plain, smooth and unmarked, a plain black field at its left end, a cable to a small cream portable television showing a soft even white glow, an empty room, a brown woollen school pinafore with a narrow white lace collar hung over the back of the chair, a glass of tea, pale green walls, a red geranium, a tall window with frost patterns on the panes.
What it was used for
The first mass-produced home computer of the Soviet Union. The design came out of the Elektronika NC-8010 at NIITT in Zelenograd (chief designer V. L. Dshkhunyan); the finished machine was created in 1983 at the Exciton plant in Pavlovsky Posad, where series production ran from 1984 to 1991. Plants in Kishinev, Tbilisi, Šiauliai and Ordzhonikidze also built BK-0010 and BK-0011 units. A television served as display, a household cassette recorder as storage. Exciton alone delivered about 125,000 units between 1983 and 1992, roughly 78,000 for retail and over 44,000 for school classes; total BK-0010/-0011 output exceeded 162,000. It was also used in industry and the military, including torpedo-attack training aboard one submarine.
What was new
Inside sat the K1801VM1, a 16-bit single-chip processor running up to 300,000 operations per second, with the instruction set of the PDP-11. A household machine was thus software-compatible with DEC's LSI-11 microcomputer and the Soviet Elektronika 60. Plus 16 KB of RAM, 16 KB of screen memory, 32 KB ROM, and a picture of 512 × 256 monochrome or 256 × 256 in 4 colours. The barb sits in the word "bytovoy", household: the machine cost 650 roubles, while the same source puts an ordinary engineer's monthly pay at 120 to 140 roubles — about five months' salary for the household computer.
What the sources leave open: The figures come from a trade-journal article in Elektronika (electronics.ru). The year is not uniformly attested: that article dates development and the first showroom sale to 1983 and series production to 1984. The Home Computer Museum gives 1984 and 600 to 650 roubles, and puts the average Soviet wage at about 150 roubles.