Soviet Wired Radio, How It Worked

January 25, 2025 by Jenny List 39 Comments

At the height of the Cold War, those of us on the western side of the wall had plenty of choice over our radio listening, even if we stuck with our country’s monolithic broadcaster. On the other side in the Soviet Union, radio for many came without a choice of source, in the form of wired radio systems built into all apartments. [Railways | Retro Tech | DIY] grew up familiar with these wired radios, and treats us to a fascinating examination of their technology, programming, and ultimate decline.

In a Soviet apartment, usually in the kitchen, there would be a “Radio” socket on the wall. Confusingly the same physical dimension as a mains socket, it carried an audio signal. The box which plugged into it was referred to as a radio, but instead contained only a transformer, loudspeaker, and volume control. These carried the centralised radio station, piped from Moscow to the regions by a higher voltage line, then successively stepped down at regional, local, and apartment block level. A later refinement brought a couple more stations on separate sub-carriers, but it was the single channel speakers which provided the soundtrack for daily life.

The decline of the system came over the decades following the end of communism, and he describes its effect on the mostly older listenership. Now the speaker boxes survive as affectionate curios for those like him who grew up with them.

You probably won’t be surprised to find twisted-wire broadcasting in use in the West, too.

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Illustrated Kristina with an IBM Model M keyboard floating between her hands.

Keebin’ With Kristina: The One With All The Espionage

November 11, 2024 by Kristina Panos 6 Comments

[Ziddy Makes] describes this cute little guy as a biblically-accurate keyboard. For the unfamiliar, that’s a reference to biblically-accurate angels, which have wings (and sometimes eyes) all over the place. They’re usually pretty scary to behold. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

A cube keyboard with adorably vibrant pastel keycaps. — Image by [Ziddy Makes] via GitHub

But this? This is the opposite of scary. Sure, there are keys everywhere. But it’s just so darn adorable. You know what? It’s those keycaps.

This 16-key macro cube uses a Pro Micro and a system of PH2 5p ribbon cables to connect the four four-key sisterboards to the main board. A 3D-printed base holds all the boards in place. Out of all the switches in the world, [Ziddy] chose Otemu Blues. Clack!

Although it may take some getting used to, this seems like it would be a fun way to input macros. I can see the case for putting some rubber feet on the bottom, otherwise it might scoot around on the desk. That might be cute, but only the first couple of times, you know?

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A Soviet Cassette Recorder Receiving Some Love

July 29, 2024 by Jenny List 40 Comments

For those of us who lived in the capitalist west during the Cold War, there remains a fascination to this day about the Other Side. The propaganda we were fed as kids matched theirs in describing the awful things on the other side of the wall, something that wasn’t borne out when a decade or so later in the 1990s we met people from the former communist side and found them unsurprisingly to be just like us. It’s thus still of interest to have a little peek into Eastern Bloc consumer electronics, something we have the chance of courtesy of [DiodeGoneWild], who’s fixing a 1980s Soviet cassette recorder.

The model in question is a Vesna 309, and it has some audio issues and doesn’t turn the tape. It gets a teardown, the motor is cleaned up inside, and a few capacitor and pot cleanups later it’s working again. But the interest lies as much in the machine itself as it does in the repair, as it’s instructive to compare with a Western machine of the same period.

We’re told it would have been an extremely expensive purchase for a Soviet citizen, and in some ways such as the adjustable level control it’s better-specified than many of our equivalents. It’s based upon up-to-date components for its era, but the surprise comes in how comparatively well engineered it is. A Western cassette deck mechanism would have been a much more sketchy affair than the substantial Soviet one, and its motor would have been a DC part with a simple analogue speed controller rather than the brushless 3-phase unit in the Vesna. Either we’re looking at the cassette deck for senior comrades only, or the propaganda was wrong — at least about their cassette decks. The full video is below, and if you’re hungry for more it’s not the first time we’ve peered into electronics from the eastern side of the Iron Curtain.

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A Look Back At The USSR Computer Industry

July 16, 2022 by Al Williams 58 Comments

According to [Asianometry], in 1986 the Soviet Union had about 10,000 computers. At the same time, the United States had 1.3 million! The USSR was hardly a backward country — they’d launched Sputnik and made many advances in science and mathematics. Why didn’t they have more computers? The story is interesting and you can see it in the video below.

Apparently when news of ENIAC reached the USSR, many dismissed it as fanciful propaganda. However, there were some who thought computing would be the future. Sergey Lebedev in Ukraine built a “small” machine around 1951. Small, of course, is relative since the machine had 6,000 tubes in it. It performed 250,000 calculations for artillery tables in about 2 and half hours.

The success of this computer led to two teams being asked to build two different machines. Although one of the machines was less capable, the better machine needed a part they could only get from the other team which they withheld, forcing them to use outdated — even then — mercury delay lines for storage.

The more sophisticated machine, the BESM-1, didn’t perform well thanks to this substitution and so the competitor, STRELA, was selected. However, it broke down frequently and was unable to handle certain computations. Finally, the BESM-1 was completed and was the fastest computer in Europe for several years starting in 1955.

By 1959, the Soviets produced $59 million worth of computer parts compared to the US’s output of around $1 billion. There are many reasons for the limited supply and limited demand that you’ll hear about in the video. In particular, there was little commercial demand for computers in the Soviet Union. Nearly all the computer usage was in the military and academia.

Eventually, the Russians wound up buying and copying the IBM 360. Not all of the engineers thought this was a good idea, but it did have the advantage of allowing for existing software to run. The US government tried to forbid IBM from exporting key items, so ICL — a UK company — offered up their IBM 360-compatible system.

The Soviets have been known to borrow tech before. Not that the west didn’t do some borrowing, too, at least temporarily.

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Sixty Years Ago Today: Yuri Gagarin Becomes The First Human In Space

April 12, 2021 by Jenny List 17 Comments

As those of us with an interest in space exploration look forward with excitement towards new Lunar and Martian exploration, it’s worth casting our minds back for a moment because today marks a special anniversary. Sixty years ago on April 12th 1961, the Vostok 1 craft with its pilot Yuri Gagarin was launched from the Baikonur cosmodrome in what is now Kazakhstan. During the 108-minute mission he successfully completed an orbit of the Earth before parachuting from his craft after re-entry and landing on a farm near Engels, in the Saratov oblast to the south of Moscow.

In doing so he became the first human in space as well as the first to orbit the Earth, he became a hero to the Soviet and Russian people as well as the rest of the world, and scored a major victory for the Soviet space programme by beating the Americans to the prize. All the astronauts and cosmonauts who have been to space since then stand upon the shoulders of those first corps of pioneering pilots who left the atmosphere alone in their capsules, but it is Gagarin’s name that stands tallest among them.

In Russia the anniversary is being celebrated with particular fervour with special events, TV coverage, and a visit by President Putin to the landing site, and from space by the Russian cosmonauts in orbit on the ISS. Meanwhile space agencies closer to home are remaining tight-lipped, with NASA failing to mention that particular objective for ISS Expedition 65 crewmembers.

We consider that the politics of the Cold War should not be allowed to detract on our side of the world from the achievement of Gagarin and the engineers and scientists who placed him in orbit, thus we prefer to tell the whole story when dealing with space history. If you’d like to read a bit more Vostok history then we’d like to point you at the story of another Soviet cosmonaut, Valentina Tereshkova, the first woman in space.

Header image: Нина ПЕТРИЩЕВА, CC BY-SA 4.0.

This Mini Soviet Micro Will Have Astounding Attention To Detail

August 1, 2020 by Jenny List 12 Comments

As the retro craze has gone mainstream, we’ve grown used to seeing “mini” versions of classic hardware, preloaded with a selection of games and ready for a wallow in nostalgia. Unfortunately for fans of the less well known platforms, the only devices to get the mini treatment so far are popular ones such as the Nintendo consoles, or the Commodore 64. This is something [Svofski] is aiming to change for one classic micro, by producing a mini version of the Soviet Vector-06c. And unlike the Commodore with its fake keyboard, this one will work in its entirety and have a fully-functional keyboard.

It’s a build that’s not finished yet. But in this case that’s no bad thing, because such is the extreme attention to detail that you’ll want to stick around and watch it unfold. The electronics will come courtesy of an FPGA recreation of the hardware, while the Vector’s unique keyboard is being recreated in miniature, with keycaps designed to fit a particular Alps switch. These are 3D-printed, painted, and then marked with their decals using stencils carefully etched from copper sheet. Even if you have no interest in the Vector-06c, these techniques could find a place in so many other projects.

The wonderfully ingenious and diverse world of Soviet technology has found its way onto these pages many times over the years, including at least one other microcomputer, and even a supercomputer. If your interests extend behind the Iron Curtain though, you might wish to read our colleague [Voja Antonic]’s account of hacking in Communist Yugoslavia.

The Electronics Of Cold War Nightmares

November 27, 2018 by Al Williams 8 Comments

It is a good bet that if you look around you, you’ll be able to find at least one smoke detector in sight. If not, there’s probably one not too far away. Why not? Fires happen and you’d like to know about a fire even if you are sleeping or alert others if you are away. During the cold war, there were other things that people didn’t want to sleep through. [Msylvain59] tears down two examples: a Soviet GSP-11 nerve agent detector and a Polish RS-70 radiation alarm. You can see both videos, below.

In all fairness, the GSP-11 is clearly not meant for consumer use. It actually uses a test strip that changes colors and monitors the color change. Presumably, the people operating it were wearing breathing gear because the machine could take quite a while to provide a positive output. Inside reminded us of a film processing machine, which isn’t too far off.

The radiation monitor looks more like a miniature version of an old floor-standing radio. The case design, the thick-traced, single-sided, hand-drawn printed wiring board, and the –by today’s standards — huge parts within all contribute to making this look like a piece of radio gear from the 1970s or even earlier.

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