@pernia @colin_mcmillen @meeper Computers as an institutional thing were researched heavily in the 50s, 60s, 70s. Lots of original designs during the early part of that period but the Soviet bureaucrats eventually decided to just copy the IBM 360, various DEC iron, and the IBM PC. Once perestroika came around a number of smaller machines proliferated, usually cloning the Spectrum or doing something equally as simple (aside from oddities like the Elektronika BK being a PDP-11 based home computer). I used to have a bunch of good resources about this on hand, but for now I'll just say Ware 1959 is pretty good at explaining the early years, https://archive.org/details/ppr-cccp is a good overview of the supercomputing side of things, and translations of articles from Soviet trade periodicals are somewhere in the CIA's digitized archives.