In the 1970s, the USSR had an undersea cable connecting a major naval base at Petropavlovsk to the Pacific Fleet headquarters at Vladivostok. The cable traversed the Sea of Okhotsk, which, at the time, the USSR claimed. It was off limits to foreign vessels, heavily patrolled, and laced with detection devices. How much more secure […]
Tearing down hardware from different parts of the world can be revealing, showing unique parts, techniques, and tricks employed by engineers living in a very different world from our own. To that end, [msylvain59] has been kind enough to give us a look inside the Elektronika MK-26—a calculator built in the former Soviet Union. There’s […]
By now, you’ve probably heard about Kosmos 482, a Soviet probe destined for Venus in 1972 that fell a bit short of the mark and stayed in Earth orbit for the last 53 years. Soon enough, though, the lander will make its fiery return; exactly where and when remain a mystery, but it should be […]
If you’ve ever fancied building a ZX Spectrum clone without hunting down ancient ULAs or soldering your way through 60+ chips, [Alex J. Lowry] has just dropped an exciting build. He has recreated the Leningrad-1, a Soviet-built Spectrum clone from 1988, with a refreshingly low component count: 44 off-the-shelf ICs, as he wrote us. That’s […]
What looks like something famous, is much smaller, and is embroiled in a web of cold war cloak-and-dagger intrigue? It sounds like the answer could be Mini-Me from the Austin Powers movies, but we were actually thinking of the D-21 supersonic spy drone. Never heard of it? It didn’t have a very long service life, […]
We admire [Alex Studer’s] approach to schoolwork. His final assignment in his history class was to do an open-ended research project on any topic and — this is key — using any medium. He’d recently watched a video about how Tetris came from the former Soviet Union, and adding in a little eBay research set […]
Used in everything from calculators to military hardware, the 3LS363A is an interesting piece of vintage hardware. With a resolution of 5 x 7 (plus a decimal point), the Soviet-made displays contain no electronics and are simply an array of 36 green LEDs. It’s not hard to drive one of them in a pinch, but [Dmitry […]