Electronika BK

~ the obit ~

BK stands for bytovoy kompyuter, which is Russian for household computer, and the machines were designed by NPO Scientific Center, at that point the strongest microcomputer team in the Soviet Union. The BK-0010 was finished in 1983 and went into serial production in 1985. Underneath it was a K1801VM1, a single-chip processor compatible with Digital's LSI-11, which makes this one of the very few home computers ever built on a minicomputer architecture rather than on a cheap eight-bit part. It was 16-bit in a year when western living rooms were still on the Z80.

It also cost between 600 and 650 roubles, against an average monthly wage of around 150. That is four months of work for a machine with 32 KB of memory, half of which was the screen. People bought it anyway, in enough numbers to make it one of the most widely owned computers in the country, and the reason is partly that there was very little else. It was the only Soviet home computer design in mass production that was officially approved and written into economic planning, which meant it actually got built in quantity instead of existing as a magazine schematic.

What shipped in the box is the strange part. The hardware was documented completely, down to the behavior of the gate array driving the display, and the software was almost absent. The default machine came with a FOCAL interpreter rather than BASIC. There was a debugger in ROM and nothing else you could call a development tool. The first keyboard was not really a keyboard, just an array of microswitches under a flexible sheet with no keycaps, which was bad enough at home that the sealed version found a second career as an industrial controller. Owners filled the gap themselves. Tools were ported down from the bigger DVK machines, and writing a disk operating system became a competitive sport in the BK scene. By the nineties the thing had turned into a demoscene platform, because the processor was fast and the documentation left nothing to guess at.

None of this crossed the Black Sea. Soviet machines did not reach Turkish homes in any form, and the computers that eventually arrived where I grew up came through the western market with the manuals translated and the schematics missing. So the BK is a machine I know only from other people's archives, and the thing I keep returning to is the trade it made. It handed you every electrical detail of itself and no way to write a program, which is precisely the opposite of what a vendor ships now. The tools are excellent and free, and the hardware is sealed with its datasheet behind a signature. Both arrangements produce a community. Only one of them produces people who know what is actually inside the box.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the three switches ~

There is a standard list of modifications that BK owners installed, and it tells you what the shipped product was assumed to be. A reset button came first, because programs hung constantly and the alternative was cycling the power until the switch on the external supply wore out. After that a pause switch wired to the processor's own suspend line, since no game had a pause of its own, usually fitted alongside a turbo switch that moved the clock off 3 MHz. Not every processor survived 6 MHz, and the only way to find out was to try.

The last two had to go in together, because switching the clock with a mechanical contact produced enough bounce to hang the machine unless the processor was already suspended. That is the sort of detail you only know if the manufacturer told you how the clock line worked, and the manufacturer had.

~ the school model ~

The BK-0010Sh was the classroom version, and it came with a network. The adapter was a current loop running at 19200 bits per second, compatible with Digital's DL-11 and KL-11 serial interfaces minus the modem control lines, which let a room full of machines talk to one another and to a teacher's station. Schools that got them usually got a modified Yunost portable television as the display.

Networked classroom computing in the mid-eighties was not unusual in itself, since Britain was doing it with Econet on the BBC Micro. What is unusual is that a state that controlled information distribution as tightly as this one did chose to put a functioning local network in front of teenagers, and then documented the protocol.

~ what came after the country ~

The BK-0011 of 1989 doubled the memory to 128 KB in pages and added sixteen selectable palettes, which users disliked almost unanimously because the color combinations were odd. It also broke compatibility with the earlier machines, badly enough that it could not load their tapes, so the factory redesigned it as the BK-0011M and most of the handful of original 0011s that reached buyers were later converted by their owners.

Production ran to 1993. By then the Soviet Union had been gone for two years and the planning apparatus that had put this machine into the five-year plan no longer existed, which is a more literal cause of death than most hardware gets. For a while the machines turned up doing jobs nobody had specified for them, running tills in the GUM department store on Red Square among other places. The scene outlasted all of it, and BK demos are still being written.

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