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Fujitsu 186
Posts: 10
| Maybe someone can shed some light on this...
I work at a company with many former DEC employees. We are in Massachusetts which is where DEC had a major headquarters. I even work in one of our client sites often that is in
one of the old DEC buildings and still has the working Helicopter pad which it allows medical emergency helicopters to use when needed.
SO - I have been told a few pretty incredible tales but this one involved the design of a CPU or some other component I cannot get anyone to remember exactly what
CPU or component this was.
Supposedly the Soviet union was cloning DEC chips and supposedly directly not by reverse engineering the functions but basically making outright copies. No idea if this is true as one would
think the Soviet union- for its own uses could probably make a chip or clone intels like everyone else was. I digress...
The story says DEC inserted a message in Russian into the physical chip so on inspection it would be discovered by someone who was looking at a close enough level to have the intent of
copying the thing. Has anybody heard of this and does anybody know what CPU or component this is supposed to be? I have access to .... basically the motherload of old DEC equipment and
if anybody could find something made by DEC it would be someone in my position. We have eveything from old decstations, vaxes, alphas, mainframes and even Compaq branded ES80s.
Anyone? It would be kind of cool if its true and I could find and possibly even try to have someone take a look at it. |
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TM Crusoe
Posts: 618
 
Location: Hull, UK | I'm sure I've heard that before, but no idea on the model. I've also heard from people who live in or near former USSR about clones from their perspective.
It would certainly be possible, most larger chips actually have information about the fab and copyright written inside the die, so it's not out of the question that they could put something else there. You need to get very, very close to see most of this information however. You can just make some of it out in this 486 die shot where it contains info about the fab and manufacture date. Look towards the corners. |
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Slow 8088
Posts: 5
Location: Hell | The Soviet Union somehow managed to make a PDP-11 compatible microcomputer for home use.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronika_BK |
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TM Crusoe
Posts: 618
Location: Hull, UK | I've heard of the Electronika before now. From what I've seen the Soviets built a good number of PDP-11 compatibles, I saw a DVK once (I think it was a DVK-3, not sure now, too long ago) and that was a PDP-11 machine too, though much more bulky than the Electronika.
For me, I always wanted to somehow track down an EC1849 (x86), if only for those weird transparent ISA slots. |
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UMC U5S
Posts: 54
| The soviets designed a microprocessor that implemented the PDP-11 instruction set on a single chip, this was around the early 80s. I believe before that they'd fit the PDP-11 onto 3 chips. I see the single-chip version pop up on eBay regularly. |
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Slow 8088
Posts: 3
| In Bulgaria, the local socialist computer manufacturer - Pravetz, copied 1:1 Apple 2's processor by the painstaking process of stripping a dozen chips layer by layer under a microscope.
So i totally believe this DEC rumor. |
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Slow 8088
Posts: 1
| Looks like it's true:
https://micro.magnet.fsu.edu/creatures/pages/russians.html
More DEC stuff:
http://simh.trailing-edge.com/dsarchive.html
Edited by Martin 2020-07-09 8:40 PM
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Urband Legend about DEC and the Soviet Union
