Soviet PC Replica From Chernobyl Zone Boots Up After 30 Years

Chornobyl Family, a Slovakia-based YouTube channel dedicated to finding and restoring Soviet-era electronics, has managed to cobble together a working PC that operates on the same hardware as the builds deployed in and around the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone. As you can imagine, procuring hardware and software that even allow such a Frankenstein build to operate is hard. But it works, even in black-and-yellow tones.

The mainframe-type systems they took inspiration (and parts) from to make it work were built initially by Minsk Mainframes, including hard-to-procure clones of Intel's 8086 processors. It was a symptom of semiconductor yields in the eighties; only 80,000 EC-1841 mainframes were built, and some kept soldiering until the 90s. It's a transition rhythm that still echoes today. But there's a twist: according to them, the specific CPU within the processor board used by the Chornobyl Family is a military version of the ES-1841 CPU, the ES-1845, frequently deployed by the KGB.

Considering the CPUs within these mainframes typically ran at 5 MHz, no, you couldn't run Crysis (nor an AI model...) on it. But it could run a Soviet-cloned, highly-translated version of DOS called alphaDOS. Software, too, is a scarce commodity, which frequently leads to electronics restorators having to engage in a veritable software hunt. Can you imagine how hard it can be to find the specific floppy disks needed to make the mainframe run within the small numbers of floppy disks that still operate today? When have you last seen one? Did those include five-inch floppies printed by Electron Mass Factor out of Kyiv? I haven't, especially not within a purpose-built case colored in a way that'd make it inconspicuous in an urban warzone.

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