This well-researched book chronicles the unsung history of computing told from a unique perspective of what went on in the former Soviet Union, particularly the pace of innovations in Ukraine. There are period photographs of both the people and the machines that were built. Most of us in the west are familiar with this story told from our perspective, but there was a parallel path that was happening back when Alan Turing, John Von Neumann and Grace Hopper were active in the US and UK.

The names Sergey Lebedev and Victor Glushkov may not mean anything to most of us, but both were the key developers of electronic computers in the early days in Ukraine. When room-sized computers were being built in numerous labs in the US and UK, the other side of the Iron Curtain had a lot of challenges. For one thing, these scientists couldn’t read Western journals that described their operation without special permission from Communist Party elders. Getting parts was an issue too. And the party continued to not understand the steps needed to construct the machine, and continually blocked the scientists’ efforts.

Lebedev lead a team of researchers outside of Kyiv in the early 1950s to build the first digital computer that had a 5 kHz CPU that performed 3,000 operations per second. Nevertheless, it could solve linear equations of 400 unknowns. He was transferred to Moscow where over the course of his career built more than a dozen computers. This is where Glushkov came into play to help direct these projects both in Moscow and Kyiv, including the first computers based on transistors (and later using integrated circuits) and not the temperamental vacuum tubes. (One of which, the MNP3, is shown above.) Part of the challenges these projects faced were the top-down Soviet system of central planning committees running seemingly endless equipment performance reviews and testing. One of those early machines were used in utilitarian projects such as designing synthetic rubber manufacturing processes, building railroad tracks, and controlling chemical processes. Glushkov was also instrumental in the development of the Soviet internet, which faced a difficult birth thanks to Soviet bureaucracy.

Another chapter documents the rise of the personal computer. The Soviet versions, called the Specialist-85 and ZX Spectrum computers, were developed in the 1980s in Ukraine. Both were widely available as a hobbyist’s construction kit from department stores. The former ran BASIC on cloned Intel-like CPUs. The latter machine was built with its own CPU designed in Ukraine and was a gaming machine which looked a lot like the Sinclair models of that era. As PCs became popular around the world, the Soviet factories began offering their own IBM PC clones running their own versions of DOS and CP/M operating systems such as the Neuron and the Poisk. Many of these machines were built in Ukrainian factories. That all changed in 1994, when imported Western-built PCs were sold in the Soviet Union.

The second half of the book documents eight computer companies who have flourished in the modern era, including Grammarly,  MacPaw – who sells the CleanMyMac utility and one of the sponsors of the book, Readdle – who was early to the mobile app marketplace, and several others.

The book is a fascinating look at a part of history that I wasn’t familiar with, even though I have been involved in the early days of PCs and tech since the 1980s.