How it began
A 1956 resolution of the USSR Council of Ministers ordered new plants to expand computer production. One was built in Minsk and named after G. K. Ordzhonikidze. A Special Design Office was set up at the plant in 1958, and authorities recruited experienced engineers from Moscow, Zagorsk, Noginsk, Penza and Yerevan. G. P. Lopato became its chief engineer in 1959.
The plant started by building the existing M-3 computer, turning out the first in September 1959. Its own design, the Minsk-1, was completed in August 1960 with Lopato as chief designer. It used 800 vacuum tubes and ran about 2,500 instructions per second.
How it works
The Minsk-1 was a vacuum tube machine with a 31-bit word, ferrite core memory and magnetic tape storage. The Minsk-2, designed under V. V. Przhiyalkovsky and finished in 1962, was built from transistors and diodes. It moved to a 37-bit word, added floating-point arithmetic and could handle alphanumeric text, at about 5,000 to 6,000 instructions per second. The Minsk-22 was the same machine with punched card equipment and a line printer.
The Minsk-32 of 1968 kept the 37-bit word so that older programs would still run. It added seven-bit characters, memory protection, the ability to run up to four programs at once, and compilers for COBOL and FORTRAN.
How it spread
Production numbers were high for the Soviet industry. The plant made 220 Minsk-1 machines between 1960 and 1964, including variants for seismic and telemetry data. It made 852 of the Minsk-2 and Minsk-22 together, and 2,889 of the Minsk-32 before production ended in 1975. Versions of the Minsk-2 processed telemetry from meteorological rockets and Meteor satellites. The Minsk-23 ran control systems at a locomotive works, a Moscow dairy association and the Aeroflot ticket booking system.
Who pushed back
Not every model succeeded. Only 28 of the Minsk-23, a business data machine from 1966, were built. It was incompatible with earlier models and demand for business data processing was still undeveloped.
The line was ended by policy. The Minsk-32 and an upgraded Minsk-22 were considered as the basis for a unified Soviet series of compatible mainframes. That proposal lost to the plan to copy the IBM System/360, because being able to reuse existing IBM software was judged more important. The result was the ES EVM series, which the Minsk plant then built.
What changed first
The plant kept design and manufacturing under one roof, which the Russian Virtual Computer Museum describes as unique in the Soviet computer industry. New models were designed in under two years and went into full production within one to three months of completion. The Minsk-2 sold for 100,000 rubles. The Minsk-22 came with a large software library, which let a machine first meant for scientific work also be used for economic and business data.
What lasted
In 1970 the Minsk designers and manufacturers received the USSR State Prize. By then they had produced over 4,000 computers, which the Russian Virtual Computer Museum puts at more than 70 percent of the Soviet computer fleet. The same source calls the Minsk-32 the most widely used general-purpose computer in the USSR. The design office became a separate research institute, NIIEVM, in 1972.
