Elektronika B3-04

The Holy Grail for Soviet Calculator Collectors

Imagine the fearsome problem faced by the State Committee of the USSR in 1973; how to avoid falling hopelessly behind the West's burgeoning integrated circuit industry. A senior State Committee member stood up in front of the assembly and with a grave face displayed a small plastic box not much larger than a pack of cigarettes. This device, he said, is a pocket calculator, and we must be able to mass produce them cheaply for our comrades, if we hope to stay competitive with Western science and technology. Pocket-sized electronic calculators, he went on to explain, were sweeping the Western world and revolutionizing every calculation, from checkbook balancing to lunar launch trajectories.

Truth be told, these little wonders were already sweeping the Communist world as well; a thriving gray market was busily filling the demands of defense industry scientists and wealthier academic faculty members for smuggled "electronic slide rules" from Western Europe and the USA. Dependency on Western technological proficiency was a very real fear.

It was under these auspices, in August of 1973, that the State Committee gave 27 engineers from the Ministry of Electronics a 12 month deadline: develop a working prototype of a hand-held electronic calculator that can be manufactured in the Soviet Union! These men worked long hours under a lot of pressure to create an entire industry from scratch, and the prototype they presented to the Committee nine months later would come to be known as the Elektronika B3-04.

Sharp EL-805 remarkably similar in design. It is not currently (and it may never be) known just how much independent design went into these "Soviet" calculators, and how much was reverse-engineered or just plain stolen. Due to possible lost-royalty claims, nationalistic propaganda and touchy issues of the international observation of Geneva Convention copyright laws, details of USSR design procedures are scant. What is known, or at least can be observed, is the similarity of various Soviet electronic devices to Western and Japanese designs.

The B3-04, for example, bears a striking resemblance to the early Sharp LCD calculator, the EL-805.

B3-04 COS-LCD digit. The fact that this initial Communist offering had an ultra-state-of-the-art COS-LCD display, by a country not previously known as an LCD technology "powerhouse", raises obvious questions as what country originally designed it.

And since subsequent calculators fell back on more conventional LED and vacuum luminescent (VL) displays until LCDs reappeared 5 years later, suspicions of Soviet reliance on imported techniques are only heightened. This calculator, identical the Sharp EL-805, performed the standard four functions and used "arithmetic" logic, e.g. to compute 4-1, one must press [4],[+/=],[1],[-/=] instead of the later-developed algebraic logic of [4],[-],[1],[=]. Internal aspects of the calculator, though, do point to at least some original Soviet design. The circuit board for this calculator looks different than the Sharp unit, and used the Russian-named Big Integration Schematic (BIS) (similar to our Large Scale Integration, LSI) which could place 3,400 transistors on a 5x5 mm² silicon chip.

Text © Kenton Green

© Sergei Frolov The label proclaims "6000 Transistors"

© Sergei Frolov Close-up of circuit board. Select the image for a full close-up view of the circuit board for this machine (picture will open in new browser window).

© Sergei Frolov The Manual. Note the colour variation. Here you can see how the display cover flips up when the machine is on, allowing the COS-LCD digits to be seen.