"Red" Calculators

This article discusses the history of Soviet hand-held electronic calculators from a collector's perspective. I can't claim it is comprehensive nor error-free. Much of the information and pictures presented here are gleaned from various sources, but I am responsible for the errors and inaccuracies. If you have corrections or extra information, please contact me at the email address above.

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 infiltrating the Communist world; a thriving gray market was hard at work fulfilling 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 Radio Production (MRP) a 12 month deadline: develop a working prototype of a hand-held electronic calculator to be manufactured in the Soviet Union! These men worked long hours under tremendous pressure to create an entire industry from scratch, and the prototype they presented to the Committee three months ahead of schedule would come to be known as the Elektronika B3-04.

It is not currently (and it may never be) known, 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 patent laws, details of USSR design procedures are scant. What can be observed, however, is the similarity of various Soviet electronic devices to Western and Japanese designs.

The early B3-04, for example, bears a striking resemblance to a Sharp LCD calculator, the EL-805. 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 fluorescent and LED displays (until LCDs reappeared 5 years later), suspicions of Soviet reliance on imported techniques are only heightened. This calculator, like 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, point to at least some original Soviet design. The circuit board for this calculator is different than the Sharp unit, and used the Russian-named Big Integration Schematic (BIS) (counterpart to our Large Scale Integration, LSI) which could place 3,400 transistors on a 5x5 mm² silicon chip.

Although this article focuses on the decade from the early-70's to early-80's, when Soviet integrated circuit and handheld calculator technology was in its infancy, calculators were made in Russia for a long time afterward (into the mid-nineties at least). Three lines of calculators, all under the Elektronika name, existed: the oldest line, the B3 series was produced by the MRP as mentioned. Shortly afterward came the MK line (by the Ministry of Electronic Instrument Production, MEP) and C3 line (by a Leningrad company called Svetlana). There were also calculators partially or completely designed in other parts of the USSR, like the Elka of Bulgarian design, the MiniReks MR series that came from East Germany in 1973, and the Czechoslovakian Tesla Corporation's line of calculators in 1977. Within Russia, besides the Elektronika calculators, there were some small computers and desktop calculators of the "Iskra" line.

Elektronika B3-04

The first Soviet-made hand-held calculator, as mentioned, was the B3-04, and it began production in 1974, shortly after approval by the Committee. I have been told that the production run extended into the 80's, by which time production volume had risen and price fallen an order of magnitude, however it is practically impossible to find one today. It supposedly went through many design changes in that time also, including abandonment of the flawed COS-LCD in favor of a fluorescent screen (the Russians called it vacuum luminescent). Having a working LCD-version B3-04 would be quite a find, and definitely mark you as a Soviet calculator collector of unparalleled skill!

During this era of "Built in the USSR" quality was very sporadic; weak solder joints, poor IC boards and uneven material processing gave the calculators a reputation for high "infant mortality"-- many would quietly die within a month or two of manufacture, and with no easy means of prompt warranty repair. The flip side of this, though, was that factors such as thick board traces, low transistor- and circuit-density, and large, heavy duty, wide-margin industrial/military design parameters led to surprisingly long lifetimes, even in harsh conditions, for those that did survive the initial weeding-out. I have a Russian desktop calculator whose printed-circuit board was broken and twisted by rough handling from the Russian postal system. The damage would have utterly destroyed a modern calculator, but by re-soldering a couple wires, it is still operating today.

Elektronika B3-09

Elektronika B3-14M

The B3-09 and B3-14 succeeded the B3-04 in early 1976. Modifications, either cosmetic or more substantial internal changes, resulted in models such as the B3-09M and B3-14M. They used a fluorescent display, and featured reciprocal (both) and square root (B3-14) or percent (B3-09) functions, and debuted the improved "algebraic" logic with separate [=] key. Non-Soviet influences continue to be seen, as evidenced by the similarity of the B3-14 to Corvus models. The fluorescent display would prove to be a hit: the Russians developed it to a high art, making it more robust and less power-hungry then any Western manufacturer was able to achieve. In fact Soviet calculators are dominated by this display to such an extent that few red LED models exist, and the greenish-glowing fluorescent displays continued to be put into Russian calculators long after the LCD dominated the Western calculator market.

Svetlana C3-33

Elektronika B3-26

At about the same time "Svetlana" presented the 40-ruble C3-33, with a less-common LED display and change sign, percent, reciprocal and square root, and new, precedent-setting memory functions. Svetlana also claim to have designed the first truly all-Soviet ICs in 1976, a version of which went into their C3-33 and an obscure, earlier four function unit, the C3-27, sold at 60 rubles. In response to the C3-33, the MRP debuted the B3-26 soon after at 70 rubles, with fluorescent display and percent, square root, change sign and memory functions.

Elektronika B3-18A

The next leap in features occurred with the B3-18 and it immediate successor the B3-18A, with more sophisticated MOS-LSI production techniques (to remain on par with the West's) which could stuff 10,000 components on a single chip. Concurrent with this improvement is a new Western partner (or inspiration for imitation): Rockwell. The B3-18 had a built-in rechargeable battery and was produced starting in late 1976, using a fluorescent 8 digit display. This calculator, like models before it, was sold under many different numbers, all functionally the same but with differences in either case design, display, chip layout, battery type, or even all four!

Elektronika B3-25A

Other versions of it that have been found are B3-25A powered by replaceable button-cell batteries, and B3-37 with an LED 8-digit display and standard alkaline AA batteries. These calculators were quite popular (except the B3-37, which is scarcely found now) and were designed to assist engineers by offering sin/cos/tan functions (including inverse), and with degrees or radians to select from. Other new features included square root, exponential (in x^y format), reciprocal, Pi, log/10^x and ln/e^x. Although transistor density in the chips were roughly similar between USSR and the West, the method of mounting these chips on the board did differ. In the West the IC was always placed inside a plastic package with dual, in-line sets of pins for soldering to the board. In the Soviet Union, in contrast, the IC was often placed with great precision directly unto the board, where data lines would converge like rays to fine points. The chip would be soldered down and a drop of epoxy resin encapsulated and secured it to the board. This technique had the advantage of reducing processing steps and chip real estate, but left it more vulnerable to board flexing and made replacement (in the event of failure) impossible.

Elektronika B3-19(M)

At about the same time, due to the emergence of Reverse Polish Notation (RPN) as popularized by Hewlett-Packard, a line of RPN calculators was created in collaboration with East Germany, starting with the B3-19(M). This little LED unit (also with a rechargeable battery) was based on full RPN logic (indicated by an [Up Arrow] to indicate stack entry, rather than [=] key) and had an 8 digit mantissa, 2 digit exponent (8+2) display. Its features were similar to the (algebraic) B3-18, but without a 10^x or Pi. This calculator was I think meant to bring the "rogue" HP users back into the fold since it was RPN and LED, both unusual for Soviet calculators, and also the shape and sloping lower part are reminiscent of the HP design.

Elektronika C3-15

A little later, perhaps in early 1977, the Svetlana company came out with the successor to the C3-33, called the C3-15. The C3-15 came with (besides the by-now standard scientific functions) three memory registers, a ten digit mantissa, 2 digit (10+2) display, and a unique magnitude operator: square root of (x²+y²).

Elektronika B3-21

Programmable calculators were next, and the first Soviet version was the B3-21, beginning in 1977. It boasted 14 storage registers, a maximum program size of 60 key strokes and square root, square, reciprocal, change sign, x^y, Pi, log/10^x, ln/e^x, and sin/cos (but no tangent). It did have one interesting function, e^ix (which by the way allowed one to determine tangent).

Elektronika B3-34

The B3-34 arrived around 1979 as the improved programmable RPN costing 85 rubles, and it too was a huge sales success judging by its availability now. The improvements over the B3-21 included 98 program steps, full scientific capability, and indirect addressing for more sophisticated programming.

Elektronika MK-54

It then became the MK-54 (with cosmetic and internal circuitry changes), marking possibly the first calculator of the merged MK/B3 lines of calculators. This seems to mark the emergence of the MK line from the shadows of the more prevalent B3- line, since earlier MK calculators have proven difficult to find. The B3-34/MK-54 cost 85 rubles, its price (as on many of the calculators) was marked into the injection-molded plastic cases, making price changes difficult and demonstrating the Communist regimes famously inflexible pricing philosophy.

Elektronika B3-30

The final generation of calculators we will discuss in this article were produced around 1979 and started with the B3-30 (not at all easy to find) and B3-39. Improving over the previous generation, these were smaller, lighter, cheaper and drew less current. The B3-30 heralded the return to LCD display technology and claimed to go 800 hours on one set of batteries due to the combination of LCD display and their new CMOS circuitry. Here again, the technology "leap" and visual clues point to a strong assist from the Japanese firm "Casio" (look at Casio's early FX series). These two calculators had only percent, square root and reciprocal functions.

Elektronika B3-32

Elektronika B3-36

In 1980 the B3-32, with 8+2 fluorescent display, was designed to help engineers solve two ubiquitous problems; quadratic equations and (3x3?) systems of linear equations. Another calculator made at that time, the B3-36, was similar to the B3-32 in basic scientific features but it provided arc sin/cos/tan and degree/radians conversion. The B3-30 also used three AA-size batteries while the B3-36 used a built-in rechargeable type.

Elektronika MK-61

Elektronika MK-52

Next in the now-popular MK line of RPNs was the MK-61 in around 1983, featuring 15 storage registers, 105 program steps, unit conversions, nifty things like integer and fractional part, and for the first time logical operations (AND, OR, and XOR). This calculator cost 85 rubles (as molded into the case). The last hurrah for Soviet-designed programmable RPN calculators was the MK-52 made in Kiev around 1986, with the ability to store 5 programs totaling 512k bytes. It cost 115 rubles, and could accept additional ROM modules containing various programs for another 40 rubles.

Thus brings to a close an exciting era in the USSR's domestic pocket calculator industry. By now, following the fall of the Berlin wall and the later dissolution of the Soviet Union, domestic calculators were still being produced, but design had largely given way to the wave of readily available, inexpensive Asian imports. Like the Soviet Union itself, the domestic handheld electronic calculator industry started with a bang and went out with a whimper.

Elektronika MK-53 Elektronika MK-60 Elektronika MK-51 Elektronika MK-71 As a final round-up, I will briefly mention a couple of the final-era calculators, such as the MK-53 from around 1985 which contained, besides standard calculator functions, a calendar, clock, stop watch and alarm clock. The MK-60 from around 1986 added no new functions but was able to operate from office- or sunlight via a 5-element solar cell. For engineers, the MK-51 came with statistical functions. The MK-71 is a solar-powered version of the MK-51.