Stats...
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| 1987 |
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| Never available for purchase, released to the 70th party congress.
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Factories...
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Elektronika MK-87
Discovery
Often the discovery of a 'new' calculator proceeds in stages. Usually the first report is an email from a visitor to the site who remembers a machine she saw a long time ago, or from a mention in a book or magazine. Usually just a few lines is all that is available. Sometimes these machines are found fairly quickly, once people know what to look/ask for - and sometimes... well, we're still looking!
The MK-87 was one of those machines which, for the longest time, was just rumoured to exist. Finally, for the first time to Western eyes.. here it is!
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The only two MK-87 units thus far in captivity (January 2001).
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The MK-87 was first reported by Alexei, who wrote...
"There was also MK-87, sort of a proto-PDA, like
modern Casio datebooks. Was also a reverse engineered
Sharp with cyrillic support. Never appeared in stores
-- 1 batch of about 7000 was made and given to
attendees of [which?] party congress in 1986. It was of
folding construction, like older Sharp Wizards, with
calculator keys and display on the right and alpha
keys on the left. Because of such a small batch
production glitches were never sorted out, and the
ones I saw were quite flimsy.
MK-87, MK-85 and a few others were based on common CPU."
Well, as you can see, it turns out that Alexei was mostly spot-on. The two units pictured here were found in Ukraine. Their serial numbers are 07825 and 04337; both were manufactured in 1987. It is probable that a small production run (guess: 8000) units were made, and appears fairly safe to assume that they were only distributed at the 70th party conference. The manual is clearly marked with '70-years to the Great October'.
However... the keyboard is on the left, alpha keys to the right!
Sergei reported that this model was manufactured in 7000 pieces, and made available only to party deputies.
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The smaller LCD window is the clock/date display.
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Display
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The clock/date display.
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The main window indicators.
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Display
I find the design of this machine quite interesting. Bad, interesting!
The above pictures show the two LCD display windows. The smaller is for the date/time, and my assumption is that the machine was initially designed to have a small window which would be visible through a gap/window in the case so that it was not necessary to open the machine to tell the time. However, the keyboard covers this window, so clearly it is quite useless as a seperate window. Is this just bad design, or is there some other reason for the two windows? We may never know.
Alexei has a plausible explanation for the two windows...
I think I can shed some light on why the second LCD is
there. In the original Sharp which they
reverse-engineered there was no provision for
date/time. This feature was considered important by a
client and, given a short development time, the
engineers just added a small daughterboard with clock
circuitry and a second display. I'm not entirely sure
whether the clock was on a daughterboard or the
circuitry was integrated on the same PCB.
Very interesting. So, can anyone shed light on which Sharp this machine was derived from?
The large window display shows the LCD icons. They are hard to make out, but obviously this machine was used as a small organiser. Date, name, phone number - that sort of thing. It is quite unsophisticated, and the calcultator itself is very basic. It is interesting to note that ONLY Cyrillic is available on the keyboard; all other alpha-capable USSR calculators have both Cyrillic and English characters (e.g: MK-85, MK-90, MK-98)
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