Page 12 - Kotov

The Ural Family
Ural was a family of general-purpose computers focused on engineering and economical
applications. They were designed by Bashir I. Rameev who earlier worked with Isaak Bruk
and then was involved in the development of Strela. The first four models (Ural-1, Ural-2,
Ural-3. and Ural-4) used vacuum tubes; Ural-P, Ural-14, and Ural-16 were transistor-based
computers.
Built in 1957 in Penza, a city south of Moscow, Ural-1 was a small and relatively cheap
computer for engineering applications. The machine had small yet developed instruction
set with manual control to monitor program performance and interfere in the course of its
execution to make corrections during debugging. The main technical characteristics: 36-bit
Bashir I . Rameev fixed-point number representation, a single-address instruction set, the speed was 100 in-
(1918–1994) structions per second. A magnetic drum, storing up to1024 words served as the core memo-
ry. It was supplemented by an external magnetic tape (40 thousand words) and punched tape (10 thousand words).
The keyboard printer and the punched tape were the only I/O devices.

Ural-1
In subsequent models, Ural-2, Ural-3, and Ural-4, the ferrite core memory replaced the drum, the capacity of the
drum and tape external storages was extended, as well as the spectrum of I / O devices. Those Urals formed a
software and hardware compatible series of computers of different performance.
The next Urals (Ural-11, Ural-14, and Ural-16) produced between 1964 and 1971 formed a series of transis-
tor-based computer systems, which were bottom-up hardware and software compatible, had unified interfaces
and could be aggregated into various multi-machine configurations covering a wide range of applications. The
Urals embodied many of the ideas that were then widely used in the computers of the third generation (extended
interrupt system, effective memory protection, advanced system software, etc.).

Ural-16

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