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The Unified Systems III and IV
The first computers of the Unified System III appeared in 1984. They were the Soviet ES-1036, ES-1046, and
ES-1066, the Czechoslovak ES-1026, and Hungarian ES-1016. The performance of the most powerful EC-1066
was 5.5 million operations per second. As the operating system, was used the OS-7, which consisted of the base
operating system and the system of virtual machines.
In the second half of the 1980’s, the Unified System IV was initiated with computers ES-1130, ES-1170 and
ES-1181. However, in the course of the perestroika the economic situation in the Soviet Union in the second half
of 1980’s deteriorated sharply. The funding for the Unified System was drying out. To this, the personal com-
puters revolution reached also Russia and the mainframe computers started quickly to be replaced by mini- and
micro-computers.

The SM Family of Mini-Computers

The Institute of Electronic Control Machines (INEUM is the Russian abbreviation) founded by Isaak S. Bruk
has been successfully developing small computers for real-time control of technological processes and small
enterprises in 1960’s and early 1970’s. When the Unified System program was initiated, the similar program was
proposed for small computers and the INEUM was designated to be the head organization for the program that
was named System of Small Computers, or SM, Systema Malykh (Machines) in Russian. As in the case of the
Unified System, the Eastern European countries of the Soviet block were included into the SM program.
Unlike the Unified System, the SM was not one series of compatible computers differing in performance, but
several families of mini- and micro-computer architectures. They were associated with specific applications and
different levels of complexity of controlling technological processes. The goal was to ensure that each level of
the complexity would have computer systems with relevant capabilities.

The SM-1 mini-computer The SM-4 mini-computer

The SM-1 and SM-2 families were 16-bit computers with the instruction set of the Hewlett-Packard HP-2000.
Other SM computers were mostly built in accordance with the de facto internationally standard architectures de-
veloped by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC). The models SM-3 and SM-4 were patterned on the PDP-11
architecture, in which all communications between the processor, RAM, and the I/Os were based on a single in-
terface: the common bus. The common bus was also implemented in 32-bit microprocessor-based mini-computer
SM-1700, which was software compatible with the VAX-11 and appeared in the late 1980’s. The SM computers
were widely used in the USSR, specifically in the energy industry.

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