technology
Notes: 40
"We Are Peaceful People, But Our Armored Train Stands Ready on a Side Track"
The story of the famous line "We are peaceful people, but our armored train stands ready on a side track," from a 1935 song by Svetlov and Dunaevsky…
City Phone Numbers in Early-1990s Moscow: a Status Symbol and Scarce Resource
Why owning several working Moscow phone lines in 1993 — after years-long waiting lists and a thriving black market in numbers — was a status symbol…
A4 Paper: History, Standards, and International Differences
The math behind the A-series paper standard — and why the United States never adopted it.
Axle Box
Axle box
The Betacam Video Format
Betacam is a family of professional video-recording formats on 1/2-inch magnetic tape cassettes, developed by Sony. In the early 1990s, Betacam was…
Double-Deckers: London's Symbol on Wheels
Double-decker is the name for the red two-story buses that run on London's city routes.
Elektronika VM-12
The first mass-produced Soviet home VCR, built on licensed Panasonic technology from 1984 to 1995 — the humble object of Roman's old daydreams…
Funai
The Japanese electronics maker whose cheap-but-solid VHS players made it a byword for accessible imported quality in early-1990s Russia, on its way…
Grundig and Satellite Television in the 1990s
The Grundig company traces its history back to 1945, when Max Grundig founded the enterprise in the Bavarian town of Furth. The company was…
Lexicon -- the Legendary DOS-Era Word Processor
In the early 1990s, mentioning "Lexicon" in a Russian office required no explanation — it was the primary word-processing program used on personal…
The NEC Corporation and Its Presence in Russia
The Japanese electronics giant behind the pager that marked its 1993 Russian owner as plugged into the new elite — a status symbol costing more than…
Oracle Database in 1993
Oracle was founded in June 1977 under the name SDL (Software Development Laboratories) by three programmers: Larry Ellison, Bob Miner, and Ed Oates…
The Patek Philippe Perpetual Calendar: A Symbol of Status and Technical Mastery
The Patek Philippe Perpetual Calendar is one of the most prestigious and technically complex collections from the Swiss manufacturer Patek Philippe.
RCA Colortrak 2000: the television standing in for a fireplace in Roman's new house
The RCA Colortrak 2000, a symbol of vanished American technological supremacy that read as "elite" in 1990s Russia even as it was being junked back…
SAGEM, the French Electronics Maker
SAGEM was a French company founded in 1924 by Marcel Méhé, a 25-year-old entrepreneur. The firm initially specialized in mechanical equipment…
Sony Trinitron
The revolutionary single-gun, aperture-grille picture tube that made Sony televisions synonymous, by 1993, with the best image quality money could…
Stinol
The Lipetsk-built refrigerator brand, a joint venture with Italy's Merloni that had only just formally opened — July 2, 1993 — when Zhorik hauls a…
"Tetris" and "Lines"
The two computer games that colonized every idle office PC in early-1990s Russia — one a Soviet-made international sensation, the other a homegrown…
The "Poljot" Watch: Pride of the Soviet Watchmaking Industry
The pride of the Soviet watchmaking industry.
The BTR-80: Russia's standard armored personnel carrier
The BTR-80 armored personnel carrier: its Soviet development history, design, armament, and combat use, from Afghanistan to the present.
The Buzzer
The buzzer was an electromechanical device in Soviet-era telephones designed to give an audible alert for incoming calls. Despite the term "buzzer"…
The Clothes Dryer: the mystery second washing machine by the garage door
How the American clothes dryer works, its size and installation compared to European models, and why Roman couldn't place it as a household appliance.
The Dot-Matrix Printer in 1993 Russia: Technology of an Era of Change
The noisy, ink-ribbon workhorse of early-1990s Russian offices, prized for one thing laser printers couldn't do: strike through several layers of…
The Floppy Disk: the Era's Primary Storage Medium
In 1993, the floppy disk was the primary and most accessible way of transferring digital information between computers. For businesses of the time…
The Fragmentation Grenade
A fragmentation grenade is an offensive or defensive explosive device, designed to injure enemy personnel and damage equipment through fragments of…
The Ghetto Blaster, or Boombox
The oversized, metal-bodied boombox that defined 1980s street culture in the West, arriving in Russia just as its golden age abroad was already…
Ikarus Buses
The Hungarian company Ikarus was founded in 1895 as a blacksmith and carriage-making workshop in Budapest. Its name comes from the mythical Icarus…
The Iveco Daily: the anonymous workhorse van behind every 90s Russian motorcade
The Iveco Daily, the unremarkable Italian van whose entire selling point — as a convoy vehicle — is that nobody looks twice at it.
The Kerogas
The kerogas was a household kerosene heater popular in the USSR from the 1930s to the 1960s. It served as an alternative to wood stoves amid…
The Pager
From Motorola's 1949 patent to a million Russian subscribers by the mid-1990s — and the looted pager Zhorik keeps fidgeting with.
The Rotary Phone and Its Creaky Dial
From an 1891 patent taken out by an undertaker convinced a rival telephone operator was stealing his customers, to the Soviet TA-6 model that…
The Walkman: a Revolution in Portable Music Listening
Sony's 1979 invention that turned music into something private and portable for the first time, selling over 400 million units and reshaping an…
The Yak-42: the Soviet airliner Proma converts into a business jet
The Yak-42, the Soviet three-engine airliner Proma converts into a private business jet after squeezing a regional air detachment.
Thermobaric Charges
Thermobaric charges (also known as fuel-air explosives or volumetric-detonation munitions) are among the most destructive types of non-nuclear…
Thyristors, Diacs, and Triacs
Diacs and triacs are specific semiconductor devices belonging to the thyristor family. These terms are especially fitting for the technical speech of…
Type Size, or Kegel, in Typography
"Kegel" (from German Kegel) is the vertical size of a typeface, encompassing the top and bottom edge of a printed letter along with its ascenders and…
Video Combo
What a "video combo" (television + VCR, bought and used together) meant in Russia of the early 1990s, and why owning one signaled real prosperity.
Widescreen Picture: the Evolution of Cinema
The full history of wide-gauge cinema, from the first experiments of the 1890s to IMAX: the difference from widescreen film, the Soviet NIKFI system…
Computer Games: Wing Commander and Civilization
The two PC games that defined unattainable Western luxury for early-1990s Russians rich enough to own a 486 — a cinematic space war and a strategy…
Печатная машина Adast Romayor
The Adast Romayor — the indestructible Czech offset press that put small-time printing within reach across Eastern Europe