Debugging Behind the Iron Curtain (2010)

It's a very cool story that seems to be completely made up to me.

While the nuclear accident was in large part caused by what one may call "Soviet factors", the Soviet authorities were not some comically stupid villains. They certainly understood the dangers radiation presents to living beings so thousands of cattle from the surrounding area were killed, starting shortly after the meltdown. In the 80s, the USSR didn't have famine-level food shortages either. Yes, there were the unforgettable queues, some rationing and overall shortages, but no famine risk and no incentive for the government to try and feed radioactive cows to the population.

And technically, flipping a bit on an SM-1800 (which wasn't a PDP-11 clone like most SM-series machines, the 1800 was more or less an Intel 8080 machine), with the 80s transistor sizes, would certainly require a considerable level of radiation. The cows in the story weren't using the computer terminal, they'd be passing at least a few meters away even if the train track was close, radiation falls off quite rapidly.

On top of that, Chernobyl fallout was mostly the wrong isotopes for this. Iodine-131 is terrible for people but decays quickly (half-life of 8 days so 86% would be gone in a month), Cesium-137 was very widespread but neither of these produce alpha rays, which are the main source of bit flips, the isotopes produce gamma rays which are less likely to flip anything.

Finally there's the bit where "Sergei decided to move his family out" in 1986, and "filed immigration papers with any country that would listen". That wasn't a thing. The Soviet Union did not allow people to freely leave until just a few months before its collapse, leaving the country was very challenging, few people got approved, it only became easier in 1987 to get an exit visa and a computer engineer in 1986 definitely didn't have the option of deciding to file immigration papers with several countries. I'd say this is some embellishment of the story to give it a fun conclusion, but with the rest of it, I'm pretty sure it's just made up.

Not great, not terrible.

SM-1800 was Intel based, not PDP-11 based. 1800 was based on Russian variant of 8080, and 1810 had both 8080 and 8086 as I remember. https://ru-m-wikipedia-org.translate.goog/wiki/%D0%A1%D0%9C_... will give overview of the SM series. Regarding OS - PDP-based were initially on RSX, later on Soviet variants of unix. Intel based had either custom OS for 8080, or ms-dos like for x86 - Wikipedia article covers it well.

Same as everywhere: C/C++, Pascal, Fortran, BASIC. There were some exotics, like translated versions of the languages (similar to Chinese version of Python these days), but they were rare. My dad had a translated C manual printed on a matrix printer, A3-size, album orientation, with hand-made hard cover. I saw a book (made in state press) on IBM 360.

But these were 1980s. A teacher told me they were using punch cards in the '70s.

This sounds really like an urban legend.

>All cattle in that area was shot and buried

The story is about cattle from outside of the exclusion zone. In particular Homel and Mogilev regions of Belarus got lion share of the fallout. No cleanup was done there and anything what can accumulate the stuff, like say cattle grazing in the open, would back then make your Geiger sing. Though flipping the old Soviet electronics - i'd bet on say grid power fluctuation due to say passing train if it were electric powered, bad grounding, current leaks everywhere when wet, etc. Back in the 80-ies in our city the 220V grid's voltage sometimes would go beyond the 250V - the max of our on-the-wall voltmeter's analog display - for unknown reasons, and it wouldn't be like just few-second spikes, it would go for tens of minutes at least.

Googled a bit and here we're, even exclusion zone cattle made it into "kolbasa" :

https://time.com/4305507/chernobyl-30-agriculture-disaster/

"Half of the animals were too contaminated to keep, and 25,000 were sent immediately to slaughterhouses.

Soviet enterprise managers hated to waste valuable animal products. They wrote instructions that the contaminated meat be graded by levels of radioactivity. Then workers were to thoroughly wash the medium- to low-range meat and mix it with clean meat in sausages to send to shops all over the vast USSR.

...

The Ministry of Industrial Agriculture originally recommended treating the radioactive wool as workers would any wool. Employees of the Chernigov wool factory, 50 miles from the Chernobyl plant, unloaded the raw wool, sorted it by hand, washed it and baled it. As they worked, dust rose and hovered over the factory floor. Most employees were women. By late summer of 1986, they started to feel strange—often nauseous, with scratchy throats, and unusually fatigued. "

It's an old discussion from 2018.

From the FAQ, reposts are ok if the last (big) discussion is older than one year (or so). https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html

I also like to link to the previous discussions, because sometimes old discussions have good comments, but I usually add (97 points | March 2018 | 19 comments).

Please explain what you mean.