DataArt Announces IT Museum Website Dedicated to the IT History of Eastern Europe

DataArt, a global software engineering firm, is pleased to announce the release of the English version of its IT Museum website, which is dedicated to the history of computer technologies in the USSR and Eastern Europe.

The selection of more than 400 exhibits is a treat for vintage electronics enthusiasts and fans of old school industrial design. The museum features real gems: computer artifacts dating back to 1960, including a Mera computer terminal, a rare example of Eastern bloc industrial design; the VTA-2000 terminal, a common feature for late Soviet research institutes of the 1980s; and the legendary American ADM-3A terminal.

«As the part of the modern world interlinked with the computer technologies that give us exceptional opportunities, we feel a responsibility to remember the pioneers in our industry who blazed a trail into the digital world in Eastern Europe,» says Alexey Pomigalov, Curator of DataArt’s IT museum.

The original collection was built through donations and the personal efforts of Gleb Nitsman, an engineer from St. Petersburg who joined DataArt in the 1990s. The collection now includes many smaller devices, processing units, memory cores, and an original example of the Soviet DIY personal computer Radio-86RK, later recreated by the thousands both in factories and at home by enthusiasts.

Pomigalov continues: «We feel it’s part of our responsibility to preserve this history, and our project’s goal is to promote the heritage of the early computing age. Existing projects have been mainly tech-focused, but we want to tell the story of the people involved, how it was to design computers from the very beginning, how the industry was born, and how we’ve reached today’s level of technology.»

«The museum fills an important void in Soviet computer history. In addition to presenting old machines, we also wanted to add a human touch and tell the stories of participants in the largest computer projects in Armenia, Bulgaria, Poland, and Ukraine. We interviewed engineers and programmers active from 1950-1990, which allowed us to create a more engaging, educational, and in some way nostalgic experience», said Gleb Nitsman, the mastermind of the DataArt IT Museum.

Today, the DataArt IT Museum is launching an online exhibition supported by six articles on periods in Soviet computer history, with pictures, videos, and audio recordings. This exhibition tells the stories of the unique ternary computer and the popular ZX Spectrum clones from Leningrad and Lviv, the Soviet proto-Internet of the 1960s, and the government promotion of computer science in schools, and how the countries was introduced to the worldwide web.

The DataArt IT Museum team continues to work on the project, acquiring new pieces for the collection and recording interviews with notable figures in the development of computer science. Further plans include creating public installations and exhibitions that will complement the museum’s digital representation.

To visit the museum, please go to our page: https://museum.dataart.com/ru/en/artifacts/.

For more information: 
Asya Georgieva
Media Relations
DataArt
+359 885 20 88 49
dataart.teams