Fun fact, since soviet calculators were copied from western designs, when an error happened it was displayed also a "error" on a 7seg display. if you squint hard enough you can read it as ЕГГОГ (eggog, total nonsense gibberish) in russian, which was explained in manuals as a "keyword signaling an error condition". There is an article in russian wikipedia on studying the error codes and undocumneted features - "eggogology" https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%95%D0%B3%D0%B3%D0%BE%D0%B3...
A lot of them were heavily influenced by western designs but they were not clones or copies by any stretch, unlike many Warsaw-pact-made personal computers. There are probably more detailed comparisons out there but this gives a decent idea:
Only a few were domestic designs. Most of them were copied almost 1:1 from HP and Casio calculators, and adjusted for the inferior production capability. B3-38 in particular, MK-51 etc. Die shots almost match each other, and even the microcode was 99% copied with some fixes. [1] That likely was the reason they never updated the firmware.
The "Eggog" message was likely copied too, although I can't think of a good way to display an error in Cyrillic in 7 segments.
Home computers is another story, in particular the 1801 series which was a domestic PDP-11 compatible design underpinning most of the Soviet personal computing boom of the late 1980s. (it was slow though, holy hell)
I would guess it's very close to the first thing that pops into the head of many a Russian speaker. А? Что? - Ничего. Желтые ботинки! Not to mention the frequent use in the classical literature, for the more high-minded. https://vk.com/topic-16292643_23535328
Have you come across something similar about the programmable ones? The fact the basic models involved more copying seems more or less as-expected to me (the B3-38 kind of reminds me of the Ну Погоди! Nintendo Game & Watch clones, just by appearance) but the programmable ones look tweaked far beyond just changing the names of things.
No die shots but the Wikipedia articles of all things on the MK61 and MK52 are surprisingly thorough including photos of the PCBs, schematics, and the External Links sections contain most of the interesting articles I'm aware of about these.
They're quite interesting and quirky machines, definitely HP-inspired but unique in a lot of ways. Especially the MK52 with the built in EEPROM (though other than the EEPROM and connector for an external ROM it is functionally identical to the MK61). They're also still readily available and cheap on eBay if you want to play with one.
It seems odd there isn't more first-hand/primary-source-ish information about these - people who worked on ICBMs or nerve agents or whatnot have written about their experiences, you'd think calculator designers would pop up as well. Like, where is something like this for Soviet calculators https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39962737
> which was explained in manuals as a "keyword signaling an error condition"
Fun side-note: As someone who learned programming in parallel with learning English, my brain still thinks of many programming constructs as keywords that have no real meaning. 20+ years later it still surprises me sometimes when something clicks and my mind goes “Oh wait that concept is named after a real world analogy!! Whoa”
It's been argued that this makes programming easier for starters not fluent in English: they see a token to which they can attach a single meaning, instead of having interference from their linguistic intuition. There's some evidence backing that up, but it wasn't much.
I read ?TYPE MISMATCH ERROR as mishmash (миш-маш, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mish-mash_(food) ) error and it made perfect sense. Was a while before I learned what 'mismatch' actually meant.
That was my introduction to hacking . The realization that you can make the system to do things that the designers didn't intend it to do, and open the whole new would of possibilities, was what got me hooked and probably made me choose the path that led to going into computer technology.
The usual word for this is "ошибка" which is hard to spell on 7seg, but the main reason was that designs were copied layer by layer from chips and not reverse engineered (with few rare exceptions) to be able to change something like that.
What’s lost to history is the lore of Soviet calculator design. These were made by real people who made design decisions based on the constraints they had, even when it came to cloning Western tech.
Just like Latin, some Cyrillic characters can be displayed, but the words that mean an error, unambiguously, have letters that don't fit, even if you shorten the word. Ошибка (ш & к are problematic), сбой (й won't fit).
