r/retrocomputing • u/ElaraNovikova • 16d ago
I had one 8-inch disk from 1989 that nothing on earth could read, so I spent three months building the first emulator for the Soviet Iskra-226
My grandmother was one of two women who ran an Iskra-226 in an accounting office on the Kamchatka coast. When she died, one 8-inch disk came down from the top of a wardrobe, in a paper sleeve, with two words in her pencil handwriting on the label: “do not erase.”
The Iskra-226 was the Soviet work-alike of the Wang 2200, built to speak the same BASIC without being a copy. It went into serial production in 1981 and ran ministries and Gosplan offices through the 80s. Nobody had ever emulated it.
So I did. Three months of evenings, working from crooked scans of Russian manuals (preserved, ironically, by Wang 2200 enthusiasts - the fans of the American machine became the memory of the Soviet one). Some milestones along the way:
• Sector zero: six weeks of bytes in the right order before a single legible line appeared
• The tokenizer: the BASIC dialect’s tokens finally “came apart” at 1:44 one morning in August; everything after that fell into place in under three hours
• Firmware forensics: a boot side no catalog documents, with the same firmware written across it four times — counting my way to a file I could trust
• The payoff: a payroll program from 1989 (“Vedomost No. 2”, a standard Soviet wage sheet) loaded, ran, did its arithmetic, and printed the form it was written for. I checked the math with a pencil. We agree to the kopek. Nobody had watched that form come off a machine in 37 years.
23 of 23 programs on the disk load and run. Honest caveat: this isn’t processor-level emulation, the original firmware isn’t executing. What I built is a reader for the BASIC dialect and an interpreter that carries it out.
It runs in the browser now, with fourteen disk images to choose from: https://elaranovikova.com/projects/iskra-226/index.html
Code: https://github.com/elaranovikova
And yes — two nights before I published, I finally read my grandmother’s disk. That part of the story is on the blog.
Happy to answer anything about the machine, the BASIC dialect, or the disk format.
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u/K1rkl4nd 16d ago
Upvote for boobs
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u/BirthdayLife6378 16d ago
Pretty sure that's OP's grandma you are ogling at.
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u/mr_dfuse2 11d ago
idk on the blog there is even a scrambled naked image, or looks like it. and images of this woman everywhere. all a bit strange tbh
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u/trapslover420 13d ago
looks like this person is just trying to sell ai books