The article discusses the history of computing in the Soviet Union. By the early 1970s, the lack of common standards in peripherals and digital capacity caused the Soviet Union to fall behind Western producers in terms of technology. Some experts believed that with intensive effort, similar to the Soviet space program, the Soviet Union could catch up to the West. However, others believed that without capitalist competition and user feedback, this was unlikely. As a result, the government decided to stop original development in the industry and instead encouraged the pirating of Western systems.
During the late perestroika era, when Western technology embargoes were relaxed, the Soviet Union started adopting foreign systems. In 1989, the Moscow Institute of Thermal Technology acquired 70 to 100 IBM XT-AT systems with 8086 microprocessors. Due to the poor quality of domestic manufacturing, the country imported over 50,000 personal computers from Taiwan in the same year.