I FINALLY FOUND IT! Behold Elektronika MS 1504, the ONLY SOVIET LAPTOP EVER. 

More of the cat using computers please :-)

'Reaaally carefully, reaaally slowly' Picture of demon core in the background 🤣

The use of three screws to secure the case was quite innovative. All modern devices nowadays have dozens of one-way clips and indestructible glue. 🙂

It seems easier to reverse engineer some of the experimental chips than to figure out how the power supply was made. The motherboard on the other hand looks beautiful!

In Soviet Union you didn't enable the turbo mode, the turbo mode enabled itself.

This reminds me of Asianometry's videos on Soviet computing history plus videos about weird 80s and 90s laptops. It's definitely something I'd love to see more of, hence why this channel is one of my favorites. It's rare we westerners get to have a real look at what you guys had. Schools here hardly talk about early computing history and definitely completely gloss over Soviet computers, which is a shame because it's equally as impressive despite the Soviet computers having completely different standardization to western and east Asian ones and ultimately having to be abandoned due to that. I have to wonder if schools in former Soviet states even talk about Soviet computers or do they also only talk about western ones?

In the Soviet Union they knew how they built computers and strove to keep up with the West. They even proposed to create their own OGAS network that would be the Soviet internet. Unfortunately the political leadership in Moscow did not see the potential of this technology.

I like that you're using Norton Commander, that was my favorite in the early 90's.

Needs more cat, thanks for the video/effort, it's appreciated.

I'm here for the cat.

Thanks a lot to the tabby cat for its crucial contributions to this great video.

I had not seen this combination of VLSI and DIP chips before, and was baffled by the components (especially the chip-like-with-holes) on the motherboard. Thanks for taking the time to take this machine apart and show the inner workings. Really enjoyed this video.

I remember such machines, Compaq for example, and always liked them. It's such a shame the power supply is junk but I know you can sort it out. Thanks for showing us Alex, I really enjoyed this one.

I seen these. The problem with computers at end of USSR was in people heads. Not many knew about them nor imagined how to use them for productivity. Also huge prices and lack of software slowed adoption. It changed though and fast.

I have an old soviet computer named "Byte" in English or "Bait" when converted straight from cyrillic. I also have the book that came with it and it's quite funny. For starters in page 64 of the book they have instructions how to code in BASIC a program that draws the flag of the soviet union. The motherboard inside is a 10 layer PCB, which is crazy.

A 7805, 7812, and 7912 with some caps on a solder proto board and you're set. Awesome Soviet copy!

Great video ! Thanks a lot ! Keep up the excellent work and may God bless you always !

I knew it was a Toshiba clone I had similar one and I loved ur cute cat being curious about the laptop

Amazing! Look at the use of screws. At the time everything in the West was put together using Phillips head screws. Ca 1984 I took a day trip to East Berlin. There was a trade show going on. They were so proud of a controller for a machine that used EPROMS... At that time my desktop computer was a 3270 terminal on a mainframe with thousands of users. And I used Altera EPLDs at the time. Wat a failed system it was...

Excellent video. Quite glad I found this channel.

love this channel, very informative :) excellent work

Great video as always, I wish my cat was so excited about retro computing :)

Beautiful video! Thanks a lot for presenting us this jewel! :)

Awesome! Thanks for sharing a detailed video about this rare machine!

Dude, you killed me with that fade out to the image of the demon core when removing the floppy wire conector. What about the elektronika MK-85...can we consider it that 1st "portable computing equipment" of the ussr? Amazing job with the videos, spasibo bolshoe!

Wow that’s pretty cool the stacked 3.5” floppy disk drives

The color scheme, and general appearance, resemble a Toshiba laptop, of which I would tend to think this is an imitation. Ah, you got around to mentioning that.

nice video as always. the demo program and construction of the power supply is very interesting

A couple of those print ads for the thing have a pretty cool aesthetic. I’m not surprised many people didn’t decide to shell-out for a laptop though, even in the west almost no one had a laptop until the mid-to-late 00s, unless you were a businessman. Pretty neat that there were probably only ~1500 of these. I liked your little rant about how metal scavengers should’ve just resold them for their intended purpose. The same comes up for people who broke into railways for electrical cable over here, they’d melt it and sell it for scrap copper even though a highly-engineered high-purity high-current power cable sold for WAYYYY more.

12:15 I guess this laptop belonged to a company. An addicted worker noticed that this laptop had not been used for a long time and was obsolete so he decided to salvage some chips so that he could buy something to drink 😀. Most likely he thought that nobody will notice what he did and that the laptop will be thrown away. Very interesting video, looking forward to the next part.

Thank you so much for showing this piece of history. The technical info is super interesting. Those Soviet engineers were very smart, even the reverse engineering has it's own challenges, and i have to admire that the Soviet Union and the post Soviet countries had electronics manufacturing capabilities, unfortunately generations behind the west, but still had some industry unlike the "third world" were I'm from.

This looks very similar to Tandy 1400LT. Same specs as well. I still have mine from the late 80s.

I just sat down for a cuppa' tea after finishing work for the day - perfect timing!

Fascinating! Thank you!

Thank you very much for the review of this old laptop, and for the historical details of its manufacture. Very cute cat and very professional. Many greetings.

Such a great video, great content and great channel!

I hate the gold "recyclers" that destroy rare and invaluable electronic components for a few dollars.

The windowing demo program (showing the graphic capabilities in various windows) reminds me of a Turbo Pascal demo of the same era.

A glimpse into an alternate past. Fascinating. Genius. асио дру.

I have a feeling whoever stripped those chips from the PSU didn't own the whole device to sell intact. If it was someone working in the warehouse where the laptop has already sit unopened for months or years, they must've thought it will never be sold. So there is no harm stripping out some interesting components and putting the rest back into the box. Nobody will ever notice because it will rot here the warehouse until clear-out straight into a landfill. Still, they wouldn't dare to just steal the whle laptop and leave behind an empty box because that would be too obvious during inventory.

Ahaha, that demon core :D And send my regards to the kitty assistant, he's doing a great job. I wonder what else he can fix!

*Дякую* for this video sir, and especially for the finely detailed teardown! One thing I've always had trouble finding is the Soviet Cyrillic keyboard layout, and thanks to this vid (And a couple of screenshots) I _finally_ have what I was looking for in this regard! ⌨🇷🇺😀 Rare as this is, I sadly doubt very much that original replacement parts for the power supply still exist anywhere (Especially if they were laid on gold, because $$$s) but many years ago I ran into a similar problem with a laptop of a roughly similar vintage, and for testing purposes I used various series/parallel combinations of alkaline batteries to produce the correct voltages. It was an absolute pig fitting it all on the bench, but it was enough to test out the laptop and prove that it worked! 😇 Assuming the service manual gives the voltages for each of the rails coming off the PSU (And let's face it: One of the reasons why I love tech from the USSR is because it was _designed_ to be user serviceable! 🛠) a battery array might work for testing, but for continued use some of the off-the-shelf PSUs now available in the market should be able to provide the correct voltages to keep this beauty running safely! 🙂 And OK, it might not be the _best_ computer of its time...But unlike any of the British made computers of that era I wouldn't be surprised if this - Once fixed - Would continue to work for a good 200-300 years afterwards! 🤘

That's unexpected! I have found 2 units of Soviet elektronika pong

Thank you for an excellent review and retrospective. I own a descendant of the Toshiba T1100 - the slightly later T3200, but it is less useful as a laptop due being designed without a battery. You've given us great overview of this very unique machine, while also delving into its history and how it came into existence. That context makes the video far more interesting than just a tour of the computer on its own. With the rarity of this machine and how many computers are pillaged for gold, I'm surprised that you were able to find one to review, let alone a copy of the manual. Well done. If you don't mind my asking, was this part of a personal collection belonging to DrPass, or does he have a museum? Fuzik inserting the floppy disk got a chuckle out of me!

Wow, great video! Thanks! I had one of these S/N 1372 july 1993

Now: that was pretty interesting. I worked with early Toshiba Laptops quite a bit back then and still own a T-3200 and T-1600 (of which I don't know if they are still in working order to be true). But comparing the inards with a Toshiba there are quite some similarities. In the Soviet Union it was quite common to reverse engineer western products. This one came quite near. But for what expense ... Thanks for sharing !

Love your cat!

Soldering on the closeups seems to need work. At 13:15 there are a few suspicious joints visible.

I love the star of the show, the orange cat. Laptops were status symbols, not something to rely upon for work or entertainment, with limited battery life and odd input devices. Would be cool to finally get abundant gold on Earth. People would laugh at crimes commited for a piece of metal. "Collectors' items" are a big scam.

Fantasic machine hope you will be able to run it! BTW Belarusians have one more interesting peace of hardware in the early 90's It is a spectrum ZX clone called Alf (Ельф) it is made to be lice console with cartrages and all the games are western games translated in Russian. The funniest thing is that the controllers are clone of famicom ones, but mirrored 😅(D-pad is on the right side and the buttons are on the left, yes there are 2 buttons but doing the same)

My Sega Genesis Nomad was made in 1996 and just 2 years before this was the best Russia had to offer. Crazy.

such a cute kitten! computer kitty!

From my experience with twisted nematic displays like this, the solid blue screen is likely just the contrast cranked all the way up. The artifacts on the LCD look to be scratches in the polarizer film from somebody drawing on it with a pen or something. If you can find a junked donor LCD, even a modern one, you could probably trim to fit and get that fixed. As for the backlight, you'll likely need to get the -15v rail working on the power supply, or connect an external supply long enough to find out if the CC tube is still good. The 60-pin internal expansion connector is likely an ISA bus if this is a true XT-compatible clone, so you could probably design a CF-IDE card for it if you can find a pinout. As for the power supply... Eh. I don't even know where to start with repairing that, especially without schematics or even knowing what those missing components are. Personally, I'd just build a new one from scratch, as DC buck converters and voltage inverters are inexpensive, and easy to use. That might not be a "proper" restoration, but it would at least be functional. Sometimes you just gotta do what you gotta do.

It’s a thing of beauty

That's a very interesting laptop! Some of the Soviet assembly techniques are the same as in the Lell PSR drum machine I restored; it's all pretty elegant though. I would never expect a Japanese display in a Soviet device though. Oh, and I saw a screenshot of Block Out! i liked this game when I was a kid in the early '90s with a PC XT/AT at home.

The outer design looks similar to old Toshiba Laptops of the late 1980s or very early 1990s.

Awsome🏆 would be super nice to se some older equipment from space race, computer and software 🤗

Oh, I forgot to ask: Are the demonstration floppy disk images backed up somewhere? It might be fun to try running it on other computers. I'd certainly give it a go.

I love the detailed video, Спасибо!

Cool video :) and cool kitty :)

I had toshiba T1000 and this one is Very similar in ports arrangement (external and internal), and even component’s arrangement. The power supply looks here like a pure madness and my main board has a lot less chips and more of them were smd ( im not surprised). My toshiba had rare citizen floppy with different ribbon cable, but this looks like normal FDD

Removing the keyboard ribbon included a reference to the Demon Core? Oh my.

Интересно, МС 1504 это функциональный аналог Тошиба Т1100. Видел ролик на Ютьюб, как умелец сумел запустить на Тошибе windows 1.0. По идее и на МС 1504 это тоже должно пойти, но почему-то никто не пробовал до сих пор

What the hell is that power supply! :O edit: oh, ok ... I missed the bit about it being stripped of some parts.

Hm, EXTREMELY similar to my old Toshiba T1100 PLUS, with 2 floppy disk drives! Maybe the Japanese copied this nice design from Russia ;) A great workhorse in the old days. THANK YOU for this great video!

What a fantastic piece of history. Impressive to see all of the chips made especially for it. I wonder what is the one with holes in the packaging?! It's more than unusual! I'm really sad to see the power supply butchered... it's so beautiful, all made in with bodge wires. Very time consuming process to build things... Maybe later ones had a more cleanly made power supply that you can retro engineer to save this one? Thanks for sharing this comprehensive explanation about this time capsule!

Крутая штука.Держать в руках не приходилось.Видел первый раз на обложке журнала ТМ,в одном из номеров начала 90-х.

Cool video!!👏👏👏🔝💯

1992 I had a 486 DX 33 MHz computer. Weird that in Russia a 8086 compatible was still state of the art

This is great!

cool laptop

Looks like a 1980s Bondwell PC, which used a Z-80 processor

that fuckin' demon core overlay made me laugh harder than anything else I've seen this year. There's dark humor, but that was vantablack

Hmm, very interesting machine, thank you for your very well made review! It shows how much effort had run into the basic hardware layout, if the chips are genuine russian made (which I assume). The AMI Bios makes sense, to keep it IBM PC Compatible and thus open to the world of programs. All in all not shabby, a 386 was ok in 1991, not the cutting edge, but good to work with. If it had been developed further to make it more affordable and the international PC world wouldn't have gone that crazy cheap for used machines, it could have become a success story as well.

That’s so cool to see! I had a Tandy 1400 LT which looked like this. It weighed a ton, the battery lasted maybe an hour, and the display was similar. The Toshiba laptops were much nicer. That would’ve been 1991 or so.

i wonder if there are any more readily keyboards available from the time who were using the same alps clone micro switches as this keyboard used on the laptop.

your cat likes it

I love the cat. :)

Продавался такой недавно на аукционе

do you have any archived images of the demo programs? I would like to see them for myself, translate a few things etc

good design

You know, if the expansion port is basically an extension of the ISA bus, there might be a noninvasive way to attach a modern fixed disc solution like the XT-IDE. Tex-elec has a very tiny card that would fit nicely in that unused battery compartment. Figure out the pinout, have the right sized card edge made (maybe PCBWay), and then solder a ribbon cable on and route it into the battery compartment. As far as the PSU is concerned, I know the Amiga community swears on the Mean Well PSUs. I'd put it in an external enclosure, make a new expansion plate and solder in the multipin connector of your choice and build a matching cable to the external PSU. Basically adapt the Amiga solution to the computer. This assumes the scrappers trashed the orignal PSU beyond repair. Regardless, I bet you could fit a battery holder (say, 3 triple As) in that battery compartment to power the clock chip and get it on a more modern DOS variant. All in all kind of a slick computer.

Weird how the PSU looks like a over-engineered prototype, while the motherboard looks like a consumer grade product, nice PCB layout, not overcrowded. Would almost thing two different companies worked on it or something

I'm curious about the keyboard, as are some people I know in the keyboard community. The switch mount on the pcb resembles Mitsumi miniature mechanical, but it's soviet, so it can't be that. Any way to show?

Крутий девайс ! Треба відновлювати.

Thank you

When you open the screen, hold and lift in the middel of the screen. It Can bend or break the screen when opening from corner, thats goes new laptops aswell. But its a Nice laptop.

Don't expect people who break things apart for scrap metal to be able of logical thought. They cut IEC and figure-8 cables instead of just unplugging them.

Nice to see one disassembled, I knew about it's existence and that it was a clone of the early Toshiba laptops, but I never realised how much similar they are even inside - having repaired T1200 some years ago this looks almost identical layout and plastics wise.

04:57 obligatory Norton Commander!

WE found it, Kamerade, we found it...

Your cat remindsm e of the cat I had in collage. Oscar was a good furball. I miss him. Given I've been looking into the pdp-11 for fiction material? The soviet use of the platform will never not astound me. And yet? This is a genuine Soviet intel clone. I wonder what could have come of things had athis come out even a couple years sooner so that it didn't release as the soviet union was collapsing. Thank you for covering these things. Stay safe out there.

This was absolutely not obsolete in 1989. 5150 clones were selling like hotcakes in the late 80s as a desktop computer. Adding this being a laptop makes it even less obsolete. DOS was supported well into 1998. There were DOS versions of a lot of software available at the time. In 1989, DOS was still king. The Windows explosion was a few years away in 1993 or so. This computer was by no means cutting edge, but calling it obsolete is a vast over statement. I live in the US and my first PC computer (not my first computer, but my first PC) was released in 1982 and was the Compaq Portable original XT "luggable" I had up to date Lotus 123 and Word Perfect. Best of all, it was 99 bucks.

I remember watching a RU-vid video, called akin to "A review of Elektronika ES 1841". The review as something like: "this chip has 0.1 grams of gold" (snap!), "these two are 0.05 each" (snap!), "and this one is limited edition ultra-rare ceramic with 0.3 grams of gold" (snap!). I remember screaming at the screen! I couldn't even comment the video, because stupid RU-vid censors everything I can tell the bastard!

The Soviet Union’s mathematicians & computer scientists were capable of so much more, had the political system been open to market forces & free flow of information they wouldn’t have built this thing.

It was a copy of Japanese Toshiba laptop from 1985. It was obsolete by the 90’s but hey, it’s better than no computer at all.

From the patches, you get the impression they were not so good at designing switchmode supples... It is actually quite critical, regarding board layout, decoupling, etc. If you fail, it will be unreliable, switch off spontaneously, break... Looks like they experimented with it.. Probably easier to replace it with some standard modules.. The plastic seemed to be of better quality than the corresponding Toshiba, because it had not gone yellow...

Interesting that they went straight for their own design rather than copying a western or Japanese one first.

Even if its a clone and the case is a litle.... creaky. .. given its the only one its still pretty compact....

О,it is incredible vintage laptop.