inside Duga-3 / Дуга-3, computer mainframe of the Russian Woodpecker / Chernobyl-2

in this video, we'll take a look at the control room and computer mainframe of the Chernobyl-2 over-the-horizon radar, finding punch-card programs - the software for the Duga-3 radar array...
previous video (climbing): • climbing and exploring...

[@20kilovolt]

0:58 look like a switchboard for relais. 1:12 is an Radio tube B9G base.. a pentode or so. 3:00 These are military connectors and are most often custom made. 6:23 a high power resistors. 6:31 look like a delay line memory unit. 7:00 Yes there were cables in the floor. the copper thieves have robbed it away. 8:27 NOS parts :) (new old stock) 13:12 -Faraday cage wire mesh-. magnetic core memory cool video bionerd23..

[@bionerd23]

20kilovolt comments like this make the entire youtube comment section (which is admittedly quite lousy due to software bugs all over) worth it. thanks, really. :)

[@bionerd23]

20kilovolt but yeah see how this comment got marked as spam again, automatically. maybe because you post one too many timecode link... fucking ridiculous... wish i could disable this auto-spam behavior. like this, i have to constantly keep an eye out for good comments being trashed by youtube, and have to dig it out the trash again. ffs.

[@20kilovolt]

bionerd23 Yes annoying is that the auto-spam almost always fails.

[@20kilovolt]

bionerd23 do you go also near St.-Petersburg? in this place they have a high voltage test laboratory It's called ВНИЦ ВЭИ It is wonderful to be there. +55° 55'26.15", +36° 49'10.97"

[@TMS5100]

20kilovolt not faraday cage wire mesh. it's magnetic core memory.

[@THR33SIXX3MPYR]

Thanks for filming this stuff. Very well done. Just to think, 30 years ago it was probably one of the Soviet Union's most highly guarded areas.

[@Skracken]

That place should have been preserved as a museum. It would have been so interesting to see how it actually looked like when everything was intact!

[@bionerd23]

Niklas Bergsten yeah, i bet it'd have been the number one holiday destination for US spies in the early 90ies... ;)

[@kenosabi]

It's in the exclusion zone. No one was going to be posted there.

[@Aussie50]

amazing piece of cold war equipment!, such a shame its been pillaged for scrap :(

[@gentbar7296]

Aussie50 yeah look into the radiation contaminated concrete Rebar (iron bars) scandal !!!

[@Petr75661]

A 30-years old computer is an ancient relic while a 10-thousand-years old human brain is still a top of the line design. Mindblowing!

[@msylvain59]

Damn, I collect soviet electronics, seeing all that stuff is so exciting and so sad at the same time ! Unreachable treasures....

[@wa4aos]

Amazing tour of the wood pecker facility.. As a Ham radio operator, I remember well the Russian wood pecker being turned on and ruining parts of our Ham bands until they moved to other frequencies or shut it off. We had filters in some equipment that would greatly reduce the interference. I was very surprised to see punch cards being used in Russia as late as the 1980's. They had been mostly eliminated here in the states but for certain simple functions punch cards served well. I remember using these cards to write programs in FORTRAN back at the university I attended in the 70's..What a pain.. If one card had one error the program would fail and you would have to go back to the punch machine and try to find the error.

[@bionerd23]

wa4aos haha, yeah, punch cards are crazy! i would've failed class back then, i think... i'm way too chaotic for that. when i have to program, i tend to make a lot of simple syntax errors... but no problem, the compiler will just say "hey, you made a mistake again in lines 24, 44, and 80!" in the end... back then, what a disaster it would've been!

[@wa4aos]

bionerd23 As intelligent as you are, I suspect you would have been great..We had no idea how easy it would be to program in the future back in the 70's..I have been playing with the Arduino micro controllers recently and they blow away what we considered Main Frame computers in the 70's. I really enjoy your great videos. I was particularly interested in the Wood Pecker site. I heard it MANY evenings on the Ham Bands years ago.. Thanks for sharing your adventures with us. Maybe I can visit your most interesting country one day before I get too old...LOL I have a good Ham friend who lives in Tula, not too far from Moscow. Very Best Regards from South Carolina, Glenn

[@Ben_306]

The use of punched cards this late might have been due to interference from the array. Cheaper and more reliable to use proven technology then building a giant Faraday cage to shield sensitive newer systems in a mission critical environment.

[@orbitingeyes2540]

wa4aos de WD8QCN... we had punch cards and paper tape at some of the ARTCCs as late as 1991. Systems were just to ingrained to be easily upgraded. Would love to hook up my TS-440SAT to that antenna!!!

[@ScienceDiscoverer]

@@wa4aos But she's from Germany and Duga is located in Ukraine, not Russia...

[@nrdesign1991]

Somehow it's sad that all the hard work and effort people put into engineering, building and running this station is completely trashed and vandalized now.

[@mattjohnson2998]

+nrdesign1991 It most likely wasn't vandalized by outsiders. More than likely the Russians destroyed the equipment when they left so it wouldn't be able to be used against them. It was pretty common practice back then. You take all the information you can and destroy everything else. Look into the hotel in East Berlin where the KGB occupied the entire top floor. When they left there the hotel employees were so afraid they waited 3 days before they entered.

[@nrdesign1991]

Matt Johnson No matter who destroyed it or what they used the system for, the engineers and workers who put it together still earn my respect. There is quite a lot of manual labour showing on the parts lying around. The technology is inferior to western technology but I can't say they did't try their best.

[@edgeeffect]

Second law of thermodynamics

[@vk2ig]

@@edgeeffect Entropy ... I'm twice as messy as I used to be ...

[@jamallabarge2665]

The Chernobyl reactor contaminated the area a few years before the USSR collapsed. Nobody was going to work there. I am appalled at all of the human labor that went into that thing. I would not be allowed to design equipment that required so much labor.

[@Record3677]

I believe that the floors are raised like that to allow cables to be routed under the floor boards. Datacenters also use that strategy. Could be wrong that though.

[@ThePoorPCgamer]

That is correct. the floors are all pulled up because of scrapers

[@Bumphuk]

That's what I was thinking, someone's been there and stolen all the copper cabling.

[@builtrodewreckedit]

United States of Nerd Yes i believe your rite about that... In the video it didn't look like the wires were copper colored where they were cut though.. They all looked like aluminum to me.

[@Max_Marz]

VinylDash303 Also sometimes for cooling air in at the bottom out at the top

[@sivalley]

builtrodewreckedit High spec areo-space and high frequency narrow bandwidth cabling is often made from silver/copper alloy. Tarnished silver is still conductive whereas copper and aluminium oxides are not. I have a small spool of Kynar 30AWG 90Ag/10Cu wire for RF repair work that I bought nearly a decade ago and it has become that brownish-black color characteristic of tarnished silver but still has good signal fidelity.

[@wronski11]

There is a Russian video of the same site. This is actually a quite interesting computer named А340А. It used residue number system instead of binary and was once among and if not the world fastest computer (2E6 operations / second). Very unique design, by D. Yuditsky, L. Vasieliev and V. Chrernyaev. Such computers are still operational in russia. Nothing like that was every constructed in the west. The Duga you are visiting is the receiver antenna, the emitter is about 50km from there.

[@sebastianheinrich8683]

I thought is was the other way round. That the visited duga(51°18'17.0"N 30°03'51.6"E) were the emitter and the one there(51°38'16.1"N 30°42'10.4"E) were the receiver. At least is that what the wikipedia article said en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duga_radar

[@wronski11]

Well wiki is wrong at 11:40 and 15:38 you can see the receiver, build from an array of Nadenenko dipoles. The emitter was something else. What is shown in the video is the station which analysed the echo picked by the big receiver. Hence the complicated electronics.

[@wronski11]

No it is not. The reduced number system is one of the options that can be used to do computations. It was pioneered in the Czech republic and further developed by the Russians.

[@mrkiky]

So that means the other antenna did all the "woodpeckering".

[@migsvensurfing6310]

@@wronski11 Sounds about right , thinking about what we saw in the video.

[@Joker11297]

Amazing, during the Cold War the US government would've done almost anything to see this video.

[@Stacie45]

+Gob spot There was a lot of bluffing on both sides during the Cold War. As a general trend the US usually bluffed to hide or downplay the strength of their systems, while the USSR bluffed to hide or downplay the weakness or limitations of their systems. Not in all cases, but in general it was the US pretending to be weaker than they were, the USSR pretending to be stronger than they were. In common, intelligence agencies on both sides always wanted to know for sure just how strong or weak the other was.

[@Joker11297]

Having grown up during the Cold War, I'd love to visit these sites.

[@adriankepler5254]

@Xeus Straski Remember Saturn V and the space shuttles? the russians attempted to copy and they failed

[@rifleshooterchannel208]

TeaSis And also pretty much every Russian military aircraft ever 😂

[@Leela_X]

I don't think so. Likely US was very well informed about the purpose and capabilities of Duga. They have done own eperiments with OTHRs before and the Sgnal could be heared all around the globe. They could relatively easy calculate where the transmitter is based and its direction where it is pointing at as well as its output power. Also they had spy planes and spies. I think its purpose was never a secret to the US govenment. It's also very well known, that US has done multiple experiments with nukes in space to knock out Ionosphere reflections, which would make ussr blind. Curious Droid made a very good Video about this topic. kzbin.info/www/bejne/gZS3o4J9iJiHr6c

[@ДаниилРитм]

That's all I know 6:32, 6:45, 13:14 Ferrit RAM 6:41 DTL (Diod Transistor Logic) 6:54 DTL ROM 4:59, 7:32 REED-1 [РИД-1] 8:55 Perfocard (old ROM) 9:47 Perfocard Read Machine 11:51 Vacuum Tube led 12:12 Top Secret (CPU & RAM) 12:17 Cable Canal 14:47 Amplifier CPU modul

[@trickortripslao8607]

Thank you Sir!

[@mandarin1257]

Crazy stuff!

[@zzzdogutube]

Since I am old I remember that Main frame computers had a lot of cables and produced a lot of heat. They used the raise floors to run air conditioning ducts and cables. It was usually very cool in a computer room. Thanks for the video..

[@rich1051414]

zzzdogutube It was really a requirement. Those rooms would not be navigable otherwise, there would be no where to walk due to the cables. Old school cable management, just shove um in the floor :P

[@NerdNordic]

Richard Smith Old school? Don't they do it today in large data centers? :)

[@bionerd23]

zzzdogutube yeah makes sense it was probably for everything. surely even the old supercomputers required cooling - but for that, you dont need to install a duct in every two square meters. you only need to do that if you want to save on expensive copper (or other) wiring that goes from one floor to the other. so i guess you're right, and it was a combination of air conditioning and cable channels.

[@mgregggphone]

NerdNordic That is correct. That is done in data centers still.

[@hzuiel]

+mgreggphone I've seen plain old server rooms or MDFs at smaller companies with floating floors, not necessarily only large data centers. It's handy because you can separate power coming in from data cabling coming in. The data cables come down from above, and power cables run under the floor. You can easily expand without having to saw up the concrete to run new power for new equipment racks.

[@bakadavid]

Imagine if someone from the USSR saw this video during the cold war: -you are speaking English -in a top secret soviet military installation that was celarly abandoned in a hurry -and carrying a GM counter they would freak the FUCK out

[@adamfarkas5327]

Oh, God, haha! Yeah, and after sawing it would proceed to inform everybody to "prevent a nuclear launch from the opposition".

[@IvanBunny]

Oh how I envy you! This is fantastic footage. I had no idea there was such a sophisticated operation there. This was apparently much more than a signal 'woodpecker', there was a datacenter there. And yes, those spots in the floor were where kilometers or cable were laid to connect all of the computer equipment. The reason the building is all iron/steel is because it acts like a Faraday cage, shielding the equipment *and workers* from the massive 10MW RF radiation output nearby. That was an incredibly powerful transmitter.

Yes in holes was cables. Iron walls was probably due to nuclear attack shielding, because Duga was just receiver, transmitter was several tens kilometers far and yes have several MW and worked on 10Hz, was so powerfull, that everyone hated it haha. BTW I loved this nefritr smal memory modules, as a child I disasembly some of them and loved technology from russian because everything was made indescruptible, everything was massive and painted by color. I hope I will see some day places like this.

[@jreg2007]

it's a receiver . not a transmitter.

[@oktal3700]

Punchcard says GOST 6198-75, the Soviet state standard governing perforated cards for electronic computers, equivalent of a German DIN, British BSI or American ANSI standard.

[@AndrewScott83815]

When I used to work as a flight instructor I would routinely fly over a facility similar to this in Christmas valley Oregon, United States. It was dismantled but always captured my curiosity seeing the size of the antenna array footprint. The control rooms are still there! Although in the middle of nowhere, high desert Oregon

[@jaredkelly930]

There sure was, and looking at it on google earth….it was massive.

[@joefranks4235]

At 3:04, we in the U.S. call it a bus and tag cable. It's used to plug together various mainframe units from disk drives to storage controllers.

[@mark33545]

It's crazy to think your smartphone likely has an order of magnitude more power than that entire building had with all those huge rooms with mainframes

[@mark33545]

I was talking about the computing power, not the RF power.

[@nessotrin]

mark rossi An order of magnitude ? More like millions time more power.

[@ProgNoizesB]

@@nessotrin and yet, we still lose connection with our smartphones and have a hard time to talk to people miles away over a radio. And that thing could sense a rocket from 3000 miles away. Maybe a weak signal, but enough to know it's no good.

[@redDL89]

@@nessotrin True. The modern school calculator has more computing power than the flight computer on the Apollo.

[@FloppydriveMaestro]

Its a shame its so destroyed it would have been fascinating to see it when it was in operating condition.

[@BisMaxx]

I wonder if there is video of it when it was operating.

[@arvizturotukorfurogep6235]

Highly doubt any was made, or any would be public. It was part of a top secet military operation and all that, you know.

[@BisMaxx]

Yes. I understand that. But just because it was top secret and military doesn't mean nobody did some photographs/video of their achievements for historical archival. Usually this type of thing is saved and many years later shown in a museum. In some cases it also shows up in KZbin. But maybe the timing isn't right just yet. Or maybe its out there already on the internet and it needs to be dug out into the open Westwurtzli

[@glenjarnold]

I used to hear it frequently one my radio gear.

[@james1787]

@@BisMaxx Perhaps someday something will surface. I would love to see the same..

[@Ralesidebottomfilms]

These films are actually better than the film The Chernobyl Diaries. Much more interesting! Thanks for posting!

[@cosimoto1]

Copper and Gold! The place must be full if it! Worth thousands! Wow! A tree is growing on the roof! I have worked with computers most of my career but the horses were the most beautiful part of this video! Thank you!

[@peteroc7395]

Duga is still going I can hear this in Australia in 2020 and it changes frequency from time to time thank you very much for your channel I do appreciate all your work regards Pete

[@ScienceDiscoverer]

No, it was stopped in 1989... At least this one. I guess you maybe hearing 2nd Duga, from Russia.

[@Lukenukkem]

@13:22 The magnetic core wire array you hold in your hand is 14k-18k gold plated. Gold was used for high efficiency.

[@ronnylucas8857]

Some interesting stuff, if you hook-up those core memories today, you can still dump the content of the last time ir was running, as ferrite cores keep their magnetic polarization!

[@lpfanatic2003]

I've seen gaps like that in server room floors. They are so they can run the cables in the trench between rooms without having them in the ceiling where they would have the fire control equipment. Awesome video, really shows how little shows in the design of high tech rooms between the 1970s and 80s and today.

[@yakacm]

The false floor is as others have said to allow cable runs. I worked on mainframes in the 80's and 90's, and the false floor we had was also used to blow cooled air from the HVAC units up thru the big disc cabinets and the CPU's, or nodes as ICL called them, which were about 9 foot tall and about 5 foot square. The false floor also would have been filled with fire suppressant gasses had there been a fire. During a fire large steel doors would have dropped down sealing off the machine room and filling it with Halon or it's more modern replacements, and the false floors had walls that lined up with the steel doors to completely seal off the room. If you were unlucky enough to be in the room when the doors dropped and the room filled with gas you would be in serious trouble, as you would suffocate in pretty quick order, so the rooms had air masks hanging ion the walls in several places. These consisted on a large full face mask like a gas mask, and a canvas bag containing a bottle of air, if there was a fire and the Halon was triggered, you would put the mask on and sling the bag over your shoulder and try and find your way out. When you had the mask on you and breathing the air in and out made you sound like Darth Vader, we would put the masks on and do Vader impressions on boring night shifts, so most of the bottles were half empty, which would have meant anyone needing them probably would have been fucked, ha ha.

[@lepton56]

Very entertaining Cold War relics in this walk around. Russian core memory at 13:06. Thank you bionerd23.

[@Flumphinator]

Absolutely fascinating. It's a small piece of the world that just stopped one day.Kind of seems eerily peaceful.

[@anguerandelamouliniere3070]

Very nice video. The "strange" floor that you have found is typical in 70's and 80's mainframe buildings. These floors are designed to let cables run under the surface of the floor.

[@LukeSnowmaker]

+Angueran DeLaMouliniere That's it!

[@Cetok01]

+Angueran DeLaMouliniere Yes; modern computer rooms still have similar trenches for cabling. Many have the entire floor elevated above the concrete pad.

[@NightWolfx03]

For as beat up as that stuff was, vintage computer nerds are drooling for it, even me :3 All that old stuff is amazing, inspiring, even in it's current state. I am glad you are documenting and sharing it with everyone.

[@hene193]

Thanks for going trough this place! No one else had done this. Thank you :)

[@TheYodoc]

The channels in the floor were cable trunks; you speculated correctly about that. A common architecture for computer facilities of that era, when components were placed on large racks and interconnected with multi-conductor cables. They were covered with the steel plates you see strewn next to them. If the cables were removed by copper thieves, as speculated by 20kilovolt, they did a most thorough job. They could have been simply removed for re-use elsewhere as they would have been a valuable commodity. I'm sure that could also be true of a lot of other high-value components, probably purchased from foreign suppliers, that are no longer present. I am an amateur radio operator who used to be vexed by the constant rattle of "The Woodpecker" when it was in operation. I'll never forget that noise on the HF bands. This video is excellent, as were those of the exploration of the array itself. I've always been curious as to what "The Woodpecker" looked like. I just wish there were photos of it and the control facility while it was in operation, but such photos would be a state secret, even today.

[@Aengus42]

I used to curse that thing for swamping my shortwave radio here in the UK! Thank you for recording this, facinating to see where those signals came from. I'd have grabbed a component or two as souvenirs. Just a small piece of The Russian Woodpecker to keep... Cold war history crumbling away. It has an eerie beauty to it now.

[@ChipGuy]

At 7:00 you guessed that the floor channels and hooks are for cables. You are completely right. However, the copper thiefs have gotten to that already a long time ago. That's why you never find many cables in these abandoned buildings.

[@Saint-Louis-du-Ha-Ha]

why would anyone want to steal copper wire?

[@sleeplessindefatigable6385]

this is an absolutely fascinating video. Thanks for making this.

[@n3rf0r30]

*muffled "GET OUT OF HERE STALKER" in the distance*

[@dichotomy1593]

Those graphite rods look like the ones put in the writing arm of a data recorder. They used round paperboard that spun and recorded levels.

[@projectshininglight]

Im late to the party. Just found your videos, wow super awesome. Thank you, i have learend so much from you. Thanks for sharing

[@superchris8504]

Very interesting. Thank you for that. Got a good impression of the decay and also a hint how it could have been looked in working condition. The wild horses at the end of your vid are very cute :)

[@richardcooper589]

I know your comrade he sounds very much like our tour guide when we visited Chernobyl and Duga, great guy very knowledgable of the area. We visited the places in this video amazing experience

[@SteveMack]

Mind-blowing to think that these days we most probably have as much computing power in our mobile phones that the entire building had back then! and probably we have even more technology in our hands!

[@mangan6961]

It should been kept as a museum after closing the facility down instead of smashing it a to pieces..

[@cokeforever]

It's in exclusion zone of chernobyl disaster... What museum?!

[@daevarthurford3529]

Amazingly spooky place. Its should quite honestly be preserved for scientific history

[@DanGoodShotHD]

Just think. It took an entire building sized computer to run that thing. Something we could do with the phones we hold in our hand today. Craziness.

[@jamesburleigh7276]

I remember as a kid, late at night, i could hear this thing ticking faintly on the radio. Back then nobody in Aus had any idea what it was.... I'm in south eastern Australia !

[@edgeeffect]

As for them leaving stuff behind and what valuables they took. The problem with computers in the old days was that they were so expensive to build that you'd carry on using them for their original purpose until they were several degrees of obsolete but if you abandoned that original purpose, they'd be worthless for re-purposing because of that obsolescence, so you just leave them behind.

[@tomp2008]

awesome! so interesting. and the wild horses at the end! wow. great vid!!

[@Draggynsmate]

Beautiful video, and such a great piece of history you have the opportunity to visit. I would like one day to make it to see DUGA-3 and climb the array.. The view must be unimaginable. It is sad to see that this was not preserved in some manner. This was a cold war OTH radar that was audible on many of the shortwave bands for years hence its nickname "The Woodpecker." I enjoy your series of videos taking us along on your travels. Please continue to make more and us your faithful subscribers will watch in awe at the places you bring us to. Enjoy and be safe in your endeavors.

[@leisergeist]

The floors are like that simply to run cables through them, they're just floating sub-floors Common in datacenters and computer rooms

[@timmotel5804]

12/17/2023: As with your "tower climbing video" Very Cool. Literally Also. Thank You & Merry Christmas. Yes, cables ran beneath the floor.

[@graemedavidson499]

Astonishing. I can remember hearing Duga's transmissions and wondering what it was. The old comms receiver in front of me has a Noise Blanker which was introduced to blank out woodpecker interference. Really interesting to see the remains of the equipment and the technology used. Thanks for sharing.

[@Skracken]

Those floors are indeed for running cables in. Normally they would most likely have been covered by boards. This type of cable management is still used widely in industries etc.

[@MisterClaws]

It is astounding to see the deterioration of the complex after such a relatively short period of time. I remember the chaos that array caused to the short wave broadcasting stations back in the day. It was universally disliked as those old broadcast bands were the internet of the time. It was the only way for many countries opinions to be heard and every country had its own powerful transmitter. Sadly, those old shortwave bands have little remaining except for religious broadcasters and crazy off-center political stations. As a boy I loved to listen and hear the voices from around the world.

[@Fodi_be]

Absolutely amazing content, thank you for making and posting it!

[@jpvoodoo5522]

There probably are real woodpeckers living there now.

[@SwingingChoke]

At 12:16 the rectangular pits in the floor were most likely huge battery compartments. That room would have been most likely the power control room for the building. Sort of like a huge modern day uninterruptible power supply in the event of a catastrophic power failure. The huge ventilation shafts seen on the right of the shot when you enter the room also help add to the clue. Most likely this room would have been some what RAD-Hard to help resist a pulse. Main thing to do in that case is to keep the lights burning and have communication.

[@rennobecker9032]

Very interresting .... I was an radio Amateur in the 80s ... and i had often proplems to receive stations on short wave cause the Woodpecker Signal was to strong ... i had to use often the noiseblanker to filter out the Woodpecker Signal on my receiver. .... amazing Building 🏭

[@adamfarkas5327]

What an amazing video of the exploration of this place. Thank you for sharing such an amazing experience! I bet it must have been exciting.

[@amramjose]

Raised floors were for routing cables and moving cooling air for the electronics. It appers the center had been looted, or the critical electronics removed, the rest just discarded. What a mess; it would have been fascinating to see the control room in a pristine state.Great video!

[@-yeme-]

its crazy how everything in the zone has been ransacked and destroyed, and it looks like it was all done a long time ago. I guess it was easier to get in and out in the past than it is today. but back then things would have been even more contaminated, there must be hundreds of people who got some pretty heavy doses going in there and tearing the place apart and taking potentially contaminated things out with them

[@OMG-jx5nm]

yeme well just look at old uvb 76 place,it is like if there were 393949 earthquakes in it

[@hzuiel]

You can carry a geiger counter and know when it's too hot to stay. For the most part, the exclusion zone was simply not an area safe to live, entry would be relatively safe pretty soon after the accident, especially if you wore a respirator and washed off afterwards. Lets face it, looters don't have much regard for their well being anyway. People risk looonnnggg prison stays to steal a few hundred dollars worth of copper out of unoccupied homes.

[@paul36uk]

I love your videos, thank you for showing this, it is such a pity it has been reduced to scrap. If ever you are in England the national museum of computing at bletchley park has a lot of very early mainframes some of which have been restored and are working.

[@among-us-99999]

I think I would cry if I would get to see before/after pictures.

[@SpectreOZ]

With the flooring cavities exposed and the electrical fittings laying around I get the impression the cabling has literally been stripped from the building possibly for it's valuable copper content, similar activity occurs here with vacant/disused commercial buildings by scrap metal thieves.

[@MostorAstrakan]

The little copper net you were holding was memory, and the little rings were the cores. We still use the word "core memory" today. When things go wrong, we still have a file called "core". It contains a dump of all the process' memory for debugging by nerds...

[@bionerd23]

Pax Vobiscum thanks for the precise term! even though i grew up with DOS and real "floppy" floppy disks (5,25"), the stuff i saw here i never saw before, only at museums maybe...

[@nessotrin]

bionerd23 Floppys have as much as 10000 times the memory of one of those modules. I believe they were the very first type of memory ever.

[@Ne3s23p2]

With such small memory and speed compared to today's relatively affordable programmable hardware (FPGA), I wonder what was their circuitry for analog & digital signal processing, and if it could achieve over-the-horizon radar imaging, or only detection of missile/aircraft/uncloaked UFO.

[@Steve211Ucdhihifvshi]

I love your videos Bionerd23, Ive watched this one years ago, but like to come back and see your cool explores again. Imagine how awesome it would be if the idiot theives didnt ramsack this place. What an amazing find it would be

[@PrimephotoStudio]

Great video, thank you for sharing it with us.

[@michaelparadigm7836]

Very cool video... I like the way you narrate it :) Thank you guys!

[@EstraNiato]

Thanks really amazing footage

[@2fas4me2]

It's appreciated, very much, to see this site. I would've been stuck in this place for days! I don't know much about electronics but I believe the floors were elevated so as to isolate them from (or include them from) the electric current. It would be incredible to explore with you, for your knowledge and translation of things I do not understand. Thank you. I learn much from your work!

[@glenjarnold]

I remember picking up the interference signal from this establishment on my radio equipment 35 years ago!

[@TheEPROM9]

The floor is designed like that for cabling and ventilation as aircon air would be pumped through the floor. From what was left the equipment looks like it is 1960s vintage or at least parts of it were but also has the "modern" touche of CRT terminals and HDD's. The reel to reel tapes were most likely for backing up the data but it does look like it was programmed with punch cards. Sadly not enough left to identify the mainframe.

[@Obladgolated]

At 13:14 you are seeing a part of a magnetic core memory plane. You can see the row, column, and sense lines that have been unceremoniously hacked out of the frame in which it was supported. It would have cost many rubles, once upon a time. By 1980, these had been replaced by semiconductor memory chips, at least in the West. There could have been a somewhat good reason for using them in the USSR at that time, because they might have thought they were more immune to EMP effects.

[@sonofeloah]

I would love to get hold of as much of that computer as possible and reverse engineer it to reproduce the computer and even get the mainframe working again! It would be interesting to see just how it worked and how well it worked. Thanks for videoing the place and what is left.

[@andrewlittleboy8532]

I'm always amazed by the total destruction in these building caused by people ransacking.

[@miles2378]

Andrew Littleboy might it have been soviet/Russian forces withdrawing from the Ukraine after the dissolution of the Soviet union rendering the facility useless.

[@PhattyMo]

Ohh,core memory,neato. I'd assume the room was all metal,and well grounded,for shielding the computers from the huge amount of RF around the antenna(s).

[@EightiesTV]

10:16 the black rods appear to be ferrite sleeves used for suppression of radiofrequency interference. On circuit boards, components such as a resistor would have one lead folded over 180 degrees and these RFI suppression ferrite tubes would be slipped over that lead and the component would be soldered with the body very close to the board and the other lead going through one of these tubes - which also act as an electrical insulator.

[@redbaronrefining5322]

There is so much history, and precious metals there to recover haha. That memory module was too cool! Magnetic core memory isn’t something you see every day!

[@svinjamaria]

If I were walking around inside of DUGA-3 people would get used to me saying "WHAT'S THIS?!" "WHAT COULD THAT BE?" "AH, A PLUGGY THING!"

[@meepk633]

+TheShrimpyNorwegian To be fair, there were lots of pluggy things in there.

[@Ltresso12]

me too

[@Ltresso12]

me too

[@LalkeBanditen]

Why are you a pig :)

[@jp498]

as mentioned the raised floors is to hide wiring between cabinets, areas. Sometimes used for air cooling cabinets as well. The black cubes at 0:58 is either gas tube surge arrestors or relays. If it's wires coming in from outside, it's probably surge arrestors. The iron ceiling at 14 minutes is perhaps part of an EMP shield. Many facilities in the US have a mesh screen built into the wall as a faraday cage to protect against EMP damage. I would expect asbestos too which would be bad to inhale. Good thing it's wet in there. Cool video with the old hardware.

[@CrisisGuildWOW]

The floors were built like that to house cable runs that could be accessed by pulling up the floor panels. I could clearly see at around the 6 min mark the racking installed in the "trench" that would support either very large cables, or just a mass amount of smaller ones. Same same, I guess. And at the beginning I believe she was correct in supposing the equipment observed was indeed telephone eq related. On the left hand side of the "switchboard" I could clearly see several solder pin wiring blocks for connecting jumpers and the large drive rings to route the jumpers to where they were going. Looks like they had a small telephone company inside the building, makes sense.

[@elitedata]

i love your videos but im really in love with your voice !

[@hemptime123]

i could have watched those amazing horses for hours

[@ellisdee1233]

I really enjoyed your videos......I love your voice and your candor ...very cool info.

[@unixconsole]

Interesting video. I haven't seen core memory in a long time. I wouldn't be surprised if the mainframe was a reverse engineered clone of an IBM 360 mainframe, possibly even a ES-EVM (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Fotothek_df_n-11_0000385.jpg). It's interesting how many core memory boards were laying around. The room that was shielded with metal was probably to protect the equipment from RF signals coming from the antenna array itself. The amount of power it must have taken to power the computers and the array must have been impressive for the time. Thanks for sharing;)

[@NicholasAarons]

Unreal & Amazing. Keep up the great work. Nick.

[@timbo01889]

The memory is core memory similar to that used in the apollo guidance computer

[@bassmith448bassist5]

Do you mean Rope Core memory??? That was used in Apollo.

[@TheZooman22]

That is amazing, all that infrastructure and effort designed to detect nuclear launches, because we didn't trust each other. So much time and money spent by two great civilizations. To see it all now abandoned and in a state of in ruin is sad. Just imagine what we might have been able to accomplish together if things would have been different.

[@chrish4nsen]

There was def cables in the floor and marauders ripped them all out, which is why they look so weird. They are also who dismantled parts of the Duga. Marauders were/are everywhere all over the exclusion zone. They even ripped doors and other wild things out of the 5th reactor plant. The Ukrainian govt knew about and was fine with it for a long time, but just recently somewhat put a stop to it.

[@shawnaburns5158]

I personally would have loved the gauges,,switch panells light boards and dot matrix printers thank you for sharing

[@emuman]

The reason behind the flooring being that way, is so that cables can be run easily and neatly between rooms and equipment. Its called a false floor and there would have been floor tiles covering the holes originally.

[@mwising]

The iron and copper in the iron room is probably to try to resist EMP damage to the memory circuits ^^ Super cool thanks for sharing!

[@neuhausers7287]

Hey, thanks for this video and the others. This one probably is my favourite of all the ones you've done. A couple of points. The reason why you see so much "old" technology is the prohibitive upgrade costs of a lot of the existing infrastructure. Certainly there were operational reasons why magnetic cores would continue to be used (like EMP resistance), but the more likely reason is economic considerations that led to the lack of upgrades (from what we can see). Early warning over the horizon radars are fairly "static" in their capability in how it relates to its purpose. Its main aims to detect a massive ICBM strike against the Soviet Union emanating from the West. The total number and technology of NATO ballistic delivery systems remains fairly static after 1972 partly due to arms control treaties and U.S. policy. Thus the technology deployed in Duga-3 in the mid 1970s would remain viable up into the late 1980s, and even up to today if it continued to be funded. Over the horizon radars really provide detection for a small space of time between a missile's launch and acquisition by more conventional line of sight radars. That could only provide a few extra minutes of warning, which may be critical in a total war scenario. By the early 1980s the USSR were deploying a spaced based infra red tracking system for early warning of ICBM launches (Oko system). That meant the pressure to keep the Duga system at the cutting edge was lessened. It would serve more to verify data produced by the Oko system, which was notorious for false readings, and as a backup if the satellite system failed or was damaged. Still it's necessity was significantly lessened, and would be an extravagance in the post 1990 geopolitical environment. Given the complexities of the Russian-Ukraine relationship with the dissolution of the USSR, its not surprising that the facility was closed after 1989. Hope that gives you a sense of the site's significance. It is extremely cool to see it from the inside. I wish I could go and pick up a souvenir from that bygone era.

[@magmajctaz1405]

It's very likely been mentioned already, but I'll comment anyway so other won't have to search. The room with the metal ceiling, with the metal gaskets on the metal door is a Faraday shield. It prevents electromagnetic waves from leaving the room. Every electronic device produces radio waves. If you don't want an enemy to pick up these waves and interpret them, you need a Faraday shield or cage.

[@michaelparadigm7836]

Look at all these cool memory cores, I can't believe it's what they still used in 1980, and those punchcards are awesome :D

[@histopixelfilms6778]

The ruskies weren't known for up to date electronics......if it worked, don't touch it......even today their electronics is very old school and looks like western electronics out of the late 60's early 70's at best.

[@1337flite]

The floors are probably raised for cooling and cabling. Data centers often have raised floors for the same reason, and if they had a lot of electronic equipment, they would probably be addressing the same problems.

[@dusterdude238]

Hi! the reason that some of the floors were made that way, was because the computers back in the day could fill an entire room with individual units some the size of refrigerators, others the size of washing machines. there were alot of thick cables that ran from one Unit of the system to another. and all this wiring ran in these spaces, they were called Plenum floors. there were removable metal panels that went over these openings for Maintenance purposes. the really old computers (1940's- 50's) ran on Vacuum tubes that generated Alot of heat. so the space also served as Ducting that refrigerated air ran through, to cool all of the equipment. also the light from the tubes would attract Moths and other night flying insects, which would die by either the heat in the cabinets generated by the tubes, or electrocution, and if not cleaned out regularly, the piles of dead/ dying insects would short out circuits or cause some of the tubes to over heat and burn out. and there would be a system failure. thus the genesis of the programming term that "there is a bug in the system" these type of floors are still used today in modern server rooms / farms sad to see Vintage computer equipment just rusting and corroding away.

[@glmemory]

I used to respond with similarly timed continuous dots with my auto CW keyer at 1.5 KW, 4 element beam up at 100 ft.. My paltry efforts were probably useless at confusing anybody or anything at the sending end. One time I recorded their signals and sent them back at different individual freqs. I figured it was worth playing around with.

[@Noodleude]

I would have loves to see the control equipment and transmitter when it was operational. That would have been a thing of beauty! anyway,s I think those are raised floors used to route cables and wires from place to place. They used to use that sort of thing in computers from the 60s and still use those kind of floors in television stations and data-centers to manage all the cables. Thanks for the video!

[@0bamanation215]

the old stacks of wire mesh are magnetic memory modules. electrons pass through the wiring and through ferrite magnets. depending on the polarity, and when the field collapses, that gives you your 0 or 1.