# Forum General General Discussion  How do Russians and others normally switch between Latin and non-Latin keyboards?

## Hanna

I am just curious about how people in Russia and elsewhere normally handle this.   _I don't mean techie geeks who wor in the IT industry, like myself and several others here, who have parallel English and other keyboard layouts installed as part of Windows, and swap with a a keystroke. But regular, non technical people. _ 
I mean, if you have a standard Cyrillic keyboard and no other parallell keyboard installed, you still need to type URLs with Latin letters, or if you happen to need to go into the command prompt or write forumlas in Excel or something like that. How is it done?

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## xdns

Every keyboard in Russia already has Cyrillic and Latin letters on it.
Russian letters are often red, while Latin letters are grey. On black keyboards they are all white, and vice versa.
Latin letters are usually located in the upper left corner of buttons, and Russian - in the lower right corner. 
Russian version of Windows has Russian and English layouts by default, with Alt-Shift combo to switch between them (though many people prefer to change the shortcut to Ctrl-Shift). 
By the way, there is a little helpful program Punto Switcher, which many Russians are using.
It is trying to guess in which language you are typing (Russian or English), and switch keyboard layout on the fly.

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## zxc

> I am just curious about how people in Russia and elsewhere normally handle this.   _I don't mean techie geeks who wor in the IT industry, like myself and several others here, who have parallel English and other keyboard layouts installed as part of Windows, and swap with a a keystroke. But regular, non technical people. _ 
> I mean, if you have a standard Cyrillic keyboard and no other parallell keyboard installed, you still need to type URLs with Latin letters, or if you happen to need to go into the command prompt or write forumlas in Excel or something like that. How is it done?

 All of the keyboards that I saw when I was over there were standard QWERTY keyboards and the people used the same method you described above (ALT+SHIFT or clicking on the language bar) to switch between languages.  Not that this is the method of the majority or completely correct, but that's just what I witnessed. 
(Well, not necessarily your _standard_ QWERTY as you'd find in the UK or US.  Most of them had both Latin and Cyrillic characters printed on the keys.)

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## Hanna

Ah, ok. So there is no special trick, people just do it in the way that I am already familiar with.  
The reason I was wondering, is because switching input locale is considered *really* complicated by most people in Europe. I notice it here in Sweden for example, and also in the UK. I don't know HOW many times I've explained how to set this up to friends and family, for them to say "Omg, how complicated" etc, etc.  
So it hit me that it is necessary for everyone in Russia and I was wondering if there was any special trick.

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## Anixx

Formerly computers had a special key "РУС" so that the layout could be switched. They also had more alphabet keys so that it was possible to put the punctuation in Russian layout at the same places as in Latin layout. For example, this is a keyboard of Yamaha computer from the mid-80s (it was the first computer model I ever used):  
Unfortunately, in mid-1990s we saw dramatic spread of the American standard of computers, whose keyboard has no features to support languages other than English. So now we have to press two keys (usually Alt+Shift simultaniously) to switch the layout (or those who uses Linux can employ Caps Lock for that). These keys were never intended for layout switching. American keyboard standard also has smaller number of keys so that dot, comma, question sign and other punctuation are located in different places in Russian in English layouts. When entering Russian text we have to use Shift key to enter such usual character as comma. And we have no possibility to enter some characters such as {, [, ], }, <, >, #, @, & in Russian layout at all. This is very annoying if you have to enter a text with these characters: you have to switch the layout after each word. 
Possibly the fact that computers from 1980s (even imported) had better support for Russian language can be explained with stronger position of Soviet government that required all computers to be adapter for Russian well.

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## Eric C.

> Ah, ok. So there is no special trick, people just do it in the way that I am already familiar with.  
> The reason I was wondering, is because switching input locale is considered *really* complicated by most people in Europe. I notice it here in Sweden for example, and also in the UK. I don't know HOW many times I've explained how to set this up to friends and family, for them to say "Omg, how complicated" etc, etc.  
> So it hit me that it is necessary for everyone in Russia and I was wondering if there was any special trick.

 Are you familiar with any version of Windows (as far as I get it, you only mean this OS) that doesn't have its normal layout (English-US) already installed? I just can't see any problem about hitting alt-shift/ctrl-shift anytime you need to, really.

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## Hanna

Interesting explanation, thanks! Yes, I have noticed the *super awkward position of comma on the Russian keyboard*. That must be irritating absolutely everyone. Can't imagine who agreed that it should be placed there.  
I agree that the fact that English has so few letters and no accents or umlauts complicates! It's not quite as tricky in Swedish as in Russian, but we have 3 more letters than English, and need to use accents more. So  ; : and -  require pressing shift, and [ ] @ €  require pressing ctrl+alt too! I think the situation is similar for German and French too.   
Impressive that you used a Yamaha in the mid 1980s! Was it at home or for some other reason? 
I noticed that for the Yamaha they put the English letters at the same place as the equivalent sound in English. I.e. a completely different position than QWERTY. This isn't still done, is it?  When I first took up Russian, I read that there is actually an alternative Russian keyboard layout, which puts the Russian letters at positions that matches the English sounds, i.e. a kind of Russian QWERTY. But the book recommended against using this layout since it is unusual.  
I remember using a model in school, during the mid 80s. Unbelievably (as it seems today) it was manufactured in Sweden by a state owned company. It had a wider keyboard with more keys to acommodate all keys in a comfortable position, as well as Swedish words on the keys for delete and print screen etc.  The spec was probably super low, but it could be programmed in Pascal... Of course, local manufacturing of computers did not stand a chance against competition from globalisation, so it never took off but it made me interested in computers and learning more.

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## Throbert McGee

> Unfortunately, in mid-1990s we saw dramatic spread of the American standard of computers, whose keyboard has no features to support languages other than English.

 But the advantage of this, it seems to me, is that if you regularly type in MORE than three languages (such as English, Russian, and Hebrew), everything is done by software-switching. 
And even if you type in just two languages (such as Russian and English), using software-switching allows you to switch conventiently between a phonetic mapping (as Hanna noted on the Yamaha keyboard) and the "standard" layout. (For instance, English speakers learning Russian with the intent of studying/working in Russia should really try to become accustomed to the "йцуке" layout, and Russians learning English should get used to the QWERTY layout. But in both cases, using a phonetically-mapped keyboard can be much easier at first!) 
By the way, is there a common name for the standard Russian arrangement, analogous to QWERTY? I always mentally think of it as the "ФЫВА layout" -- because when I learned touch-typing in English as a kid, the teacher drilled it into my head to think of ASDF as the "home keys" for the left hand.

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## Dmitry Khomichuk

It is called ЙЦУКЕН as QWERTY by the first 6 letters

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## Seraph

ЙЦУКЕН — Википедия

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## Hanna

I think what we are saying is that it wouldn't hurt with a few more keys on a standard keyboard. I am sure they could find something useful to do with the extra keys for English speaking users, and it would massively improve the situation for speakers of many European languages, particularly Russian.   
Pretty cool huh:

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## Anixx

> Impressive that you used a Yamaha in the mid 1980s! Was it at home or for some other reason?

 Yamaha was the most widespread personal computer in the USSR in the mid-80s. It was everywhere: in the schools, in youth creativity centers, in young pioneer houses etc. I think you could not buy it for home at the time or it was too expensive (like a half of a car). There were less expensive Soviet-made computers for home use which were more affordable. 
I started programming at 8 years (2nd grade) at a programming group at creativity center. The group was free as anything in the USSR. Besides Yamahas there were also Toshibas there, and other groups were equipped with Soviet computers. My school was also equipped with Yamahas but the informatics subject only started from 6th grade (although as the teacher was informed that I attended a group, she allowed me to program and play games after lessons).    

> I noticed that for the Yamaha they put the English letters at the same place as the equivalent sound in English. I.e. a completely different position than QWERTY. This isn't still done, is it?  When I first took up Russian, I read that there is actually an alternative Russian keyboard layout, which puts the Russian letters at positions that matches the English sounds, i.e. a kind of Russian QWERTY. But the book recommended against using this layout since it is unusual.

 It was a Soviet standard. All computers, both imported and domestically produced were required to follow it. 
The IBM PC-compatible computers that emerged in mid-1990s did not respect any Soviet standards.

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## Anixx

> But the advantage of this, it seems to me, is that if you regularly type in MORE than three languages (such as English, Russian, and Hebrew), everything is done by software-switching.

 The switching is ALWAYS software. On Yamaha, on Soviet computers the switching mechanism was software based. It is just that the keyboard had special keys for switching layout and more alphabetic keys. Now the US standard considers that switching is not necessary. You have keys for scroll lock, for context menu, for main menu, for sleep and wake up etc etc - but not for layout switching.

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## Anixx

> I think what we are saying is that it wouldn't hurt with a few more keys on a standard keyboard. I am sure they could find something useful to do with the extra keys for English speaking users, and it would massively improve the situation for speakers of many European languages, particularly Russian.

 In Kazakhstan, for example, they even have to place letters on the numeric keyboard because all cannot fit on the main keyboard.

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## Doomer

> Now the US standard considers that switching is not necessary. You have keys for scroll lock, for context menu, for main menu, for sleep and wake up etc etc - but not for layout switching.

 Is there other language beside American  ::   ::

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## Hanna

> The switching is ALWAYS software. On Yamaha, on Soviet computers the switching mechanism was software based. It is just that the keyboard had special keys for switching layout and more alphabetic keys. Now the US standard considers that switching is not necessary. You have keys for scroll lock, for context menu, for main menu, for sleep and wake up etc etc - but not for layout switching.

 It sounds like the sort of thing to start an online petition for! Imagine how many people would sign up. Just for them to add one or two more vertical lines of keys to the standard keyboard. For things like language switching and a few extra letters that have to be hidden away and can only be reached with irritating key combinationa.  
I mean, it is certainly in the interest of most people in Europe, everyone in the ex USSR area, and probably Asians too! 
Unbelievable with the Kazakh letters on the numpad!!! Some keyboards don't even have a numpad, so I wonder what they do then....... Like on an Ipad or something...   
The placement of* ё* on the Russian is weird too, I had practically never had any reason to use that button when typing on an British keyboard, it's hard to use when touch typing. Can't even recall what's on it, but nothing you use regularly. I guess most Russians don't use it, but use *e* instead. But I use it.  
For some strange reason the American and British keyboards are different, and that is another frustration. On an unfamilar PC you don't realise you are in American mode until you try to get a non alphabetic character, many of which are in a different location than on the British keyboard. I once worked for a company where the keyboard was automatically reset to American English with nothing else available, every time you rebooted.... It drove people mental. 
I was fascinated by the "Dvorak" English keyboard and tried to learn typing on it a few years ago. But it was too hard and I gave up. The idea is that they placed the keys in the most logical and convenient position for minimum hand movement when typing. It is more comforatable and you can supposedly type faster. But it was too hard to re-learn the positions! 
I DID memorise the position of all Russian keys though, since I wanted to be able to type Russian on any keyboard without messing around with stickers. So I can kind of touch type in Russian....... 
It just sounds like quite a lot to ask from Russian pensioners and other computer users who are not familiar with English OR computers... that they should switch languages, etc... When people like my sister who is trilingual and well educated finds it confusing and challenging. She just wrote me a letter where all the Swedish letters were substituted with the closest looking English letter. It's an absolute pain in the neck to read, and I have showed her many times how to get Swedish letters on an English PC - but it's too hard apparently.    

> Yamaha was the most widespread personal computer in  the USSR in the mid-80s. It was everywhere: in the schools, in youth  creativity centers, in young pioneer houses etc. I think you could not  buy it for home at the time or it was too expensive (like a half of a  car). There were less expensive Soviet-made computers for home use which  were more affordable. 
> I started programming at 8 years (2nd grade) at a programming group at  creativity center. The group was free as anything in the USSR. Besides  Yamahas there were also Toshibas there, and other groups were equipped  with Soviet computers. My school was also equipped with Yamahas but the  informatics subject only started from 6th grade (although as the teacher  was informed that I attended a group, she allowed me to program and  play games after lessons).  
> It was a Soviet standard. All computers, both imported and domestically produced were required to follow it. 
> The IBM PC-compatible computers that emerged in mid-1990s did not respect any Soviet standards.

 Very interesting to read! Do you work in the IT industry today? You sure started very early for someone who went to school in the 80s! The Soviet youth programs are very impressive and I hope much it has survived! I did not know that you had Japanese computers back then, but I remember speaking with a Bulgarian guy who told me that Bulgaria supplied computers to much of Eastern Europe - this guy was an IT GENIUS. I was dating him, and sadly was not much attracted to him, but he had a brain to kill for. Back then, I visited Leningrad and since shops were not computerised in any form at all, I got the impression that the USSR was behind in computing. Perhaps only in places like shops though, not in universities, military etc.

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## Shady_arc

> It just sounds like quite a lot to ask from Russian pensioners and other computer users who are not familiar with English OR computers...

 Guess the situation lacks symmetry. First, Russian symbols, though look similar to Latin alphabet and are partially based on it, differ from English for the most part. You may use transliteration, of course, but to type in Russian you must use a Russian layout.
Second, people in UK/US/CA/AU/EU/wherever may not bother lerning cyrillic writing, but people in Russia can and will write and read Latin characters. If someone had't got foreign laguage lessons in early elementary school, they are going to learn it all anyway in math classes, like in 4th grade. Yeah, we don't name variables and X's in cyrillic.
Foreign words and Latin characters are used everywhere, even just for the cool look of it, so you may very well say there little if any users in Russia who are not familiar with characters other than cyrillic. Even past the age of retirement. Hell, the MP3player I got wo weeks ago is by EXPLAY, and as I have come to know, that's actually a Russian company.

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## Valda

> Formerly computers had a special key "РУС" so that the layout could be switched. They also had more alphabet keys so that it was possible to put the punctuation in Russian layout at the same places as in Latin layout. For example, this is a keyboard of Yamaha computer from the mid-80s (it was the first computer model I ever used):  
> Unfortunately, in mid-1990s we saw dramatic spread of the American standard of computers, whose keyboard has no features to support languages other than English. So now we have to press two keys (usually Alt+Shift simultaniously) to switch the layout (or those who uses Linux can employ Caps Lock for that). These keys were never intended for layout switching. American keyboard standard also has smaller number of keys so that dot, comma, question sign and other punctuation are located in different places in Russian in English layouts. When entering Russian text we have to use Shift key to enter such usual character as comma. And we have no possibility to enter some characters such as {, [, ], }, #, @, & in Russian layout at all. This is very annoying if you have to enter a text with these characters: you have to switch the layout after each word. 
> Possibly the fact that computers from 1980s (even imported) had better support for Russian language can be explained with stronger position of Soviet government that required all computers to be adapter for Russian well.

 У меня есть Иврит, Английский и Русский.  Так моя клавиатура выглядит как.   
It's a hassle switching 3 languages! I wish I had a button for each...

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## Anixx

> I did not know that you had Japanese computers back then, but I remember speaking with a Bulgarian guy who told me that Bulgaria supplied computers to much of Eastern Europe - this guy was an IT GENIUS.

 I think the MSX standard to which the Japanese computers belonged was the most widespread in the world those days except the United States, as says Wikipedia. MSX - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
One more feature I remember from their experience was that you could move through the text diagonally by pressing two arrow keys at once - very comfortable! In IBM PC - compatible computers you cannot! 
I never seen any Bulgarian computer, although, Soviet-made computers were seen quite often. I also seen some East-German equipment such as Robotron printers and drives.
My first home computer was БК-0010-01 which at the time costed 600 rubles: 
Im my case the case was gray: 
Although it was not compatible with MSX and had a different architecture, it was heavily influenced by Yamahas in that its imbeeded Basic dialect was a truncated variant of that on the MSX computers. You can also see the two buttons for switching layouts here  ::

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## Hanna

> У меня есть Иврит, Английский и Русский.  Так моя клавиатура выглядит как. 
> It's a hassle switching 3 languages! I wish I had a button for each...

 Wow, you are running 3 alphabets simultaneously!!! I can't imagine anyone here beats that!     

> You can also see the two buttons for switching layouts here

 Listen and learn, keyboard vendors... 
Very interesting to hear about your experiences of computers in the 1980s! I love to hear stories about people using IT equipment back in those days. My current manager was one of the first female programmers in Sweden, and her stories are very fascinating.  
I have never seen a Russian made computer in real life, but I remember the name Robotron. They definitely made TVs and casette players too! (One has to wonder how a company like that stood up to competition after the German reunification... Their products were not cool, but they were functional and cheap. But I certainly have not heard of them in modern times, so I guess the company went bust, or was bought for about 1 penny.....) 
The first computer I saw was one my dad got from his work, to use at home. I think it was around 1982 and it was an Apple. Later in the 80s I saw a hobby computer that my cousin built from parts off a catalogue. It could be connected to the TV to play computer games off a casette tape!  
In the UK all computer geeks over 40 get nostalgic at the thought of BBC Micro and Altair computers. They had to be assembled by the user.

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## Anixx

> Wow, you are running 3 alphabets simultaneously!!! I can't imagine anyone here beats that!

 I think most people in Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Kyrgizstan etc do the same.   

> My current manager was one of the first female programmers in Sweden, and her stories are very fascinating.

 My mother was a programmer.

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## E-learner

> I have never seen a Russian made computer in real life, but I remember the name Robotron.

 It was not Russian.
An example of a Soviet computer would be Искра 226. It was the first computer I worked with.

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## Hanna

Wow, I am in awe by you guys! Did not know that IT was such a common profession here. 
I was taught programming by people like you, but in England. I always admired those who worked in computing back when it needed serious brains... I got in just when object oriented programming kicked off, meaning you did not have to be seriously clever to be a programmer anymore. The senior guys called it "Donald Duck programming" because it was so simple, according to them. I never got very good at C++ even though I gave it a shot, just to show myself I had the brains..  
Anixx, wouldn't mind taking your mother to lunch if I am ever in Moscow! Hope she is healthy and well in retirement. I would probably find her career endlessly fascinating, particularly in light of her being a woman.  
I did not know that computing was so accessible to regular people in the USSR. Some aspects of USSR life seemed a little bit old fashioned, and there was lots of talk about how cool products that people wanted, sometimes were not available in the socialist countries. So I guess I just assumed that people did not have computers, at least not at home. Sounds like I was wrong about that. It's very cool to think that the Eastern European computer industry made the computer parts from scratch, rather than importing from Taiwan, Korea, Japan etc. Too bad they did not continue with that. It is a bit creepy that in Europe (and America) we are no longer able to put together a computer from scratch. We are 100% dependant on parts that only Asian countries have the know-how to assemble.

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## Anixx

> Anixx, wouldn't mind taking your mother to lunch if I am ever in Moscow! Hope she is healthy and well in retirement. I would probably find her career endlessly fascinating, particularly in light of her being a woman.

 She is dead unfortunately.  
She was a physicist and teacher by education, she worked in school, and then with low-temperature physics but eventually she was invited to work in programming as early as the Ulal computer Ural (computer) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia because at the time it was considered a job for physicists. She later programmed in Assembler and PL/I for mainframes. 
She worked on a secret job and had no right to tell what she was doing. I only know that it was somehow connected with real-time space communication. Once she wrote a driver for plotter in assembler and we had at home a stack of papers lined for "Preference" cards game (they were plotted by a test program). 
We had a lot of punch cards at home and printed machine outputs. I also remember large paper lists (definitely larger than A2) with multiple blocks interconnected with each other with arrows like in Visio diagrams. They were labelled "stack of punch cards", "magnet drum", "remote console" etc. She drew these diagrams with special stencil. She also had a cheat sheet she made herself for deciphering punch cards. 
When she lost her work in 1991 we made a good fire of the punch cards near our home.

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## Anixx

> I did not know that computing was so accessible to regular people in the USSR. Some aspects of USSR life seemed a little bit old fashioned, and there was lots of talk about how cool products that people wanted, sometimes were not available in the socialist countries. So I guess I just assumed that people did not have computers, at least not at home. Sounds like I was wrong about that. It's very cool to think that the Eastern European computer industry made the computer parts from scratch, rather than importing from Taiwan, Korea, Japan etc. Too bad they did not continue with that. It is a bit creepy that in Europe (and America) we are no longer able to put together a computer from scratch. We are 100% dependant on parts that only Asian countries have the know-how to assemble.

 Most of Soviet computers after Brezhnev were copies of Western analogs at least by architecture. Brezhnev is often criticized for the decision to copy rather than develop ourselves. Before that the USSR made computers of its own architecture. Some people even called the politburo meeting where this decision was taken a disaster.

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## Valda

> I think most people in Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Kyrgizstan etc do the same.

 
Да, двуязычие не редкому явления в наши дни. На израиле, практически все люди из советских корней знают три языки. Круто, да?  ::

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## bitpicker

If I remember correctly (being a Linux user myself) a standard Windows installation in Germany will only have the German layout. That means that y and z are swapped in comparison to English and most of the symbols for interpunction are distributed differently. You can easily write English with it, so there is no need to have an English layout installed.

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## Anixx

> Да, двуязычие не редкому явления в наши дни. На израиле, практически все люди из советских корней знают три языки. Круто, да?

 _Да, двуязычие - не редкое явление в наши дни. В Израиле практически все люди с советскими корнями знают три языка. Круто, да?_ 
Sorry, but do you write without cases?

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## Valda

I think you write without cases
Negative is genitive hence 
редкое явление -> редкому явления  
I did make a mistake in языка, but conjugated из according to its case. Whether it was correct to use из instead of с is another matter, but I did use the appropriate case for из.  
So to conclude, I used
Genitive, prepositional and genitive again. No, I don't write without cases.

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## Anixx

Valda, you do not need genitive here, only nominative. And Genitive of "редкое явление" is "редкого явления". "Редкому" is Dative.
So you put "двуязычие" in Nominative, "редкое" in Dative and "явление" in Genitive, while all the three words should be in one case, Nominative. 
"люди из советских корней" - the meaning of what you said is as if the people were made of Soviet plants' roots. 
The idiom actually means the the people HAVE Soviet roots as a tree can have roots (which still bound them to their birthplace), not that they are MADE of Soviet roots. 
Even in English you say "people WITH Soviet roots", not "people MADE FROM Soviet roots".

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## Valda

> Valda, you do not need genitive here, only nominative. And Genitive of "редкое явление" is "редкого явления". "Редкому" is Dative.
> So you put "двуязычие" in Nominative, "редкое" in Dative and "явление" in Genitive, while all the three words should be in one case, Nominative.

 I accidentally looked at the Dative line in the dictionary for редкое and явление - You're right.  Though I don't understand why you claim it's nominative where there is clear negation here. Negation is genitive.   

> "люди из советских корней" - the meaning of what you said is as if the people were made of Soviet plants' roots.

 And I completely stand by it. They are really hardy people! Ever tried to arm wrestle one? I swear it's like they're made of roots! Can't bend them... 
Fine. I made a mistake here. Will use "с" next time.

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## Anixx

> Negation is genitive.

 Who said you so? 
Take English for example: "Bilinguism is not a rare thing". Where do you see "of" here? There is no meaning here that could be conveyed as Genitive. It is a simple statement "A is B".

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## Valda

Russian/Grammar/Genitive case - Wikibooks, open books for an open world   

> The genitive case has four main uses: to denote possession ('Michael's car', 'the car of Michael'), to denote number ('five apples'), *in negative constructions ('there are no books')*, and after several important prepositions ('without me').

 "There are no books"
"This is not a rare phenomenon"  
What's the difference?

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## Hanna

> Most of Soviet computers after Brezhnev were copies of Western analogs at least by architecture. Brezhnev is often criticized for the decision to copy rather than develop ourselves. Before that the USSR made computers of its own architecture. Some people even called the politburo meeting where this decision was taken a disaster.

 Yes, something went wrong in the USSR - invention stopped and things stagnated. Somehow people lost the spark to really drive things forward. I think it is tragic and I wish I understood what happened. For what it is worth I do not consider the capitalist system to be one ounce better.  
URAL computer looks very cool!! Steampunk, LOL.  _
Wiki says  "The computer was widely used in the 1960s, mainly in the socialist countries, though some were also exported to Western Europe and Latin America."_ 
Look, this is the computer that Anixx mum worked with:   
Gosh I wonder what they used it for! Gives us some perspective on our laptops for sure!

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## Seraph

Vacuum tubes? It was used to keep the room warm!  Looks like several kilowatts.

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## Anixx

> Yes, something went wrong in the USSR - invention stopped and things stagnated. Somehow people lost the spark to really drive things forward. I think it is tragic and I wish I understood what happened. For what it is worth I do not consider the capitalist system to be one ounce better.  
> URAL computer looks very cool!! Steampunk, LOL.  _
> Wiki says  "The computer was widely used in the 1960s, mainly in the socialist countries, though some were also exported to Western Europe and Latin America."_ 
> Look, this is the computer that Anixx mum worked with:

 And later she worked at BESM-6:   
And then with something like this:

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## Throbert McGee

> Yes, *something* went wrong in the USSR - invention stopped and things stagnated.

 Yes, and what a baffling mystery! 
Are you totally unaware of the beneficial effects seen under Lenin's "New Economic Policy" -- when private entrepreneurship (on a small scale) was temporarily "unbanned", in violation of orthodox Marxist thought? Are you equally unaware of what happened when Stalin ended the NEP and ushered in the "Five Year Plans"? 
Or do you just stubbornly refuse to draw any lessons from these historical observation, lest you be forced to admit that, maybe, Communism is more than an ounce worse than Capitalism? I mean, it's one thing to admire Soviet technical proficiency, and to correct Westerners who underestimate Soviet science. But it's another thing to totally shut your eyes to -- for example -- what a total f**king backwards embarrassment the Soviet agricultural sector was, for most or all of the USSR's history. 
Yet when one breezily says "The capitalist system is not one ounce better," you ARE shutting your eyes to the degrading effects that communist theories had on various sectors of the Soviet economy. 
(At some point, this pretense of being "unbiased" and "not buying into US propaganda" crosses from intelligent historical skepticism into *пошлость* -- or at least, Nabokov once said this, and I agree with his point.)

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## Throbert McGee

> We are 100% dependant on parts that only Asian countries have the know-how to assemble.

 AFAIK, it's not a question of "know-how," really -- it has more to do with (a) labor costs, and (b) "exporting" high-pollution manufacturing processes abroad. 
In fact, (b) is especially important, because making computer components is VERY FAR from "Green". (For the same reason, we eco-conscious Westerners buy compact-fluorescent bulbs and LED bulbs that are _made in China_ -- these technologies may save a lot of electricity here, but they're quite "dirty" to manufacture. However, it has nothing to do with lacking "know how" to produce these items in our own countries.)

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## Throbert McGee

P.S. The photos of vintage computers reminded me of this classic one-liner:  *Наши советские микрокомпьютеры самые большие в мире, и советские часы - самые быстрые!* _Our Soviet microcomputers are the largest in the world, and Soviet watches are the fastest!_ 
[A "boast" that has been apocryphally attributed to Brezhnev and others, though I don't think there's any evidence of any Soviet leader ever saying it!  ::  ]

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## Throbert McGee

> Now the US standard considers that switching is not necessary.

 Aha, now I see your point. Yes, you're right -- it would be better to have a "dedicated" key built into the keyboard for alphabet-switching. 
I've become aware of that this afternoon while trying to use a "public Internet computer" at the library, because of laptop problems. The PCs are set up for Alt-Shift switching; however, the "language bar" has been enabled for dozens and dozens of different world languages, which are arranged alphabetically in the language bar. 
So when I instinctively try to "Alt-Shift" for Cyrillic, it goes instead to _Arabic_; then to _Armenian_; then to the _Bengali_ version of the Hindi alphabet; then _Bosnian_ Cyrillic; then _Chinese_ (simplified); etc., etc. Of course, _Russian_ Cyrillic is about three-quarters of the way down the alphabetized list, so there's no point in actually trying to Alt-Shift (I tried once, but hit Alt-Shift one too many times, which took me past _Russian_ to _Spanish_, and there's no way to move backward in the list!)  
But the single most annoying part is that the library computers have not been set up for a simple switch BACK to US-English layout -- so toggling between Russian Cyrillic and US Roman is a huge hassle, and I've resorted to using a "virtual online keyboard." (I know I could set up some sort of Ctrl key combination to do the Russian/English toggling, if I cared to.)

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## Anixx

> P.S. The photos of vintage computers reminded me of this classic one-liner:  *Наши советские микрокомпьютеры самые большие в мире, и советские часы - самые быстрые!* _Our Soviet microcomputers are the largest in the world, and Soviet watches are the fastest!_ 
> [A "boast" that has been apocryphally attributed to Brezhnev and others, though I don't think there's any evidence of any Soviet leader ever saying it!  ]

 Well I cannot compare Ural or BESM to the foreign analogs, but given they were exported worldwide, they were not that bad. The ЕС ЭВМ was a copy of an IBM-produced prototype so it was not larger nor smaller than IBM-produced analogs. 
You can also consider a Soviet "pocket-pc" Elektronika MK-90/92/96.    
It had a 16-bit processor, graphical display and embeeded BASIC interpreter. 
You could also attach it to a dock station and connect to an external display and printer.  
Of course this thing was much more expensive than the БК-0010 which had a similar processor and amount of memory.

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## Anixx

> Yes, and what a baffling mystery!
> Are you totally unaware of the beneficial effects seen under Lenin's "New Economic Policy" -- when private entrepreneurship (on a small scale) was temporarily "unbanned", in violation of orthodox Marxist thought? Are you equally unaware of what happened when Stalin ended the NEP and ushered in the "Five Year Plans"?

 Well in that case you should also account what happened in 1990s in Russia after transition to Capitalism.
Demographics and natural population growth: 
Industrial production:  
(1-Russia, 2-Kaliningrad oblast)
This happened not only in Russia. For comparison, population of Estonia: 
Population of Latvia: 
Population of Ukraine:  
Tuberculosis rate in Russia:

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## maxmixiv

Okay, record me as old programmer too.
My first computer (I bought it for big money): Электроника МК-61 — Википедия 
and  the second (it was in university, I was allowed for 2 hours per week): Искра-1256 — Википедия

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## bitpicker

> Russian/Grammar/Genitive case - Wikibooks, open books for an open world   
> "There are no books"
> "This is not a rare phenomenon"  
> What's the difference?

 Oh, but these are English!  
You wrote "двуязычие не редкого явления" (never mind that you originally used the dative ending). The correction was "двуязычие - не редкое явление". 
In this expression you say "A is not (does not equal) B". Such expressions use "не" in Russian, and both A and B are in nominative case. This is your "This is not a rare phenomenon". 
In "There are no books" you make no comparison, but you deny the existence or presence of books. Russian does this with нет and genitive: нет книг. In Russian you use negation and genitive to express that something is not there or that something is not being done or hasn't been done: что ты делал? (Я делал) ничего особенного. But for A is not B you simply use nominative.  
Furthermore you should note the dash in the correction which is used in Russian where a form of "быть" (which used to exist but no longer does) is dropped. To make matters worse, as soon as you do use a form of быть B turns instrumental: он - (не) хороший учитель : он (не) был хорош*им* учител*ем*.  
Only if you say that there is or was no good teacher in general, genitive enters the picture: нет хорошего учителя : не было хорошего учителя. Note было, it was, the verb does not agree grammatically to the noun phrase which follows, as it would in some other languages (frex German), but to a non-disclosed neutral grammatical subject. 
Disclaimer: while I am pretty sure this is correct I am no native speaker of Russian or English.  ::  
Disclaimer disclaimer: As no cries of outrage have been heard yet and I did receive a reputation comment on this by Lampada this post seems to be not too far off the mark.

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## Anixx

> Okay, record me as old programmer too.
> My first computer (I bought it for big money): Электроника МК-61 — Википедия

 Well MK-61 is definitely not a computer.

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## Anixx

> To make matters worse, as soon as you do use a form of быть B turns instrumental: он - (не) хороший учитель : он (не) был хорошим учителем.

 This is because you use past. If you use present "Он не есть хороший учитель" you use nominative.

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## Hanna

I am not in the mood to argue ideology or world politics with Throbert McGee this beautiful morning, as I am off to pick mushrooms! 
Not that it is anyones concern, but I am not some starry-eyed communist who thinks that the USSR was a fantastic worker's state etc, etc. Additionally I have been Christian all my life which means I have a certain natural reservation against it. But this said, I do think that the USSR is far too harshly judged in Western countries and that it had a lot of very good sides. It went through phases and was not a static entity, so the situation varied. And anyway, who are we to cast stones, eh? Particularly, IMHO, Americans!  
Primarily I think that it is for the Russians and others from the ex USSR area to judge or praise this experiment which took place in their country. Particularly those who have their own memories of this time.  
My only response to your comment would be that surely it is much more relevant to hear what the "eyewitnesses" have to say, rather than regurgitate 25 year old propaganda from the other side of the planet...! And I personally suspect the fluent English speaking Russians here are more pro-West than the majority of Russians, so what people are saying here is probably fairly nuanced. Why don't you ask questions instead of telling the rest of us what the answers are?    

> AFAIK, it's not a question of "know-how,"  really -- it has more to do with (a) labor costs, and (b) "exporting"  high-pollution manufacturing processes abroad.

 Because , God forbid, you would not want to have production of essential equipment in your own country and actually create jobs that generate tangible value. Right? Let the Chinese have all that, as long as the American shareholders and banks get their profits.  
Anyway, according to an article I read a couple of years ago, this IS a problem. It is an extremely specialised industry. Setting up factories for this, is an enormous investment in time/money. Staffing them is a massive challenge because it is such a specialised skill. At this point, you'd have to initially bring people in from Asia if you wanted somebody with hands-on and contemporary experience of commercial production. A sort of reversed corporate expat situation. Additionally, the rare earth elements needed for producing computer components are commercially mined only in China. China is exercising increasingly tight control on trade with them.  
In a situation where the dollar lost a lot of value, or the USA had a big falling out with East Asia, you literally would not be able to get hold of new computers. Or more precisely, certain _essential_ computer parts. Without computers, your country would essentially stop working. Obviously the situation is the same in Europe. Whereas China nowadays, no matter what happens, can build a computer from scratch even if its currency lost all its value (which seems unlikely anyway).   622px-153056995_5ef8b01016_o.jpg  PS - For the record - *Bitpicker* is a programmer too! And *Crocodile*!

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## Marcus

> Yes, and what a baffling mystery! 
> Are you totally unaware of the beneficial effects seen under Lenin's "New Economic Policy" -- when private entrepreneurship (on a small scale) was temporarily "unbanned", in violation of orthodox Marxist thought? Are you equally unaware of what happened when Stalin ended the NEP and ushered in the "Five Year Plans"? 
> Or do you just stubbornly refuse to draw any lessons from these historical observation, lest you be forced to admit that, maybe, Communism is more than an ounce worse than Capitalism? I mean, it's one thing to admire Soviet technical proficiency, and to correct Westerners who underestimate Soviet science. But it's another thing to totally shut your eyes to -- for example -- what a total f**king backwards embarrassment the Soviet agricultural sector was, for most or all of the USSR's history. 
> Yet when one breezily says "The capitalist system is not one ounce better," you ARE shutting your eyes to the degrading effects that communist theories had on various sectors of the Soviet economy. 
> (At some point, this pretense of being "unbiased" and "not buying into US propaganda" crosses from intelligent historical skepticism into *пошлость* -- or at least, Nabokov once said this, and I agree with his point.)

 Че-то после прихода капитализма в Россию сельское хозяйство в ней не выросло, как впрочем и многие другие сферы экономики. А то, что морю стран с правом частной собственности и предпринимательства до советского уровня развития как до Луны, не учитывается?

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## bitpicker

> PS - For the record - *Bitpicker* is a programmer too! And *Crocodile*!

 Nah, I'm more of an IT-jack-of-all-trades-but-programming.  ::  
Can script bash or perl with the help of tutorials, but that's it.

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## Hanna

_Sorry Robin, I really thought you were - must have remembered wrongly!_  *@Anixx -* I am completely speechless by those graphs. I really would not have thought it was like that. I thought that the USSR was running poorly quite poorly during the last years, of its existance, and that perestroika was an attempt at fixing that, which went out of hand, so to speak.  But these graphs at least, appear to show that problems started either at the start of glasnost, or in 1992. Either way, whatever came after looks grimmer, sort of "the cure is worse than the illness".   
The Estonia / Latvia graphs must be partly down to migration of Russians. But not the one from Ukraine though, which was the more obvious one. The TB curve was terrible. I thought there was vaccination against that. And production. Surely producing *something* even if it is not the latest fashion/greatest quality, or whatever the problem with Soviet production was... must be better than just closing down the factories.   *@Throbert, regarding Eastern European agriculture:* Sure, you can do it a lot more efficiently than they did. But at the price of losing hundreds of thousands of jobs, in the case of the USSR. Perhaps they did not want that, or saw a strong need? After all, there WAS food for everyone - surely that is the ultimate goal of agriculture?  
The agriculture/food industry you have in the USA is using GM crops, is ruthlessly exploiting third world farmers (which the USSR never did), while shamelessly subsidising your own farmers. It is creating a ridiculous superflux which means people are stuffing themselves with twice as much food as they need, and unhealthy food as that. It is making Americans fatter and unhealthier than any other industrial nation. I wouldn't hold up that type of system as an ideal. 
Iit is not feasible for all countries to have this type of agriculture/food industry anyway. Only a small minority of countries can, since the exploiting nations need to have poorer, less successful countries to exploit... And keep them that way. If cheap imports stop, the system fails. And while I am pointing out the USA as the most extreme example of this, the same trend exists in Western Europe, although not quite as glaringly obvious.  
The Eastern European system allowed them to keep people employed, doing something useful, feeding everybody and only importing foods that they genuinely could not grow themselves for climate reasons. I consider that as an achievement, even though technologically there was probably room for improvement.

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## maxmixiv

> Well MK-61 is definitely not a computer.

 Why not? I had learnt main programming construct with it. Conditional jumps, loops, indirect addressing...

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## Юрка

> Every keyboard in Russia already has Cyrillic and Latin letters on it.

 Помню случай. Лет 8 назад главный босс нашей компании дал распоряжение купить подарок для американского партнёра. Навороченный и крутой ноутбук. Купили, а там обычные клавиши (русско-латинские). А зачем американцу русские буковки? Пришлось отдельно заказывать клавиши с одной латиницей и втыкать их в ноутбук.

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## it-ogo

> Помню случай. Лет 8 назад главный босс нашей компании дал распоряжение купить подарок для американского партнёра. Навороченный и крутой ноутбук. Купили, а там обычные клавиши (русско-латинские). А зачем американцу русские буковки? Пришлось отдельно заказывать клавиши с одной латиницей и втыкать их в ноутбук.

 Ну и зря. Сувенир, экзотика. Мог бы потом перед коллегами хвастаться, что русский знает - вон даже ноут с кракозябрами.

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## Юрка

> Ну и зря. Сувенир, экзотика. Мог бы потом перед коллегами хвастаться, что русский знает - вон даже ноут с кракозябрами.

 Может быть, но наш босс очень осторожный и не креативный. Его конёк - это нужные связи и отношения, а не креатив.

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## car

> am completely speechless by those graphs. I really would not have thought it was like that. I thought that the USSR was running poorly quite poorly during the last years, of its existance, and that perestroika was an attempt at fixing that, which went out of hand, so to speak.

 This is because of the so called "shock therapy" promoted by American economists which were councillors on free market at the time, which promised that a fast and a sudden transition to capitalism ("shock") would cure Russia. They listened them and everythign only got worse. I think if they'd stick to a more gradual transition, then we wouldn't have the present situation. Now try not to think about some kind of American Anti-Russian conspiracy to ruin our country that was involved in that shock therapy advice we naively followed.

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## Hanna

Well I agree with you car - your country was sold out unfortunately. Why it happened, how and who was behind it, I couldn't say. Definitely it would have been less likely to happen if the country had been better run. But what happened at the demise of the USSR was surely daylight robbery and not in the interest of the majority of decent people. At least things are much better now. But with the death of the USSR an inspiring ideal was shattered, a people robbed not to mention all the ethnic troubles that the USSR kept the lid on, which exploded afterwards. I can't even imagine the confusing feelings and frustration I would have, had something similar happened to my country.  
On the USA conspiracy angle -- well I am not big on conspiracy theories and at the end of the day, a country is responsible for its own fate. But it is not even a secret that the CIA has a big section for propaganda, agitation and psy-ops and it is 100% certain that the USSR was the main target for any capabilities they had in that area. If there was anything they could do to damage the USSR and further their own financial interests they did it - how much damage that really did, I wouldn't know. 
My degree is actually in Political Science and from that perspective I find the experiences of the ex USSR area in the 90s until now very fascinating, but like I said, tragic too... I am glad that things are are looking brighter and people are better off.

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