Soviet computer industry

Few tidbits from a presentation by Alexander Galitsky that I wanted to write down:

1. The Soviet industry was pretty advanced, but most of it was for space and defence. If you are building a computer for a space station, you don't need to mass-produce a chip: just a few good ones will do. Radiation-hardening is important though.
2. In later stages they mostly used reference designs available from the libraries, although some people present still believed they copied chips layer-by-layer.
3. Initially there was a lot of original research, but then there was a decision to just copy IBM. "No one gets fired for buying IBM" worked in Soviet Union too! (Only s/buying/stealing/)
4. They copied chip designs because they didn't want to invest in software! I thought the hardware was the bottleneck, but apparently no.
5. The language of choice of the Soviet space and defense indsutry was Modula-2.
6. In 1980s some portion of Soviet defense network standardized on Unix and TCP/IP.

Don Knuth asked two questions; the second one was about mass storage.