Oh, I visited it in 2015. There were some very odd-looking huge boards with pins inserted into them that I assumed were ROMs. Also panels that were clearly intended to display some part of the state of the CPU. Here's some pictures I took:

https://sun9-70.userapi.com/impf/c621621/v621621231/20f0d/vL...

https://sun9-67.userapi.com/impf/c621621/v621621231/20f5d/i8...

https://sun9-28.userapi.com/impf/c621621/v621621231/20f53/cf...

edit: these ROM "cassettes" appear in the video at around 12:40

That's a strange machine. It's too bad so little is known about how it attached to the rest of the radar system. It's clearly a special purpose machine, one with manually programmed ROMs, built to do a very specific task. But what? Did it beam-steer the radar? Process the returns? The special-purpose I/O gear that must have been present is gone. The console is clearly just a programming and debug console, not something for seeing what the radar was seeing.

The US's main over the horizon radar of that era was Cobra Mist.[1] It never really worked well. Too much interference, supposedly. Trying to bounce radar off the ionosphere is inherently iffy. The US instead deployed line of sight radar chains, such as BMEWS. This required sites strung across northern Canada, but worked.

More modern over the horizon radars do work, but have much more compute power behind them.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobra_Mist

You used to be able to easily visit the Duga Radar, legally, via one of the many tour companies that offered Chernobyl tours. Back in 2018 I visited myself, I believe with this company, as part of a conference: https://chernobyl-tour.com/tours_to_the_chernobyl-2_duga-1_e... At least then Chernobyl had been turned into quite the tourist destination with enough tours running that there even was a giftshop at the main checkpoint.

Unfortunately due to the proximity to the Russian/Belarus borders the whole area is closed right now due to Russia's invasion (Russia even occupied Chernobyl briefly). But it'll probably reopen sooner or later.

As a child of the Eastern bloc, I appreciate the attention that Soviet tech is getting from this YouTuber. As Slavic language speaker, however, I find his videos unwatchable because of the unsettling breathy marble-mouth narration and deer-in-the-headlights talking head cutaways.

I am conflicted.

That's the Russian Woodpecker. It would wreak havoc on the HF bands.

This sounds like something you'd run across in the Zone.

photos: https://www.arcanumurbex.de/photos/military-objects/duga-1-r...

I don’t speak Russian or any other language written in Cyrillic, but I learned the alphabet years ago for reasons. It has come in handy when looking at pictures of computers and other tech, where many of the words are cognates with English. Words like “register” and “control” are clear in some of the pictures linked to here.

Those old Soviet over-the-horizon radars would cause interference here in the west, especially close to the borders where I lived. Sounded like a chopper.

Other interference memories is Soviet TV suddenly fading in and out on your screen.

Although Duga was an impressive infrastructure project, I don't really think there is anything beyond theory suggesting it could have detected ICBMs (or done much of anything else for that matter); and although the computational technology is interesting and exotic, it was almost certainly lightyears behind computers in the west. Cray-1 was already in production at Los Alamos in the 1970s.

This was a culture that said Chernobyl's reactor design was safe. Far less avarice would be required to suggest that a giant lattice of metal with exotic computers inside of it could actually do something useful.

Amazing. What is OS?