u/ElaraNovikova

My grandmother was one of two women who ran an Iskra-226 in an accounting office on the Kamchatka coast. When she died, one 8-inch disk came down from the top of a wardrobe, in a paper sleeve, with two words in her pencil handwriting on the label: “do not erase.”

The Iskra-226 was the Soviet work-alike of the Wang 2200, built to speak the same BASIC without being a copy. It went into serial production in 1981 and ran ministries and Gosplan offices through the 80s. Nobody had ever emulated it.

So I did. Three months of evenings, working from crooked scans of Russian manuals (preserved, ironically, by Wang 2200 enthusiasts - the fans of the American machine became the memory of the Soviet one). Some milestones along the way:

•	Sector zero: six weeks of bytes in the right order before a single legible line appeared  
•	The tokenizer: the BASIC dialect’s tokens finally “came apart” at 1:44 one morning in August; everything after that fell into place in under three hours  
•	Firmware forensics: a boot side no catalog documents, with the same firmware written across it four times — counting my way to a file I could trust  
•	The payoff: a payroll program from 1989 (“Vedomost No. 2”, a standard Soviet wage sheet) loaded, ran, did its arithmetic, and printed the form it was written for. I checked the math with a pencil. We agree to the kopek. Nobody had watched that form come off a machine in 37 years.

23 of 23 programs on the disk load and run. Honest caveat: this isn’t processor-level emulation, the original firmware isn’t executing. What I built is a reader for the BASIC dialect and an interpreter that carries it out.

It runs in the browser now, with fourteen disk images to choose from: https://elaranovikova.com/projects/iskra-226/index.html

Code: https://github.com/elaranovikova
And yes — two nights before I published, I finally read my grandmother’s disk. That part of the story is on the blog.

Happy to answer anything about the machine, the BASIC dialect, or the disk format.

USSR Iskra 226: I wrote an emulator. Check it out, it’s first time in history this code become alive again.

https://github.com/elaranovikova

While building software tools around the Iskra-226 (a Soviet Wang 2200 work-alike, serial production from 1981), I got a tip and drove four hours to a private flat in Almaty: a complete machine, two drives, a plotter and a screen that hasn’t held a picture in years.
A few things I’ve learned about this machine that don’t show up in English-language histories:

•	It was built to run the same BASIC as the Wang 2200 without being a hardware copy — a deliberate compatibility play, not cloning  
•	Most of the software was written by Gosplan itself; by the mid-80s hundreds of ministries ran on these  
•	The best-preserved documentation survives on wang2200.org, scanned by American Wang enthusiasts, the Soviet machine’s memory is being kept by fans of its Western counterpart  
•	On the title page of the 1987 operating manual there’s exactly one woman’s name, L. N. Markelova. 

The designers are on plaques; the person who wrote the book you’d actually reach for at 7 a.m. when the machine won’t boot is a name in small type on one page. I wrote a blog post about her.
I also visited an Iskra-226 behind glass in a Riga museum, reported there in 2016, and nobody in the house could tell me whether it ever had power.
If anyone here has ever seen one running, or has disks, I would genuinely love to hear from you. Blog with the full research trail:

https://elaranovikova.com/blog/topic/iskra-226.html