Source: Wikipedia - CC BY-SA 4.0 - Binarysequence

When it comes to space, there have been many firsts in the history of Russian science and engineering. And without opening Pandoras Box of for and against, good and bad, success and failure of Russian versus American space technology, there have been some true marvels of Russian engineering that went down completely different paths compared to their western counterparts.

If I ask you for the first programmable calculators, I guess, names like Texas Instruments TI-59 or Hewlett Packard 41-CX immediately spring to your mind. But did you ever hear of the MK-52?

This Russian programmable calculator with reverse polish notation and an EEPROM to store written programs was really a thing in the 80s and inspired many people, before personal microcomputers became more widely available. And not to be neglected, this piece of hardware flew to space as part of the Soyuz TM-7 mission as a backup for docking trajectory calculations!

Manual docking trajectory calculation on a 32 key calculator when sitting in a spacecraft with an orbital speed of 30.000 km/h! This just screams for a Chuck Norris joke.

Paul Hoets published an in-depth article and there is bit more of information to be found on this Hackaday project which also links to a teardown video.

Thank you Paul & Удачного полета!