The Chornobyl Family channel is restoring an ES-4001 control panel from a 1970s Soviet ES EVM mainframe, one of roughly 300 ever built. The ES EVM series was a direct clone of the IBM System/360 and System/370, produced because the USSR refused to fall behind in digital computing. An ES-1060 unit was installed at the Duga-1 early warning radar site near the Chornobyl nuclear power plant, and never entered service after the 1986 Unit-4 accident. What remains there now is a stripped carcass.
The panel being restored came from a datacenter in the early 1980s, not the Duga-1 site itself, and survived in better condition than the Chornobyl hardware. The restoration work required reversing damage from its removal, and the video documents exactly how the control panel was operated and how it interfaced with the mainframe. That operational detail is the real value here, not just the hardware.
With only around 300 of these machines ever produced and surviving documentation scarce, this project is as much archival work as restoration. The full video breaks down the system architecture and shows where it diverges from the IBM designs it copied. If Soviet computing history or cold war infrastructure is anywhere on your radar, read the original and watch the full teardown.
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