With the obligatory soda machine. They had a regular glass (made from glass, not disposable). Pushed it upside-down in this washer valve which sprayed water on the inside of it. So you "washed it". Then you put coin in, forgot how many kopeyks for regular fizzy water, it cost more to add syrup. Then the person behind you used that same glass, and so on.
Today I'd think it is crazy unsanitary, and would never drink out of it.
In the summer, throughout the city they also had large yellow barrels on two wheels with kvas (this fermented drink made from bread). Also with reusable glasses which the seller would quickly rinse with water before handing it to you. That was the best thing on a hot summer day.
It was 1 kopek for regular, 3 kopeks with syrup. Roughly equivalent to $3 and $9 in today's US dollars if calculated proportionally to median income. Prices are shown in one of the pictures, btw: http://gazirovka.15kop.ru/gallery/#10
PS. There's much more info about soda machines in Russian version, and lots of cool graphics too:
So wait, that means USSR had no coin valued at less than today's $1.5 by purchasing power (assuming the 1/2 kopek coin existed at the time)? Interesting.
It's complicated. Comparisons based on median income are inherently flawed due the radical differences in regimes (let's start from free education and housing).
Let's compare it using market tools. The black market exchange rate was about 5 roubles for one US dollar in late USSR (official rate was about 60 cents for one rouble, but you had to be an elite to use it, and even then, in very small amounts) - you get up to death toll if they catch you with dollars, but that's another story.
So 1 kopeyks in USSR was about 0.2 cents, and inflation calculator will tell you that would be about 0.6 cents in current value.
The highest official salary was about 1200 roubles a month - two people had this salary, Prime Minister and President of USSR Academy of Sciences. Nevertheless, there were people earning (illegally, of course) tens of millions - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsekhovik
Oh man those kvass canisters. So in our area there was an urban legend that once a truck transporting kvass (kind of like a fuel truck) crashed and fell on the side.
Kvass poured out and along with it monstrous worms size of a human leg (nobody ever washes those canisters).
Seems like this would be really bad business just from a transportation perspective. Giant worms take up transit space that could be filled with kvass instead.
A quick Google for "giant worms" finds a few that are a couple centimeters in diameter around the world, but none in the vicinity of Russia.
However, there was a pretty well developed culture of urban legends and rumors like that. Then there was no internet, official channels were not trusted and so on. So that made it a nice fertile ground for urban legends.
My uncle even made one up with his friends. They went fishing, got drunk and decided to tell everyone they saw aliens land. They had noticed an area by woods that was burnt by a lightning strike and some fire had started. So that became the landing site. And so on. He made us kids and a few women from the village believe him.
There were national ones of course. My favorite was about this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kola_Superdeep_Borehole. The rumor was that the scientists had reached hell (temperature increased dramatically, which it did in reality, see! every legends needs a tiny bit of truth there), and there was, of course, a red monster which crawled out from the whole. I really loved that story as a kid.
There were countless others which I already forgot.
The hotel I was staying at in Moscow in '92 had "Snaiper-2". I really liked it. Sure, it's a basic target-shooting game, but it's entirely electromechanical and it had a lens in the sight that made the target seem like it was further away.
They just talked about this on the latest episode of the Idle Thumbs podcast! The podcaster's favorite was one with a mechanical car that drove on top of a video.
I've been to the one in Saint-Petersburg. Probably worth a visit, but do expect most machines to be under-maintained, and keep you wondering if the game is even receiving your inputs...
Though, I suppose, when those machines were placed in random "palaces of culture" across the USSR in the 70-80s, their state on average wasn't any better.
Do you know if they run on 6502s and other Western chips of the time? Were they cloned, or imported? Or were there Soviet ISA's?
I remember reading years ago about how Russian computer scientists in the cold war were more honed in algorithm design, because they basically had to squeeze as much as they could out of their processors to compete with faster Western hardware.
Morskoi Boi/Sea Hunter has no computer, or chips for that matter. It's 1960s tech.
Some computer based arcades started to appear in late 1980s, but more like Pong clones and similarly simple "racing" games with 2600-like sprites. At this point the "coops" started popping up, offering pay per minute experience on Atari 800 and ZX Spectrum.
There was no Soviet 6502 or Z80 clone; there were however 8080A clones and DEC LSI-11 inspired designs. There were a bunch of creative programmers sure, although there hardly was a real "school" and CS remained largely backwaters to the West.
> The U880 is an almost identical copy of Zilog's 8-bit Z80 microprocessor.
I wrote my first machine-level programs on that chip (I didn't have an assembler, only a dis-assembler, so I hand-translated the code and then used the dis-assembler to check if I had made typos).
If you mean the T34 one, yeah it was in USSR in the sense there was tenderloin in the shops. I.e. we knew the name but I never met anyone who could get hold of it. Even then not sure it was even heard of until 1990s.
Bulgarian 6502s were probably shipped with their Apple II clones. Those were hard to come by.
With the obligatory soda machine. They had a regular glass (made from glass, not disposable). Pushed it upside-down in this washer valve which sprayed water on the inside of it. So you "washed it". Then you put coin in, forgot how many kopeyks for regular fizzy water, it cost more to add syrup. Then the person behind you used that same glass, and so on.
Today I'd think it is crazy unsanitary, and would never drink out of it.
In the summer, throughout the city they also had large yellow barrels on two wheels with kvas (this fermented drink made from bread). Also with reusable glasses which the seller would quickly rinse with water before handing it to you. That was the best thing on a hot summer day.