After completing the Strela, Rameev redoubled his efforts towards the Ural-1, and eventually it became the work horse for many Soviet computer centers. Rameev's long term goal was to create a family of universal computers with performance capacity ranging from modest to super-powerful.
The Soviet government ordered the Penza factory to manufacture the Ural-1 and in 1955 Rameev -- together with a group of talented young specialists who had worked with him at SKB-245 in Moscow
Rameev wrote to me:
We organized the Penza design team between 1952 and 1954, when SKB-245 was still in Moscow. In 1953 and 1954 the Ural-1 project commenced. Since the machine was designated for industrial mass-production, I spend most of my time on standardizing the racks, units, and overall design. At that stage, I was personally involved in designing circuitry, followed by manufacturing and adjustment, together with Vasily Ivanovich Mukhin, Andrei Nikolayevich Nevsky, and others. As they gained experience in Penza and their engineering talents grew, I gave them progressively more independent design assignments, beginning with specialized computers. Using standardized vacuum tube elements, they built special computers such as the "Pogoda" system for meteorology, the "Granit" system for calculating probabilities in experimental observations, and the "Crystal" system for x-ray crystallography. They also developed several special military computers.
Using vacuum tubes, Nevsky, Mukhin, Gennady Sergeevich Smirnov, Alexander Stepanovich Gorshkov, Lev Nikolayevich Bogoslovskii, Oleg Fedorovich Lobov, and several others, designed the universal computers Ural-2 in 1959 and Ural-4 in 1961. During my first ten years in Penza, they produced eleven different computer types and nearly one hundred peripheral units, all of which were delivered to customers and installed at production points.
In 1960, I started working on creating a family of Ural computers that were based on semiconductors. In November 1962, the design work for the Ural-10 complex was completed and the project was slated for automated production. Even though some of its elements had been developed for the Ural-11 and Ural-16 series, they were widely used in many other computing devices and in automation. To satisfy the demand in those areas, several million of such elements were manufactured.
I would like to note here the outstanding contribution made by Vladimir Ivanovich Burkov in the development of the structure, instruction and operating systems, and software of the Ural-11-- Ural-16 computer family.
During my time in Moscow and in Penza, I worked for organizations that I could confidently call a synergy between technology and industry. Only one director ran the Scientific Research Institute, a special designers' bureau, and the production plant. That is why there were no problems when we presented the newly designed computers for mass production. In that respect, I was probably in a better position than any other chief designer.
I considered standardization to be one of the most important principles. When I designed the Urals using electronic vacuum tubes, standardization allowed us to create a new series of computers in a short period of time. This issue gained much attention during the development of the Ural-11 --- Ural-16 series. Maximum "modularity" of the elements, junctions, units, computers and standard interfaces enabled us to minimize the assortment of assembled circuits, so that the mass-production of component systems and computers became significantly easier and cheaper.
In brief, the main features of the new generation of computers implemented by Rameev in the new Ural series consisted of the following:
The computers should represent a family of machines of varying performance, compatible with each other in construction, circuitry and software. The computers should have a flexible structure and a wide assortment of peripheral devices with standard interfaces to select the most compatible applications for any given task. This would also facilitate customizing the computer during its life cycle in accordance with the end user's needs and integrating newly developed units.
The design and circuitry need to allow several computers (same or different) to be joined together to form information processing systems and guarantee easy modifications of the system's components to increase performance, plus expand the number of solvable tasks and fields of application.
The backup units would guarantee a highly reliable system for real-time information processing. We need to plan for: a system of circuitry to protect information, access to programs regardless of where they are located in the memory, a system of relative addresses, a sophisticated method of starts and stops with a corresponding set of instructions which would allow us to coordinate complex systems of simultaneously working devices and time-sharing of many tasks.
The ability to work with floating and fixed points, in decimal and binary systems, and to select and execute operations with words of both fixed and variable lengths would allow us to effectively solve a wide variety of economical, informational and scientific-technical tasks;
A system of hardware control for storage, addressing, transmission, and processing of information.
A large operating memory capacity with direct selection of words with variable length, effective hardware means for the control and protection of programs from each other, partition addressing, a developed system of starts and stops, the ability to access a large external memory on magnetic disks and drums, usage of timers, equipment for interfacing with communication channels, and operator keyboards for communication with the computers. This will allow us to build information processing systems for multiple users which should work in a time-sharing mode.
All elements, blocks, and units are standardized for optimization of mass-production and technological processes, which would guarantee a reliable, high quality product.
These main features of the new generation of computers were presented in a draft document outlining the Ural-11, Ural-14, and Ural-16 family of computers. It appeared a year and a half before a similar publication about the American IBM-360. Thus, Rameev proposed the idea for a computer family with compatible hardware and software independently from the Americans, and it was implemented practically at the same time. It is important to note that unlike the first models of the IBM-360, the Ural family was capable of supporting information processing systems, which were made up of similar and/or different computers with networking capabilities and other upgrades.
Academician Dorodnitsyn signed a State Commission Act that approved the Ural software:
For the first time in the USSR, a systems approach to software development has been implemented for a series of computers. We designed an original operating system, incorporating all of the main functions that such modern systems are capable of realizing at this time. Our software documentation is of the highest quality; it is comprehensive and has a uniform layout.
Penza also developed a number of systems for the Soviet economy and national defense. In 1962 Rameev was awarded the degree of Doctor of Technical Sciences without having to defend a thesis -- an extraordinary case in the Soviet Union.