It's always very interesting to look back and track how technology has changed over times... Computers used to be much larger than they are today - see it for yourself!
A quick look into the past will show you that computers used to be those big massive units that took up a lot of storage space and sometimes needed an extra care to make sure they work as intended. Of course it meant that every place needing a complicated computer system needed to make sure that they have enough space and technicians qualified to use, repair and provide maintenance for this kind of systems. In the power plants those type of computers also have found their place - and we're absolutely not about to forget about their existance.
As you already know we love to work on our in-game environment on the basis of factually existing historical equipment. In case of computer systems in Chernobyl we also consulted the photographs and our artists who had the chance to see those kind of computer systems in person. We have made research into a system called система контроля аппарата Ленинградской Атомной that we can translate into English as Control System of the Devices of the Leningrad Nuclear Power Plant (often shortened to "SCALA" or SKALA). And we have tried our best to incorporate that into our game.
As we have said - those systems needed space - in today's standards one could even say that they needed enormous amount of space. In CLS you'll be able to check the room that hosted SKALA albeit we have miniaturized the space a little bit for the sake of convenience. It's still the system that we have tried to replicate with a great attention to detail and you can even compare some elements of it on above photos - first one being taken from our game and two other photos being real life reprezentation of SKALA.
But what functions SKALA had and what did it do? SKALA was the process computer for the RBMK Nuclear Reactor at Chernobyl NPP and it used magnetic core memory, magnetic tape data storage and also punched tape that was used for loading software. Its main functions were:
- Monitoring reactor conditions and control board inputs;
- Recording those conditions;
- Displaying all of the relevant information to operators.
Thank you for tuning in this time - take care and see you next time!
Kind regards,
Chernobyl Liquidators Simulator Team
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1113010/Chernobyl_Liquidators_Simulator/