Before beginning the history of the Soviet 580 series microprocessor, we need to say a little bit about the level of Soviet computing technology before the advent of integrated microprocessors. This is really a topic for a separate article, so just two facts. This article is largely from guest author Vladimir Yakovlev, translated from Russian, and edited/expanded by me. It is part of a series on Soviet microprocessors that started with the Soviet T34 Z80 article. In 1950 the “Small Electronic Computing Machine” (SECM) was made in the USSR. It should be noted that in the USSR this computer was launched at a time when there was only a few computers in Europe, the English EDSAK, launched just a year earlier and Zuse’s Z4 in Zurich in ~1947. But the processor of SECM was much more powerful by parallelizing the computational process.