Which Soviet computer hosted the first version of Tetris?

The first version of Tetris was hosted on the Soviet Elektronika 60 computer. Alexey Pajitnov programmed it in the mid-1980s while working at the Soviet Academy of Sciences’ Dorodnitsyn Computing Center.

The Elektronika 60 was a Soviet computer compatible with the DEC PDP-11 family, but it did not provide modern raster graphics. Pajitnov therefore represented the falling pieces with text characters, including spaces and brackets, rather than colored blocks. He wrote the original program for the RT-11 operating system.

A common mix-up is the PDP-10, which was a different mainframe computer, and the IBM PC, which came later. Pajitnov, Dmitry Pavlovsky and Vadim Gerasimov subsequently adapted Tetris for the IBM PC, whose display made the game easier to present and distribute. The IBM version helped the game spread rapidly beyond the research center.

The Elektronika 60 itself was not the machine that made Tetris commercially famous. That came through later computer releases, including the 1988 versions published in the United Kingdom and United States, followed by Nintendo’s highly influential console and Game Boy editions.