In the 1990s, the Chornobyl Nuclear Power Plant modernized its aging 1970s SKALA industrial control system without replacing it entirely. Engineers built a new auxiliary information-measurement system called DIIS, bridging SKALA via a Ukrainian SM-1210 minicomputer connected to an 80386 PC and an ARCnet hub. This hybrid setup enabled real-time reactor core modeling and visualization locally, eliminating the need to relay data to Moscow. The patchwork of Soviet-era mainframe, 1980s Ukrainian hardware, and 1990s Intel computing kept the plant running smoothly until Unit 3's final shutdown in 2000.
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