The letters RK in the title stands for the words Radio ham's Computer (Russian: Радиолюбительский компьютер).

Design of the computer was published in a series of articles describing its logical structure, electrical circuitry, drawings of printed circuit boards and firmware.

The main board used a single large connector for power, keyboard, tape recorder and even video output.

As most Soviet TVs of the time did not have video inputs, it was necessary to install a special module[7] or modify the TV's electronics to implement it.

However, finding the chips to buy was difficult, as they were scarce and sold in small volumes in major cities of the USSR.

This led to the development of a replacement video circuit[10] which contained 19 chips on a separate board, and was similar to the display module of the Micro-80 computer.

The editorial board published an appeal to the Soviet electronics industry, proposing they begin producing Radio-86RK kits commercially.

[11] By the end of the 1980s manufacturing of computer cases, keyboards and main boards for the Radio-86RK, as well as selling electronic components were carried out by numerous cooperatives.

[15] Other software published in the magazine included assembler, debugger, disassembler, text editor, voice recorder, music editing system.

Radio-86RK owners were invited to buy the fully assembled controller or a kit along with two floppy disks containing external DOS commands, programming languages and text description of the operating system.

[19] Following magazine publication, a number of factories started industrial production of several home computer models using the Radio-86RK design.

Not all models were fully compatible with Radio-86RK and included different improvements, such as expanded memory size, additional character sets, rudimentary color support.