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I know people who grew up in Eastern Europe. They had home computers, mostly C64s and the like imported at vast expense from the West. Apparently in Russia a few people had cloned machines, mostly from designs from Sinclair in the UK.

On the other hand I met someone who worked in a chip factory in East Germany. Everyone knew what they were doing was very far behind the west. In fact there was a joke that the first 1Mhz processor in the Eastern Bloc would fly in on a cruise missile.

This page reckons that the Soviet Block was 10-12 years behind the West at chip production.

http://www.cpushack.net/soviet-cpus.html

There were also CoCom restrictions on selling technology. You can see how this worked with this example

http://www.canberra.edu.au/~scott/C=Hacking/C-Hacking13/os.html

Bootstrapping was the first major problem. How do you start a new computer and debug its OS if don't have an OS on the computer? From earlier systems I already had a small monitor program - directly burned into an EPROM - able to load binaries through a serial line. Getting the MMU (74ls610) was the second problem, because it was on the CoCom list, and it was not allowed to export to eastern countries. (Although I don't live in an eastern country, this posed some difficulties...)

So if you were an Eastern Block engineer you'd have to get someone to buy this MMU on the black market somehow which cost precious hard currency. Or you could get some local factory to make a clone. Obviously either are harder than buying it from a mailorder shop.

My guess is that the Cubans set up a front company and buy PCs somewhere in the West and then probably pirate the software.

That's right, they just take their time to implement technology. http://www.cpushack.net/space-craft-cpu.html

Here's an interesting web-page on the processors used in various space probes over the years.

http://www.cpushack.net/space-craft-cpu.html

It seems Viking was the first to use micro-processors. Before that they used TTL, which is sort of a roll-your-own CPU based on bunches of simpler logic chips (NAND gates, multiplexers, etc.).
   

P6 (from which Core was derived) is the only decent CPU architecture they've done.

i960 was pretty good, and they almost had a winner (but not quite) with the i860 (it was useless at context switches but great for maths).

P6 (from which Core was derived) is the only decent CPU architecture they've done.

i960 was pretty good, and they almost had a winner (but not quite) with the i860 (it was useless at context switches but great for maths).

Some of these chips are clearly EPROMS, you can see the quartz window peeking out from under a label

http://www.flickr.com/photos/vonguard/2429248669/

Remember this is an unreleased game. It's likely that they would use UV EPROMS right up until the final release when they'd commit to a binary to be produced as mask roms. That way they could use the time honoured method of burning a batch of EPROMS, testing them, erasing them under UV and burning a new batch.

Actually back when these things were still used I never worked on a project that was high volume enough to justify a mask prom. The break even point was about ten thousand chips IIRC. I worked on a system where the production run was only a few hundred per firmware revison so we always used EPROM. Then again you could get chips that were physically EPROM but had a plastic package and no window. They could be programmed in the field, but only once.

Here's a picture of the chip

http://www.flickr.com/photos/vonguard/2429242881/in/set-72157604647023310/

It's a Intel D2763-4. Apparantly it's 8K*8, available in either windowed or OTP versions. It's not really clear how it differs from the very popular 2764.

http://www.cpushack.net/chippics/EPROM/2763/

A Lockheed-Martin R6000, evidently. 120MB ram, 256MB flash. Perhaps this? According to that page, it was about 60mhz, if I'm reading correctly.

The only major x86 acquisition that I can recall AMD making was their purchase of NexGen back in the mid 90s. (http://www.cpushack.net/CIC/otherpr/amd-nexgen) For those who don't recall, Nexgen had produced the Nx586 chip which ran in their own custom socket and motherbaords. They were in the process of finishing their updated Nx686 design with and integrated FPU. The Nexgen Nx686 design was never released, but was altered to become the AMD K6. (http://www.sandpile.org/impl/nx6.htm) The K5 design team along with many former DEC employees were responsible for the K7 design. That's the big reason that the K7 (aka Athlon) used the EV6 bus created by DEC for the Alpha.