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The Personal Computer Revolution Behind the Iron Curtain
szczys writes Obviously the personal computer revolution was world-wide, but the Eastern Bloc countries had a story of PC evolution all their own. Martin Malý tells first hand of his experiences seeing black market imports, locally built clones of popular western machines, and all kinds of home-built equipment. From the article: "The biggest problem was a lack of modern technologies. There were a lot of skilled and clever people in eastern countries, but they had a lot of problems with the elementary technical things. Manufacturing of electronics parts was divided into diverse countries of Comecon – The Council for Mutual Economic Assistance. In reality, it led to an absurd situation: You could buy the eastern copy of Z80 (made in Eastern Germany as U880D), but you couldn’t buy 74LS00 at the same time. Yes, a lot of manufacturers made it, but 'it is out of stock now; try to ask next year.' So 'make a computer' meant 50 percent of electronics skills and 50 percent of unofficial social network and knowledge like 'I know a guy who knows a guy and his neighbor works in a factory, where they maybe have a material for PCBs' at those times."
I just want another Bennett Haselton contribution
And now everyone can easily source parts that are not supposed to be publicly available for almost nothing. Thanks Alibaba, IC2IC and such! Xbox 360 custom ATI GPU, sure! PS3 Cell CPU, easy. I assume that if those are so easy to find, digging a little further could probably score you something you could get into trouble for just having in your hands!
And academic leftists wonder why Communism collapsed...
"But we can do it the Right Way!!!" Yeah, sure, bud, because (modern) Liberal Arts professors have soooo much experience outside the Ivory Tower...
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
Russia beat everyone in many space milestones, so clearly they must have had tons of these space spinoffs to spread around, right?
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Take that capitalist scum!
Most of you probably won't remember this one, but it is a classic.
http://tech.slashdot.org/story/01/11/17/204207/message-from-kabul
Better skills and all that.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
Maybe I'm wrong here, but were there any machines then that had non-western keyboards and layouts?
Just weird seeing QWERTY keyboards on Soviet machines is well.. weird. I was expecting something else. Or is this just the nature of cloning?
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
Mr. Pajitnov prototyped Tetris on an Electronica 60, a Soviet clone of a PDP-11. Yet he goes RIAA on anyone who clones his own work.
There were a lot of "enterprise" software written for the C64 in the late 80ies in the communist block because it didn't fell under the import ban.
It also supported a lot of peripherals, like floppy disk, hard drive and mouse. It also had a lot of documentation in German, which was easier to learn in the Eastern block.
For some situations that's probabaly a very good fit. With some signal processing stuff we're really simulating what an analog computer could do via a digital system. If there's no need to frequently reprogram the lack of flexibility doesn't matter so much.
With analog you get the solution within the limits of noise and not the solution digitized into a certain number of bits. They were good for some things, the last I saw was in 1992 being used to refine a fluid flow model in real time to match the experimental rig right next to it.
They didn't actually. For example, Soyuz-U still has analog control computers. So you didn't get advanced computers as spin-offs of the space program, because the space program didn't have advanced computers in the first place.
Just because the computers ON spacecraft were primitive (because they were made to be failure proof in extreme conditions) doesn't mean that advanced computers ON THE GROUND weren't developed to design and test the space craft and its components.
You've clearly demonstrated thinking so focused on proving your point that you missed the obvious.
Euthanize them. It's that simple. We don't have the resources to afford caring for individuals who can only be a burden to the collectivity. We must rise above individualism and embrace the concept that the community is all that matters.
My father used to work in the '80 in the Vyskumny Ustav Vypoctovej Techniky (~ Research institute for computing equipment) in Zilina, Slovakia, doing exactly those things described in the article and sometimes instead of putting me into the daycare center he would take me to his office (when he was not working in one of the buildings that was off-limits to non employees).
I was a young geeky kid and it was incredibly cool for me to watch all those people soldering, taking apart and then putting together various equipment, drawing schematics, writing programs (I remember one guy with horribly rotten teeth in a blue lab coat explaining assembler to me), working on terminals that gave of a very specific smell when they were turned on :), being in the air-conditioned "mainframe" room, etc.
This is IMO what I have to thank for becoming an IT guy myself.
If you discovered you had such a disability, would you step up to be euthanized?
Choices of other people do not make you a hypocrite. As I wrote above, he didn't clone the PDP-11 himself did he? His tetris is a thing he did himself. I'm not expected to answer to the shortcomings of whoever made the keyboard I'm typing on am I?
If I am then that can of worms is huge and hits a Godwin as soon as IBM is in the mix.
If this was an indirect cause of the "Russian Programmer" effect.
In the 1980s, military technology between the US and USSR were at a type of impasse. The Russian ICBM technology was archaic compared to US technologies but performed equally well. One major reason for this was that the firmware and software used in Russian technology was programmed with much more minimalist and elegant code. In the US no expense was spared on research and development, allowing US strategists to throw approximate guidance numbers into a supercomputer which would then massage the data. This was matched by the Russian approach which basically dropped precise, yet minimalist code onto hardware which at the time amounted to "Speak and Spell" level technology, being formidable to the US approach by virtue of it's cheapness and ability to build in volume as a result.
A professor of mine in college pointed out, in retrospect when I brought this up that Russia was fighting a losing game financially, due to the fact that their research and development amounted to dollars being taken away from the people resulting in every incremental advance in technology coming at the cost of them taking meat and potatoes off the tables of families in that culture, which worked in the short term, but in the long term leads unswervingly to declining performance, a declining economy and lead to the breakdown of the USSR as a whole (among many other factors)
Decades later now, I have found myself working with Russian immigrant programmers who have nothing short of amazing skill sets in comparison to American programmers (on average, this is not to in any way diss American programmers.)
Interesting!
My intent was not to make a rigorous argument from current law but to make a statement about the morality of cloning. Law rarely perfectly matches morality. Pajitnov's actions through The Tetris Company combined with his previous statements, such as that free software "destroys the market" and "should never have existed", imply that he believes that cloning is immoral. But by that standard, he used the product of immorality to make his flagship product.
Once again - the disconnection is that he didn't do the clone but just used a product that happened to be a clone. Are you responsible for the morality of Microsoft every time you use one of their products - are you ripping off Spyglass each time you use internet explorer because they were supposed to get royalties for what MS gave away as a free product? Similarly Pajitnov using a clone is not responsible for the morality of the people who cloned it.
I know being otherwise simplifies things and lets you find something to be critical of just about anyone, whether there are grounds or not. However remember looking at the world in such a way is dangerous, for if your focus falls on yourself you are similarly responsible in that view for things well beyond your control - it is not good for mental health. Of course you could apply exceptionalism where in some way you are exempt from the morality you apply to the rest of the world, it seems to be fashionable these days especially in politics.