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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."
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.
Ezekiel 23:20
Hitler took a nation of Germans and made a poor country out of it.
Only US provided welfare brought it back!!
Welfare is great!
The principle intent of communism was to end the oppression of the working class by those who had capital and wealth. Not so lazy people could leech off the system. I don't think that I've read anything like that in some of the original communist works.
I think the problem with Soviet style communism was that central planning bureaucracies were trying to balance authoritarian political power and economic production.
It's a pretty Brady Bunch view of the world, but had the Soviet Union not been a paranoid authoritarian bureaucracy, we might have a different view of what "communism" means.
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
Sometimes leaving stuff that works alone is fine. Actually that's a good general engineering practice.
Most engineering failures occur when "outdated" technology gets replaced with new shiny (because, new shiny!), and the new shiny bites you in the ass with the unexpected.
Not to say that things shouldn't be updated if the technology improves, but if you just need a relatively robust low tech computer technology, sticking with what works isn't such a bad thing.
Left MS Windows for Linux Mint and never looked back!
Vote for Bernie in 2016!
Not so lazy people could leech off the system.
Thus the fundamental failure of Marx: ignoring the reality of human nature.
had the Soviet Union not been a paranoid authoritarian bureaucracy
That many people -- in the Russian Empire, Germany, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, Romania, China, Korea, etc, etc, -- can't just accidentally be paranoid and authoritarian.
Good socio-political theories must take people's baser instincts into account. That's the genius of Adam Smith's Invisible Hand: it presumes that people will be selfish and greedy.
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1