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."

Comments

Re:Wait, how is this possible?

[K. S. Kyosuke]

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.

Re:'it is out of stock now; try to ask next year.'

[Nutria]

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.