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

[RyuuzakiTetsuya]

It wasn't Communism or Socialism that collapsed, it was Sovietism.

Communism as a means of where workers own the firm and means of production hasn't failed. Look at manufacturing and worker coops. Some succeed, some fail. I'm guessing around the same rate that private and publicly owned firms do. Given that though, I'm willing to say that the idea isn't a failure.

John Green said it best. "Truth resists simplicity."

If you have a system where worker owned firms are exchanging goods and services on an open market using currency and capital as means of trade, is that a communist or capitalist society? What about when state governments establish rules that govern trade?

I'm a descriptivist when it comes to language. However, when the use of language is twisted as a way to paint people and ideas as "other" I have a massive problem with it. Don't get me wrong. I do understand that when we talk about "Capitalism" we're talking about western style capitalism where production and markets are more or less handled privately(Government regulations not withstanding). Conversely and by "Communism" we're talking about Soviet style communism where the state controls the means and focus of production. It's been a few years since I've read Marx and Engels, but I don't think this was the point of the mid 19th century communist movement.

So it becomes important to remember when we talk about things like Communism and Capitalism, things are pretty complex when you start to get serious into the terminology.

Did communism fail? Probably not. Has capitalism failed? Probably not either. It's likely that these are mutually exclusive ideas that can coexist.

Furthermore, how a state governs itself and interacts with it's markets complicate things further.

One thing i'm willing to bet on being pretty simple is that state planned production systems probably won't work. Not unless you got really lucky and the Government wasn't corrupt and somehow manages to provide for everyone.

Lots of QWERTY... no cyrillic?

[RyuuzakiTetsuya]

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?

Tetris clone irony

[tepples]

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.

C64

[sourcerror]

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.

Re:We're so far from that now!

[mikael]

Back in those days, start of the art technology in CPU's were "restricted exports". The USA wanted to show that Communism didn't lead to as many advancements in technology as Capitalism, so they restricted exports on technology such as chip design software, CPU's and other chip logic (remember the A-team trying to block smugglers exporting flip-flop chips? It was that serious). This led to the Eastern European countries doing various work-arounds. They could get gray imports through third-party countries that weren't part of the Western trade block, and weren't part of the USSR either. Or they could set up fake companies in the host country that would export the technology.

Another strategy was to make their own logic chips. However, yields for complex logic such as CPU's, wasn't that good, so they ended up with CPU's with missing instructions. But that wasn't a problem, mathematician/software engineers figured out ways of emulating broken instructions using other instructions. If JMP was broken, then use CLR; BCC. Arithmetic operations like ADD could be replaced by NEG and SUB, and so on... So they ended up with an abstraction layer using assembler macros that provided a set of functioning instructions.