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1980's Soviet Bloc Computing: Printers, Mice, and Cassette Decks
szczys writes Martin Maly rode the wave of computer evolution in the 1980's while living in the former Czechoslovak Republic. Computers themselves were hard to come by, peripherals were even more rare and so enthusiasts of the time hacked their own, like dot-matrix printers and computer mice. If your build was impressive enough, the government would adopt it and begin manufacturing the design somewhat widely. Was your first computer mouse built into a plastic spice container? We covered what the personal computer revolution was like in Eastern Bloc countries back in December.
Modernism and human efficiency aside, they repaired and reused a lot of equipment and parts rather than make version N be landfill and buy version N + 1. You have to admire that aspect. The throw-away culture we have now is an embarrassment to humanity. Plus, there's the fun side of their MacGyver-ism.
Table-ized A.I.
Early 5.25" floppy disks could only store around 180K of data. An extended play tape cassette could store 3 hours of audio per side, with the data transfer rate at 600 baud (around 60 bytes/second). So a tape cassette could store a maximum of 632K of data per side. In practice, it was less than that because you had to find space to store each program on the tape cassette, and handle your own "sector management" by allocating a good segment of space for each program. Your only clue was the little counter in the tape drive. God help you if you accidentally reset that counter - had to wind the tape all the way back and start again. There were some chess playing video game consoles that actually were able to use tape cassettes to record video or the individual moves.
Fortunately by the 1990's, we than had 3.25" floppies which could store 1.44 Megabytes of data per disk, then zip drives, and now 64+ Gigabyte USB memory sticks and SSD drives.
A former coworker who worked in a Soviet client state during that period told me that the distribution of printers was controlled because it was a "printing press" and could be used to create anti-government propaganda for distribution. That there were government offices where you could take your data to be printed if you were unable to justify why you needed a printer yourself.