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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.
My C64 had a cassette recorder (DataSette I think it was called). It wasn't being Soviet, it was being cheap when the floppy disk drive more expensive than the computer.
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.
wayback machine trips to old soviet satellites are always a thrill until you realized what these states were: Speed bumps. Most satellites had to be gobbled up as part of soviet expansionist communisms ethos, but they were actually a substantial economic drain on Moscow. the education was poor, most societies were agrarian, and infrastructure was infantile compared to the motherland. Capitalizing on them meant shoveling nuclear and civil works projects into them, pumping billions rubles into their coffers while doing so. Education was immediately improved, but the focus on mathematics and sciences was dwarfed by the local politburo members to ensure they had enough cobblers, welders, masons, and mechanics to forge what the USSR had ultimately envisioned. Personal computing was a distant third in a lot of ways and by the time the Afghan war had metasticized into a full-blown proxy war with the US, many satellite states were simply human fodder for a meat-grinder campaign that saw heavy casualties on all sides.
So if youre old enough to remember your first mouse, dont take that for granted. your duly assigned Glorious Leader for the region was under immense pressure to turn it into a socket wrench, or a kalashnikov.
Good people go to bed earlier.
...putting together a plotter for my ZX clone. The best thing about those time was - no MMORPGs to hook your kids at 6. The games of the time (and place) were so lame that it was more fun to learn BASIC :)
Going from nothing to serious cyber espionage in four months is pretty impressive.
At the bottom of the
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.
You're the only one who mentioned the 1%ers. One group controls both the government and industry - can you think of a better way to describe them than as a small group of elites?
Also, I think your description of Fascism and worker syndicates is more generally applicable to... well pretty much every socio-economic system ever, really. Without some form of worker alliance the powerful will continue amassing a greater percentage of wealth until it begins to threaten the ability of the masses to continue producing it. Further, if they're too short-sighted to consider the long-term impacts of their actions.
Under fascism neither the 1%ers nor the 99%ers necessarily have any say - though if the 1%ers haven't been stripped of their wealth to further enrich the elites, then they're probably getting at least some voice in the way things are run. Granted there will always be a 1%, statistically, but there's no need to make society's "middle management" hundreds of times more wealthy than the proletariat to keep them doing their jobs.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.