Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.