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Leading the Computer Revolution In a Totalitarian State
szczys writes: How do you enter the information age when computers, and the components that go into them, are embargoed by other countries and imports of any value are restricted by your own? This and a myriad of other barriers didn't stop Voja Antonic from building his own computers and teaching others how to do so during the 70s, 80s, 90s, and beyond.
He managed to get a TRS-80 into Yugoslavia by having a friend cut the cables between the two boards and send them separately to avoid getting caught in customs. He bootstrapped his own personal computer and published the plans in the country's first computer magazine. It was built by over 8000 people. Check out these stories and his experience of living in the Eastern Bloc and through the war in '90s, all while continuing to build and promote computers in what is now Serbia.
He managed to get a TRS-80 into Yugoslavia by having a friend cut the cables between the two boards and send them separately to avoid getting caught in customs. He bootstrapped his own personal computer and published the plans in the country's first computer magazine. It was built by over 8000 people. Check out these stories and his experience of living in the Eastern Bloc and through the war in '90s, all while continuing to build and promote computers in what is now Serbia.
Building computers is easy nowadays, we don't need his help anymore. Now he'll have to live on the streets. Will I help him? No! I've planning games on my rig, can't be bothered.
I was born in Moldova(one of the Soviet republics) in early 1980's and my mom worked in "Computational Center" that had IBM Mainframe machines. So, computers in Soviet Union weren't that novel, but they were rare.
Side story.
Just for fun, she and her colleagues wrote a program that would predict a gender you soon-to be born child.
According to the predictions, I was supposed to be a girl. My mom, went out and bought all the clothing for a girl. Till the age 3, I was wearing clothing made for girls. (Not that it so different from boys for that age group)
Didn't they get in each other's way?
This story has been up for several minutes already, and no "First Post!" or "In Soviet Russia, computers build YOU!" comments. Slashdot is really going downhil...
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
Yugoslavia under Tito was not a totalitarian state. Dictatorship, yes. Keeping the ethnic tensions that later exploded in the 1990's repressed, yes. Totalitarian? No, at least, not by the 1970's.
(And, yes, I did go there and did know people there. It was the sort of place where people could travel abroad and dissidents could get their convictions thrown out on appeal. Tito was no Mao.)
Finally a truly inspirational, meaningful story on Slashdot. After theodp's diatribes about H1Bs and his hatred of getting kids educated, to various people complaining about sexism, stories about drones, 3d printed junk, and links to various paid blogs I had given up hope on finding something interesting here.
Read the article. It is really amazing.
Yet a man who lives there all his life, and still lives there calls it "totalitarian". But I guess I believe you more, because you went there once and knew some people there. What was he thinking? He should have just run the article by you first to make sure it was factually correct.
"Totalitarian" does not imply a state as bad as Hitler's or Mao's. Only that there are few or no meaningful limits on the power of the state. I believe many nations today qualify, as did Tito's (IMO). And I do think that is a bad thing, but it doesn't imply that all totalitarian states are equally bad, or even that all such states are inherently worse than non-totalitarian ones. (DIsclaimer: not Yugoslavian technically, but I do have Slovenian ancestry and my wife is from Skopje in now what is now the Republic of Macedonia.)
Nonaggression works!
Yugoslavia was neither, as someone already corrected, totalitarian, the way the Soviet Union or other East Bloc state-socialist nations might have been called, nor even, for that matter, member of the East Bloc at all. Yugoslavia was a non-aligned country, and not just any of them, but one of the five founders of the Non-Aligned Movement of states (NAM).
Yugo was pseudo-commie. Everything was taken care of. Not bad, really, considering. But some people could not leave the rest of us alone.
And the lies never stop.
What a sad story. The only thing stopping me from crying is remembering that you ruined our generation by starting a war and attacking everyone in the neighborhood. Yeah, military jeep, how scary. Try years with no water, living in shelters, feeding refugees in your high-school gym, cluster bombs taking children's legs, losing friends and family, having to leave your country. Try death.
Wasnt so hard to smuggle. When the customs agents asked you if you had something to declare you just no and if you werent suspicious that was it.
... to denounce socialist ideas by giving the failed state-socialist states the same name as fascist states, thereby trying to blur the crucial differences between both. The "totalitarian theory" that makes such an equation does not seek knowledge about both concepts, it intends a relativization of facist and, significantly, National Socialist crimes.
Actually, I lived in then Yugoslavia, and we actually thought that both USSR and US (for handling of black people, supporting juntas everywhere) are "weirdo" countries on radical political corners, and we are normal people in the middle of the road. Now, with all info I have, I still think that was pretty accurate description of what was going on. Calling Yugoslavia "dictatorship" or even "totalitarian" is laughable for people who lived there.
839*929
Correction: Yugoslavia _was_ for Cows. It no longer exists, and in any event, it was a very short-lived State, from 1945 to 1991.
So your point is moot.
The good thing about computers is that generally once they become of value to the government and import restrictions are imposed, a better one can be made using just raw metal and a vacuum pump (that is by making a electronic valve). People usually don't need a computer, they most likely just have a need for a really well tuned electrically controlled switch.
Did you know that a .su top level domain existed? I learned that recently. That's right, Soviet Russia on the Internet! Didn't last any long at all.
I wonder what would have happened if they had the time to develop 486-level chips for microcomputers. Pseudo-communists with a space station, space shuttle and same consumer high tech as the capitalist pigs.
Reminds me of the story of Richard Garriott's Sputnik 1. It's an actual spare probe prepared by the Soviets in the 1950's as a backup.
When Russia was having a hard time transitioning away from Soviet rule in the 90's, Soviet space stuff was being auctioned for ridiculously low prices.
Richard snapped up the spare Sputnik for a bargain, and disassembled it to get it past customs. His team unscrewed the metal sphere into two halves and presented them as "new-age salad bowls" to customs officials.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10...
Table-ized A.I.
I even know people who have done IT in Massachusetts.
I have the same impression based on the fact that many years ago when I lived in Sweden, I had plenty of "Yugoslav" friends who traveled back and forth during holidays. I haven't kept in touch so I don't know what nationality they now profess but clearly they were not nationalists on any side of the Yugoslav states. But has the thought struck you that the guy who wrote that wants to exaggerate his achievement and his difficulties or just tell a better story? Haven't you noticed that plenty of semi-successful people exaggerate their difficult childhood/poverty/whatever else they think people will believe? An outsider can be naïve but is usually less partial.
I agree. This guy hasn't achieved much except for creating the first home grown home computer of his country. But I am sure that your rich Yugoslav friends who travelled all over the world did so much more, mostly smoking weed.
want for us in the US. They don't want to allow us to have computers. That's why you should never vote for them.
Oh, please. The average /.er calls America "totalitarian", which it still isn't, even though the reach of its surveillance powers make Tito look like a liberal princess.
Yugoslavia was not a totalitarian state, at least not in the sense of the Communist bloc style: it was a socialist state run by a Communist party, and it it is true that it wasn't as free as the Western Europe. On the other hand, the amount of freedom in Yugoslavia was an anomaly for such a state: if you keep out of politics you were free to do as you please, and there were even some small forms of private entrepreneurship. You could travel the world freely. Take up any job. Seek work abroad. Own a car or two. Have your private land and your private house. Computers in Yugoslavia weren't banned outright: in fact, almost every Republic in Federation (Yugoslavia was a federation) had at some point at least one company producing computers using local knowledge and expertise; it was the time of 8-bit computing era, and while the computers weren't as good as Commodore and Spectrum, or Apple II or Atari ST, they were produced nevertheless and used in schools; some more professional ones (running CP/M) were used as business computers as well. Given the fact that the state was a conservative one, there was slight paranoia when it got to computers and computing power: for a really long time, any machine that had >=64K of RAM memory was banned, due to the fear that the powerful computing device could be used by the enemy to calculate trajectories for big guns, or even calculate effects of a nuclear blast. (no, I'm not making up this one :-)
People used to contraband ZX Spectrum and Commodore 64 (banned, mind you! 64K!) computers into the state and sell them for extra profit. The customs officers were not iron-fisted, so there was a prolific number of those 8-bit computers in Yugoslavia, and the market for pirated games was so huge, some people bought cars or even houses with the profits. There was a relatively limited market for computers made in Yugoslavia, mainly because they were regarded as inferior to the Western computers, and every kid wanted "the real thing".
I'm not saying that Voja Antoni does not know what he's talking about. He's a hell of a legend here, one of the first generation of hackers that influenced a great number of younger people to become successful professionals today. It's just that the situation while certainly not free, wasn't a totalitarian Soviet-style big brother state that banned things it did not understand. Quite contrary, Yugoslavia was more open to learning new things than any of the ex-Yu states are today.
Maybe the best description of the times would be of a state that was "curiously afraid" of those new things, them computers.
I came here because I was surprised by the term "totalitarian" used to describe Yugoslavia. I'm glad to see that others who knew the country have already started to debunk the sensationalist (but mainly very ignorant) "journalism".
While I didn't live there, I had it's passport, and travelled there often for holidays and to visit family. While Tito did imprison some opponents, it seems to have been mainly would-be nationalist leaders. We all saw what happened when they and their ideas were left loose. (Which also shows that imprisoning people with dangerous ideas is usually not a good long-term solution).
But Yugoslavia definitely didn't feel like a totalitarian regime. Tito helped to free his country from the Nazis, and then a couple of years later freed it from the Soviet influence. Finally, he was among the founders of the Non-Aligned Countries Movement. Unlike the US, Yugoslavia didn't order or help any killing of elected leaders in other countries, nor did it support fascist military regimes in other continents.
You're confusing "totalitarian" with "authoritarian". Authoritarianism is the lack of limits on state power. Totalitarianism is when the state actually uses that lack of limits to institute a pervasive, total control of the populace in all aspects of their lives. Remember that the word was actually used in its proper meaning in a positive sense by the very people that we recognize as the first conscious totalitarians today: Italian fascists. Mussolini defined it as "everything within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state".
Having achieved great things does not immunize you from wanting to exaggerate those things or how bad your starting point was. Some people are driven to do great things due to feelings of constant inferiority and hence the accomplishments are not enough if they seem to have started as a "regular Joe". They have to be by a "child of an abusive single mom in the poorest slum that got beaten every day in school and had to work ten jobs to get a degree". I wish I were kidding but I know people like that.
Oh, and where do you get the crazy idea that my friends were rich? Do you understand that they were immigrants in Sweden and hence near the bottom (not speaking the language all that well excludes you from quite a few jobs). Admittedly in a country where the bottom is fairly high even on a first world scale and all immigrants there travel back and forth to their countries of origin unless war or risk of "disappearing" makes it completely impossible.
I thought his point was mooooooooooot.