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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.
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.)
"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!
Statistics are the new superstition.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
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).
... 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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
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
A 1-bit rand function...
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
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.
"A 1-bit rand function..."
No, by now that would at least rand(6).
I even know people who have done IT in Massachusetts.
Sure, now, in the west. But then, particularly in the soviet bloc, it's 1 bit
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
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'm intrigued as to what the inputs to this algorithm were. You know, garbage in = garbage out and all that. Especially given that (I assume this predates genetic tests and ultrasound) things like roundness of the bump or which tit itches most have been proven again and again and again to be utter bollocks.
Also, don't they have neutral colours there?
I really wonder about Russians sometimes, and not just when they have elections.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
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".