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The TLDR version is this: > Karpiński’s computer could be so small and resilient because it used Western components. Even though they were vital to the functioning of the K-202, [...] they were elements imported from beyond the Iron Curtain and used in the sensitive field of information processing.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> strange believe that if not the communists Poland would be a global superpower I think it's fair to consider Poland the birthplace of the modern computer: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bomba_(cryptography) Maybe not a global superpower, but it is very easy to me to imagine a Poland not destroyed by Nazi then communist rule being an innovation center of the world.
According to that link, The Martians were Hungarian :-P
> Karpiński’s computer could be so small and resilient because it used Western components. Even though they were vital to the functioning of the K-202, they might have raised suspicion among the authorities of the Eastern Bloc, as they were elements imported from beyond the Iron Curtain and used in the sensitive field of information processing.
What the superior performance of his machine mainly due to the Western components he was using?
The article makes it seem he was treated very unfairly so as to favor his competitors (and maybe he was), but it seems entirely legitimate to me for the Communists to have favored a more secure supply chain, given the political situation at the time.
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Man you really should have read the article to understand that the main competitor to the K-202 had ties to the Communist government and was able to get production shut down. There was also some concern over the number of western parts inside of the K-202, so a modern equivalent would be closer to the U.S. banning of Huawei hardware in U.S. cell networks, where the hardware is cheaper and superior, but we ban it beca…
What do you think regulatory capture is? The exact same behavior, and we have it all over our society. The parallels to OpenAI are obvious. And if you look... sure enough, the board has multiple people connected directly to the bowels of federal government.
Granted, I don't think OpenAI is 1/10000th as interesting as microcomputers were, but it's still nauseating to see people take aforementioned bleating seriously.
So, I didn't know anything about the K-202, so this is very interesting to me.
However, are we sure that it influenced anything, given that only about 230 of them were ever made, and those were destroyed at the factory? How would knowledge of his team's innovations, let alone specific information, have leaked out to western computer designers from within Soviet Poland? If it did, was the mechanism... espionage, published research, what?
A couple things that I think add some useful context, having spent some of my life in other post-soviet countries:
- In Communist theory (at least as Marx and Lenin saw it) business competition was a destructive force and one of the "inherent contradictions" of capitalism. So if another project was deemed to be better, that was justification enough for shutting down other enterprises.
- Also, during this time under soviet communism, the most common measure of manufacturing was in kilograms output. Karpiński working on a small run of small computers would not have looked impressive to officials in the least.
- Importing western materials and parts was not expressly forbidden (though certainly not politically popular). But Poland (like a lot of Soviet countries) was undergoing a currency crunch. Possession of foreign currency was illegal and importing materials did not do favorable things for their "fake" exchange rates. The operation was probably contingent on generating more foreign dollars than they spent.
- Computers in general were viewed skeptically as Western excesses that either wasted time or stole jobs. So making boring calculating machines for accounting or scientific research could be seen as acceptable - but small, cheap, Western style micro-computers were another matter.
- The fact that Karpiński spent a lot of time in the West and knew people and understood English and was not a party member makes it shocking he even got to spin up the enterprise in the first place. Had he not won the UNESCO award, he probably wouldn't have even made it as far as he did.
- Getting banning from your vocation and getting a visa was unfortunately a very common method of getting dissapeared. He probably also lost housing privilege as well - hence moving out to the country and raising pigs.