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A communist Apple II and fourteen years of not knowing what you're testing

llama.gs

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Re: A communist Apple II and fourteen years of not knowing what you're testing

#11

Post by summa_tech »

gostsamo wrote: post #9
summa_tech wrote: post #8

This was a fascinating article, because I've seen so many results of the Eastern Bloc reverse-engineering efforts basically founder into obscurity. Many of these re-created (sometimes with minor variations, or quite novel and ingenious implementation choices) computers were made in small series, but could not compete against illegal imports, and in any case would only be briefly popular in their local university town…

Bulgarian is phonetic to a large degree so if you know the sound associated to a letter, you can understandably pronounce it as well. Regarding communism and computing, deterministic systems where the entire state is knowable and predictible have certain appeal for the communist mind. If you search in the HN archives, you might find even more stories about the bulgarian computer industry with a MIT publication in the…

You know, I never thought about it that way. But you're making a lot of sense here. And in older sci-fi literature, after a very early period of distrust of the concept, cybernetics as a component / enabler of perfect collectivist society did show up, before - as you said - the West advanced too far away from the local state of the art.

Also, as a broader view of your point, perhaps technocratic communism degenerates by giving way to bureaucratic communism.

Re: A communist Apple II and fourteen years of not knowing what you're testing

#12

Post by unmole »

gostsamo wrote: post #9
summa_tech wrote: post #8

This was a fascinating article, because I've seen so many results of the Eastern Bloc reverse-engineering efforts basically founder into obscurity. Many of these re-created (sometimes with minor variations, or quite novel and ingenious implementation choices) computers were made in small series, but could not compete against illegal imports, and in any case would only be briefly popular in their local university town…

Bulgarian is phonetic to a large degree so if you know the sound associated to a letter, you can understandably pronounce it as well. Regarding communism and computing, deterministic systems where the entire state is knowable and predictible have certain appeal for the communist mind. If you search in the HN archives, you might find even more stories about the bulgarian computer industry with a MIT publication in the…

> Regarding communism and computing, deterministic systems where the entire state is knowable and predictible have certain appeal for the communist mind.

Francis Spufford explores this idea in Red Plenty, which I highly recommend. More broadly, I think the book would appeal to many HN readers.

Re: A communist Apple II and fourteen years of not knowing what you're testing

#13

Post by ergonaught »

ipeev wrote: post #10

I think my reaction is mostly puzzlement. I can see a sensible point or several in the article, but I was not always sure how big a point the author was trying to make. At the narrower level, it seems to be saying that benchmarks are easier to interpret when you know what they really are. That makes sense. If a circuit is known to be a multiplier, that tells you more than if it is just called `c6288`. That is also wh…

"The Moral" section seemed to quite explicitly state the "real point".

Re: A communist Apple II and fourteen years of not knowing what you're testing

#15

Post by gostsamo »

summa_tech wrote: post #11
gostsamo wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bulgarian is phonetic to a large degree so if you know the sound associated to a letter, you can understandably pronounce it as well. Regarding communism and computing, deterministic systems where the entire state is knowable and predictible have certain appeal for the communist mind. If you search in the HN archives, you might find even more stories about the bulgarian computer industry with a MIT publication in the…

You know, I never thought about it that way. But you're making a lot of sense here. And in older sci-fi literature, after a very early period of distrust of the concept, cybernetics as a component / enabler of perfect collectivist society did show up, before - as you said - the West advanced too far away from the local state of the art. Also, as a broader view of your point, perhaps technocratic communism degenerates…

One thing to understand about communism is that lots of people believed in it, but for the most part the communist elites considered it a feudal system where one's access to resources made them valuable and gave them power. Anything that would provide the higher ups transparency and accountability would be ruinous for the balance of power and therefore met significant pushback. There was never a technocratic communism because idealists would be either defanged to act as specialist executor clas or outright removed as unreliable players.

Regarding computer usage, it was increasing to the very end, but the desolution of the USSR stopped it and the industry was destroyed in the following crises. The elites tried to modernize the economies, but it was too little too late.

Re: A communist Apple II and fourteen years of not knowing what you're testing

#16

Post by yehat »

I know there's predominant thinking that "communism" existed somewhere, but in fact it doesn't. It was the ideology developed in the West and brutally imported into the East. Why I say that and why it matters to understand the difference? Because there was no "communist" thinking behind the motivation to do whatever by the ordinary people. There was something deeper that manifested in a way that many people mistake for "communist" thinking. And that's natural, because people's thinking is not same in the West as in the East, and even more in far-East. Ok, enough on that, everyone's right to call it whatever they want, just pitching some clues that can help avoiding the cliché. My journey also started when first seeing IMKO-2 in 1984, then there was a popular magazine for the young "engineers" called "МЛАД КОНСТРУКТОР" (full archive here https://drive.google.com/uc?export=download&id=0Bw941VGG9Tjc... )that started publishing a course of BASIC. So I learned virtually and even wrote programs on paper before the first actual contact with the computer, which happened 1 year later on the newly acquired by my school couple of PRAVETZ-82.

Re: A communist Apple II and fourteen years of not knowing what you're testing

#17

Post by NitpickLawyer »

unmole wrote: post #12
gostsamo wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bulgarian is phonetic to a large degree so if you know the sound associated to a letter, you can understandably pronounce it as well. Regarding communism and computing, deterministic systems where the entire state is knowable and predictible have certain appeal for the communist mind. If you search in the HN archives, you might find even more stories about the bulgarian computer industry with a MIT publication in the…

> Regarding communism and computing, deterministic systems where the entire state is knowable and predictible have certain appeal for the communist mind. Francis Spufford explores this idea in Red Plenty , which I highly recommend. More broadly, I think the book would appeal to many HN readers.

Some explorations with an AI overlord also in LeGuin's "The Dispossessed"

Re: A communist Apple II and fourteen years of not knowing what you're testing

#18

Post by flomo »

> A limitation, but also an engineering decision that had a certain brutal elegance: you get one alphabet at a time, comrade, and you will type in capitals.

Same decision with the capitalist American Apple II, only upper case letters unless you added some additional board.

Re: A communist Apple II and fourteen years of not knowing what you're testing

#20

Post by exmadscientist »

> For fourteen years... nobody — nobody — knew what these circuits were actually supposed to compute.

This is utterly, utterly mind-boggling to me. Seriously no one had any curiosity to look in to these things for 14 years? I mean, I guess someone was bored somewhere along the way, but usually that sort of thing becomes an open secret... not here, I guess.

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