21–30 of 153 posts
Many Poles have distinguished themselves in various fields of science and life. I recognize Madame Curie, Copernicus, Ulam, Pope John Paul II, Chopin, Polanski, and perhaps Wozniak. I had a Polish professor at Mellon University who talked a bit about it, and there was a lot.
Many Poles have distinguished themselves in various fields of science and life. I recognize Madame Curie, Copernicus, Ulam, Pope John Paul II, Chopin, Polanski, and perhaps Wozniak. I had a Polish professor at Mellon University who talked a bit about it, and there was a lot.
> Thus in 1970, the Microcomputers Plant was established. Located in Warsaw, it employed Polish workers but used British components and financing – the required parts weren’t available in Poland and the communists weren’t at all eager to throw money at the project.... > 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,…
No. The genius was in the design and how the components were used.
> It seems entirely legitimate to me for the Communists to have favored a more secure supply chain.
It mentions in the article that the bottleneck with getting components that were high quality was that the local government did not want to spend the money to develop their own secure supply chain.
He demonstrated a proof of concept. If they were concerned about national security, they could have made it a priority to get him equivalent components.
Not that I want to be Debbie downer but as always in case of Polish (which I am also are) overexaggerated and having that strange believe that if not the communists Poland would be a global superpower. Its enough to go the wiki (both about the computer and the inventor) to see that the situation was not that clear. The performance was greatly overstated, it depended on the import of the component from the west etc. M…
> 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.
"The first machine was built by the Poles and was a hand operated multiple enigma machine."
There were polish contributors to the general idea of computation. But computation is not the same thing as modern computer. No serious person can view the bomba as a 'modern computer'. It took the discovery of the transistor to give birth to the modern computer.
> 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.
Poland doesn't that the population, resources, etc for that. Whatever great innovators poland would have possibly had in your alternate universe would have been siphoned off by germany, russia, britain, france, US, etc. There is a reason why so many renowned poles pre-ww2 made their contributions outside of poland.
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.
> Thus in 1970, the Microcomputers Plant was established. Located in Warsaw, it employed Polish workers but used British components and financing – the required parts weren’t available in Poland and the communists weren’t at all eager to throw money at the project.... > 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,…
My feeling from the article was that he worked outside the box, and THAT was simply unacceptable to the authorities, no matter how good the underlying technology was.
Many Poles have distinguished themselves in various fields of science and life. I recognize Madame Curie, Copernicus, Ulam, Pope John Paul II, Chopin, Polanski, and perhaps Wozniak. I had a Polish professor at Mellon University who talked a bit about it, and there was a lot.
I don't know the names, but I recall there was a large Polish contribution to Allied codebreaking in WWII.
> It’s believed that Karpiński paved the way for today’s common use of paging in computer memory systems. 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 ou…
>Thus in 1970, the Microcomputers Plant was established. Located in Warsaw, it employed Polish workers but used British components and financing.
The British were involved in every step.
> It’s believed that Karpiński paved the way for today’s common use of paging in computer memory systems. 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 ou…
Many Poles have distinguished themselves in various fields of science and life. I recognize Madame Curie, Copernicus, Ulam, Pope John Paul II, Chopin, Polanski, and perhaps Wozniak. I had a Polish professor at Mellon University who talked a bit about it, and there was a lot.
I don't know the names, but I recall there was a large Polish contribution to Allied codebreaking in WWII.