21–30 of 121 posts
Given that (afaik) the Apple II logic would have all been jelly bean logic or otherwise off the shelf parts did they really reverse engineer ICs?
The USSR did make their own Z80 and 8080 clones later though. There existed an IBM PC compatible built completely out of Soviet-made parts. A lot of fully localized ZX Spectrum clones as well, of varying degree of homebrewness. Those were very popular in the late 80s and early 90s from what I gather, but I'm too young to have used one myself.
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 f…
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…
How could that be possible? Imports had to be made in hard currency which was incredibly scarce in the Soviet Bloc (a VCR cost couple years of engineer's income on a black market), and was hard to obtain both for official/communist enterprises, and private individuals. Locally made stuff was bound to be a lot cheaper.
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…
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.
What the heck is this psycho-mysticism.
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…
The author asks why did the communists always clone things despite having engineers who could have designed their own? You don't need an LLM to answer this. The book "Chip Wars" is a really good history of Silicon Valley and has a section on the Soviet chip industry, how it was structured and why it cloned chips instead of designing their own.
The Soviets didn't just clone computers but most of their advanced tech. Partly it was just mandated top-down. You had dictators at the top who were there, as the author observes, because they were just more aggressive and swivel-eyed than anyone else. They mandated cloning, so cloning is what happened because everyone was afraid of them.
But that doesn't really answer the question. Cloning things isn't just an attribute of one specific set of leaders in the Soviet era. All communist countries are like this. Western AI labs keep claiming the Chinese labs are distilling them like crazy, and we know Anthropic has anti-distillation measures hidden inside Claude Code so it's not just a PR thing, they do believe it's happening for real.
It always happens because leftism rejects the role of the capitalist in society. Capitalists are workers whose output is voluntary coordination across complex projects. If you kill them all then you have a society that's unable to create voluntary coordination across complex projects. The immediate consequence is that the economy goes haywire because without capitalists nobody knows how much or what to produce; the USSR solved this by having spies steal price lists. But you also can't run a novel chip design programme. That would require finding the right people with the right skills, encouraging innovation by giving them a cut of the rewards, and other things you aren't allowed to do in leftist regimes. So ... they just couldn't produce voluntary coordination. And thus to get anything done outside the military they had to steal the output of western capitalists by just copying whatever their teams were doing, down to the last detail.
Also that Bulgaria invested into some semiconductor manufacturer in Singapore to maintain uninterrupted access to the components.