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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

#41

Post by unmole »

vidarh wrote: post #34
keybored wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The incredible things I read on this site. The communist mind? Oh right, there’s a book for that, and it’s probably agreeable to people on this site. What the heck is this psycho-mysticism.

It's a fascinating exercise in antrhopology to see otherwise smart people confidently discuss the mind of people most of them have had no exposure to in person. Having spoken to a variety of people across the very broad spectrum of left-wing thought, ranging from libertarian marxists opposing the very existence of a state, to hardline marxism-leninists who thought the former group belonged in labour camps, I find the…

Yeah, real communism has never been tried. /s

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

#43

Post by anovikov »

gostsamo wrote: post #38
anovikov wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Was there "communist mind" in Bulgaria? Which is same as asking - did you guys perceive Communism as something homegrown, something of your own - "your take on how it is best to develop a country", or something forcibly imposed on you by the Soviets? Bulgaria was seen with disdain in the Soviet Union as seen as a country where little but tomatoes were made (even if we knew it wasn't really the case), so in our Soviet…

I used "communist mind" as a collective term for the ideological framework in which computers were discussed. The state had a party and the party had an ideology and the ideology legitimized the other two, hence all actions of the state and the party had to be justified through it. It does not mean some other kind of consciousness that allowed one to be closer to the ghost of Marx or whatever some people seem to ascr…

My question wasn't about liking the 'socialism' or not as much, more about seeing it as something of your own - no matter if good or bad, or something that your enemies imposed on you by force?

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

#44

Post by gambiting »

anovikov wrote: post #24
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…

>could not compete against illegal imports 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.

At least in Poland it was semi-common that if you had any family abroad they could send you dollars. So yeah a soviet computer was in theory cheaper but it was impossible to buy, or you could just walk into PEWEX and walk out with an actual commodore 64 bought with dollars that you "happened" to have. Of course, PEWEX stores were fully state-sanctioned enterprises, not illegal imports.

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

#45

Post by vidarh »

mike_hearn wrote: post #36
vidarh wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a fascinating exercise in antrhopology to see otherwise smart people confidently discuss the mind of people most of them have had no exposure to in person. Having spoken to a variety of people across the very broad spectrum of left-wing thought, ranging from libertarian marxists opposing the very existence of a state, to hardline marxism-leninists who thought the former group belonged in labour camps, I find the…

All actual communist societies work the same way, so it's clearly possible to generalize.

All "actual communist societies", have been run by marxist-leninists or regimes supporting derivations of it, which is a couple from dozens of ideologies within the umbrella. So, sure, you can generalize about those regimes. That still does not speak to any unified "communist mind". Those regimes have collectively murdered vast numbers of proponents of other communist ideologies.

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

#46

Post by gambiting »

mike_hearn wrote: post #37
actionfromafar wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but, wasn't the prices fixed for stuff? I imagine there must have been things which were either cheap to buy, or which could easily "disappear" from a production line and sold in the West for more than it was worth on the other side of the curtain.

You couldn't just go and sell stuff in the west. The USSR had exit visas. You had to prove you had a genuine need to leave, would be searched and treated very carefully. And proving a need to leave was difficult. Merely wanting to go on holiday or see relatives wasn't close to enough. There were very few exit visas available, which is why stories about defectors are often about elite athletes or sports champions. htt…

>>Also the Soviets manufactured very little of anything valuable to the west. Their primary exports were commodities.

Time to mention the story of how Pepsi Co briefly had one of the largest navies in the world, because CCCP couldn't settle its debt to Pepsi with cash, so they accepted several warships instead.

https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/soviet-union-pepsi-shi...

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

#47

Post by vidarh »

unmole wrote: post #41
vidarh wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a fascinating exercise in antrhopology to see otherwise smart people confidently discuss the mind of people most of them have had no exposure to in person. Having spoken to a variety of people across the very broad spectrum of left-wing thought, ranging from libertarian marxists opposing the very existence of a state, to hardline marxism-leninists who thought the former group belonged in labour camps, I find the…

Yeah, real communism has never been tried. /s

Strawman - at no point did I make that claim. It has no relevance to my comment.

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

#48

Post by Joker_vD »

mike_hearn wrote: post #29
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…

Quite a few words in Bulgarian are similar to words in other European languages, just written in a different alphabet. I briefly dated a girl in Bulgaria years ago and was surprised at how quickly I could find my way around by reading street signs, applying knowledge of French and German, etc. The author asks why did the communists always clone things despite having engineers who could have designed their own? You do…

> why did the communists always clone things despite having engineers who could have designed their own?

Well, because they didn't always clone things, you know. But when they decided to, it was almost always pitched as "okay, we're 10/20/30 years behind in this industry, if we try to repeat that path from the zero, we'll never catch up — let's start at near of their cutting edge, and go from there".

> the USSR solved this by having spies steal price lists.

Oh, that's a story I'd like to hear.

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

#49

Post by bojan »

anovikov wrote: post #25
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…

Was there "communist mind" in Bulgaria? Which is same as asking - did you guys perceive Communism as something homegrown, something of your own - "your take on how it is best to develop a country", or something forcibly imposed on you by the Soviets? Bulgaria was seen with disdain in the Soviet Union as seen as a country where little but tomatoes were made (even if we knew it wasn't really the case), so in our Soviet…

Serbs liked it because our implementation was different (albeit also unsustainable), and we were not forcefully dependent on the Soviet Union.

For example, my father was able to buy a Beta VCR in the late 80s on his engineer's salary, it took him three months of intense saving.

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

#50

Post by unmole »

mike_hearn wrote: post #29
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…

Quite a few words in Bulgarian are similar to words in other European languages, just written in a different alphabet. I briefly dated a girl in Bulgaria years ago and was surprised at how quickly I could find my way around by reading street signs, applying knowledge of French and German, etc. The author asks why did the communists always clone things despite having engineers who could have designed their own? You do…

You're eliding the more prosaic and direct explanation for why the Soviets were forced to clone chips instead of designing systems from scratch: cost. The American semiconductor industry had a vast civilian customer base that let it recoup R&D expenses. The Soviets didn’t. Chip Wars covers this in detail with numbers.
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