Eastern bloc computers are so fascinating to me. The soviets were pretty bad at it, but the germans were doing pretty well all things considered. It's also fascinating how much they liked DEC, at least architecturally
A communist Apple II and fourteen years of not knowing what you're testing
91–100 of 121 posts
Re: A communist Apple II and fourteen years of not knowing what you're testing
#92Earlier 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…
...or as the post-'68 West-German joke goes: "When two leftists meet, 3 splinter groups are formed", doesn't quite roll off the tounge like the German version "Treffen sich zwei Linke: bilden sich 3 Splittergruppen."
Indeed. It is quite fascinating how that is simultaneously a wide-spread view of the left, while at the same time the left is regularly accused of being all collectivist. Some left wing ideologies are decidedly collectivist. Some are going equally far in the other direction...
Re: A communist Apple II and fourteen years of not knowing what you're testing
#93If you grow up in that environment (restricted by government in some areas and liberated in others) you’ll start seeing systems very differently. The game plays differently with different rules.
They had Pravets computers and robotic arms in rural classrooms in places that didn’t have traffic lights, or English teachers. Chess and Math competitions as well, were accessible everywhere. Those were all self-feedback mechanisms that are cheap but allow an interested individual to iterate infinitely to reach advanced levels. Even if only a tiny subset of any population has the cognitive surplus to meddle with programming and math, they had easy access to fulfill that and be found. In the US, schools enable that with sports, which monetize as entertainment venues. In the Eastern Block they had that with brains. As soon as the stupid restrictions on travel were lifted, the brains knew to leave the other restrictions and immigrate to places that reward cognitive surplus.
Intelligence builds with reinforcement learning on context that gives you feedback - which makes it easy to iterate on. If you’re not making those types of games/tools/systems available to kids, you are going to lose that generation to more attention grabbing stuff like Youtube or sports.
Re: A communist Apple II and fourteen years of not knowing what you're testing
#94Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think it is even simpler than you suggest. Cloning an established product is more efficient in terms of both effort (even if costs are subsidized turnaround time is still a measurable physical quantity) and politics (nobody ever got fired for cloning -- if the clone becomes popular, you win, if the clone does not become popular, the West loses). It is the difference between "safety" and "liveness" (the two kinds of…
> if the clone does not become popular, the West loses How? if the original product being cloned is popular, isn't the west still winning?
I think the OP meant "if the cloned item becomes popular 'in the west'".
Re: A communist Apple II and fourteen years of not knowing what you're testing
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
It wasn't that, not at the start. Soviets were cloning US semiconductors right from the very first days of the industries existence when they were mostly selling chips to the US military. There wasn't a huge consumer base back then keeping them afloat, and the Soviet chip industry was highly prioritized by the Kremlin. They even built an entire city called Zelenograd just to house the semiconductor workforce.
The Soviets did try to design their own chips in the beginning. But it was a lost cause because they simply couldn't keep up with the advances of the West.
Re: A communist Apple II and fourteen years of not knowing what you're testing
#96Earlier quoted context omitted.
> All "actual communist societies", have been run marxist-leninists or regimes supporting derivations of it, In other words, real communism has never been tried.
If you believe "real communism" can not be achieved by marxism-leninism, then that would be a conclusion. I intentionally did not make any claim like that, because that is wildly subjective and contentious. You're entirely free to think these regimes are "real communism" - I have no interest in that argument. What, however, is not subjective, is that the stated ideology of all of these regimes is derived from ML, and…
> communist ideologies outside of ML
Color me intrigued. Any good books to recommend?
Re: A communist Apple II and fourteen years of not knowing what you're testing
#97Refreshing interconnection of topics.
First home “Apple //e” was in Africa, using a Korean improvement on the Apple ][+ adding lowercase and memory and more. It was lugged in by Korean ambassador's son and remained a better performer than the Apple //e once that came out.
Once I started looking for the history, I've never found what that Korean machine was.
Next came Apple IIc which ran circles around it. Then Fat Mac, SE, SE/30… but that's a different story.
Re: A communist Apple II and fourteen years of not knowing what you're testing
#98If you grow up in that environment (restricted by government in some areas and liberated in others) you’ll start seeing systems very differently. The game plays differently with different rules. They had Pravets computers and robotic arms in rural classrooms in places that didn’t have traffic lights, or English teachers. Chess and Math competitions as well, were accessible everywhere. Those were all self-feedback mec…
>Even if only a tiny subset of any population has the cognitive surplus to meddle with programming and math, they had easy access to fulfill that and be found.
This is exactly 100% not true. Source: I grew up behind the Iron Curtain. Why some people are so ready to glamorize poverty and restrictions, I don't even understand.
Not every school had computers, and those which do, often had the fear of something being broken as the main guiding principle. Sure, some teachers were understanding and gaining their trust you could get some time for experiments. But it was rare. In a school "where there was no traffic lights" you would definitely find no "robotic arms" really (I can't even guess where this sci-fi bs came from). And you would rather only allowed to press spacebar when told so under close supervision.
Getting a computer at home wasn't easy either. That DIY culture appeared from the need more than from fun, but it wasn't available for all anyway. Knowing how-to is a barrier in itself for a kid, but try getting all necessary parts at first. Those were societies of constant "defitsit", and one needed connections and/or good money to obtain even simple things. On my block there were exactly 1 kid with self-built computer and you would need to fight for his favors. And anyway those machines were often more like primitive gaming consoles with very limited programming possible.
So in fact majority of late-socialism programming enthusiats grew in families where parents could bring their children to the work and let them play with computers there. Which is minority of minority.
Re: A communist Apple II and fourteen years of not knowing what you're testing
#99Earlier quoted context omitted.
Cost can't be the true reason. In a planned economy, the customer base doesn't matter. If the state wants to allocate X number of engineers to do Y, it simply does, at the expense of whatever other project is considered politically less important. The fact that the customers' demands have no influence on resource allocation, except to the extent that bureaucrats decide it's politically convenient to address them, is…
It may not have been the only reason, but cost was absolutely a major real reason. In a planned economy, cost does not disappear. Skilled engineers, specialized materials and equipment are all still scarce. Semiconductors are literally the most sophisticated manufactured products and require the most complex supply chains. The Soviet Union was notoriously bad at coordination between ministries, state agencies, design…
Of course in any economy, there are scarce resources, and skilled labor is certainly one of them. What I'm specifically arguing against is the assertion that in a planned economy, the existence or lack of a customer base would in any real way impact the allocation of those resources. That's not a helpful way to analyze the decisions of the communist planning committee.
Re: A communist Apple II and fourteen years of not knowing what you're testing
#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you believe "real communism" can not be achieved by marxism-leninism, then that would be a conclusion. I intentionally did not make any claim like that, because that is wildly subjective and contentious. You're entirely free to think these regimes are "real communism" - I have no interest in that argument. What, however, is not subjective, is that the stated ideology of all of these regimes is derived from ML, and…
> communist ideologies outside of ML Color me intrigued. Any good books to recommend?
Nothing springs to mind that gives a good overview without going to primary sources. It's been literal decades since I spent time reading up on a wide range of these ideologies.
This Wikipedia list is reasonably comprehensive: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_communist_ideologies
The main split is between "right-communists" and "left-communists" (hence Lenins "Left Wing Communism: An infantile disorder"; the Bolsheviks were considered "right"), where the "left" are those who rejected ML/Leninism on the basis of "democratic" centralism and the idea of a vanguard party.
Most of the anti-ML ideologies like council communism, anarcho-communism, libertarian Marxism are in that category.
Perhaps texts by Joseph Dejacques, Kropotkin, Rosa Luxembourg, Emma Goldman would give a reasonable introduction to those.