[HN Gopher] Project SPHINX - When the USSR tried to change the c...
___________________________________________________________________
Project SPHINX - When the USSR tried to change the computer (2019)
Author : cunidev
Score : 142 points
Date : 2021-10-25 11:41 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.inexhibit.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.inexhibit.com)
| meepmorp wrote:
| Neat industrial design, but the keyboard looks absolutely awful
| to type on. I realize it probably never got made, but still.
| bserge wrote:
| A surprisingly advanced concept for the 80s, and from the USSR no
| less.
|
| I take it half (or none) of those peripherals didn't work or were
| really bad?
|
| Like, I can say the flat speakers using the tech available at the
| time would've sounded absolutely horrible. And the flat screen
| was very likely just a mockup.
| rbanffy wrote:
| This is a mockup, most likely intended to showcase the vision
| and test the mechanics/ergonomics.
|
| I'd be surprised if anything worked (even if the keys could be
| pressed). It's still a pretty impressive - and prescient design
| though.
| timdiggerm wrote:
| The design is cool, but was any of it actually functional at all?
| helge9210 wrote:
| No.
| helge9210 wrote:
| What you see at the pictures is all USSR industrial complex was
| capable of. And I don't mean the computer. I mean single instance
| of wooden/paper "device" representing how the concept would look
| like.
| nemo44x wrote:
| Like many of their policies, looks good on paper. But the
| reality just doesn't support it as anything practical.
| fsloth wrote:
| That is quite harsh. While no credible consumer goods requiring
| complex manufacture or design come from the former USSR area
| (except of Baltics which retained pre-soviet spirit) to this
| day, the industrial complex managed to create quit a lot of ...
| industrial stuff that they managed to sell around the world.
|
| Some well known examples:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antonov
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UAZ
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mikoyan
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soyuz_(rocket_family)
|
| And of course the list would not be complete without:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kalashnikov_rifle
| pantulis wrote:
| And https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lada_Niva
| helge9210 wrote:
| Most of the stuff in your list was basically produced
| manually in very small quantities. UAZ/AK would be an
| exception, but they were unusable without careful selection
| or manually manufactured replacement parts.
| artem247 wrote:
| SU produced a lot of airplanes, both military and for civil
| use. If that's not an example of complicated industry, I
| don't know what is then.
|
| And with 'modern' capitalism in Ukraine Antonov aircraft
| factory is as good as dead.
| helge9210 wrote:
| Ukraine produced a log of airplanes. Russia-made models
| were always a joke.
| thriftwy wrote:
| Russia (and also Uzbekistan!) produced all the mid- and
| long-haul airliners - Il, Yak and Tu. You don't know what
| you are talking about.
| seanw444 wrote:
| The Kalashnikov rifle family is undoubtedly the most common
| weapon platform in the world (even if only having a slight
| edge in numbers over the AR platform). They made a _lot_ of
| them. And they were quite effective. I 'm no USSR shill,
| but credit must be given where due.
| rsj_hn wrote:
| Kalashnikovs were great. Many Russian things were great
| -- mathematicians, physicists, composers, attack
| helicopters, etc.
| euroderf wrote:
| Kalashnikov's autobiography is worth a read if you're
| into small arms. Most interesting to me was his
| description of how competitors for a large acquisition
| were tested.
| helge9210 wrote:
| > mathematicians
|
| Mostly jews
|
| > physicists
|
| Mostly jews
| thriftwy wrote:
| Is it a good thing or a bad thing for you? Would you
| consider americans of jewish descent not contributing to
| that of USA?
| helge9210 wrote:
| It's not bad or good. Just a fact.
| helge9210 wrote:
| > Kalashnikov rifle family
|
| was a copy of a German design, not independent invention.
|
| > They made a lot of them
|
| Most was just garbage. You'll have to know a year and a
| serial number range to have higher probability of picking
| an actually usable weapon.
| int_19h wrote:
| If you mean StG 44, then no, AK is not in any sense a
| copy of that, or any other design. It is a popular myth,
| but it's completely wrong, and rather evident to anyone
| who has ever seen both rifles disassembled.
|
| Kalashnikov did draw inspiration from other designs, of
| course, same as any other gun designer. M1 Garand was
| arguably the design that influenced it most - most
| notably, the trigger, but also the principle of long-
| stroke piston action. This is further supported by
| Kalashnikov mentioning Garand as one of his favorite
| designs several times. But even then, AK is very much a
| distinct design.
|
| Here's a detailed analysis:
| https://www.thefirearmblog.com/blog/2015/05/05/rifle-
| paterni...
|
| And I have no idea where you got the "most was just
| garbage" claim from. It's certainly not true, and I
| haven't heard it before.
| fsloth wrote:
| While inefficient, the system did create complex things
| that worked more or less as advertized - which is quite far
| from the the claim that the system could not make anything
| real or worthwhile. It's just not a very good system.
| helge9210 wrote:
| There was a joke in Soviet Union:
|
| Americans stole plans for super secret soviet stealth
| fighter. Every time Lockheed-Martin engineers try to
| replicate the design according to documentation they end
| up building steam engine. So Americans kidnap one of the
| Soviet engineers to help them to decipher the design.
| Once he sees the documents he points at the small remark
| at the very end: to get the desired device after building
| a steam engine shape it manually with a file.
|
| This joke is a pretty accurate description of the state
| of precision manufacturing capabilities of USSR. Manually
| created single prototype is not a "complex thing that
| worked".
| fao_ wrote:
| Everyone here saying that the soviets didn't/couldn't build
| computers, there's literally a wikipedia list of Soviet-
| manufactured computers (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Sov
| iet_computer_system...), including this PDP-11 microcomputer:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DVK
| rbanffy wrote:
| A PDP-11 _home computer_ (!) nevertheless.
| buescher wrote:
| Heathkit had the H11 in 1977:
| http://cini.classiccmp.org/heath_h11.htm
| rbanffy wrote:
| It's a shame they didn't out-PC the IBM PC. Such a nice
| machine.
|
| Imagine if everyone had Unix instead of PC-DOS...
| kragen wrote:
| Heathkit was kind of shitty at designing computers. I
| grew up on an H89, a contemporary of the Apple ][, but
| without sound, color, or a memory-mapped character
| generator, and vastly slower in software. It actually had
| a 9600-baud serial link between the computer and the
| screen, which was run by a separate CPU you couldn't
| reprogram without an EPROM burner. Heathkit's HDOS (on
| the H89, no idea about the H-11) was a clone of RT-11,
| not Unix. It wasn't a bad clone but it lacked Unix's
| power and generality.
| rbanffy wrote:
| > It actually had a 9600-baud serial link between the
| computer and the screen, which was run by a separate CPU
| you couldn't reprogram without an EPROM burner.
|
| Such a missed opportunity... it'd be easy to set up a
| memory-based terminal to be read/written at QBUS speed...
| It could have a serial keyboard, as those were relatively
| abundant, and a composite monochrome output.
|
| It'd make a world of difference. And they could sell it
| to DEC customers who used PDP-11's as technical
| workstations. If there were companies using IBM 1130's
| connected to 2250's, there has to be someone who used
| PDP-11's...
| kragen wrote:
| I don't think the H-89 had a QBUS, and you couldn't have
| sold it to DEC customers who used PDP-11s, because it
| wouldn't have been able to run either their software or
| their peripherals. I don't know what kind of display
| hardware the H-11 used.
|
| Terminals of that epoch were full of missed
| opportunities. Woz was smart enough to see them and avoid
| them, but most companies didn't even have a position
| where someone would have been in a position to do what
| Woz did. And that's a major (necessary but not
| sufficient, of course) reason that Apple is bigger than
| Datapoint, Olivetti, Tandem, Heath, Kaypro, and Hewlett-
| Packard today.
| pinewurst wrote:
| The H-100 was really very nice, but it was already too
| late for anything not PC compatible.
| rbanffy wrote:
| Yeah... the H100 is one I'd love to play with.
| kragen wrote:
| I spent a fair bit of time with a Z-100. It was indeed
| pretty great; MS-DOS ("Z-DOS") was a big improvement over
| HDOS, but the graphics were the biggest draw for me,
| being roughly EGA-class. It lacked speed and
| compatibility, though, and IIRC sound. Also, my dad's
| monitor was monochrome, so it lacked color, too. I hated
| that green.
| Kafkish wrote:
| By all accounts, Soviet chip development was ahead of that of
| the US (Intel). Then one day a party official killed the
| project. At least the lead guy found his way to the US and to
| Intel and the rest, as they say, is history.
| thereddaikon wrote:
| Definitely not true. The Soviet electronics industry was
| always a generation behind the US in particular and the west
| in general.
|
| When Victor Belenko defected with his MiG-25 in 1976 the CIA
| found that it was still using vacuum tubes when the US hard
| introduced the F-14 two years earlier which had the world's
| first microprocessor. Although the existence of it was
| classified for decades and until recently it was thought the
| Intel 4004 was the first.
|
| Why they were behind, I'm not sure. They were definitely
| ahead in some other places but the technological gap
| continued to increase the later you got into the cold war.
| arethuza wrote:
| Using vacuum tubes did have some advantages - notably being
| more EMP resistant than normal electronics. Given one of
| the MiG-25's roles was to intercept incoming nuclear
| bombers this was presumably an important requirement.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mikoyan-
| Gurevich_MiG-25#Wester...
| varjag wrote:
| citation needed
| spoonalious wrote:
| Is it? Not every comment needs to be cited; this isn't
| University.
|
| Google Soviet engineer Intel and look at
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_Pentkovski
| varjag wrote:
| Pentkovski was a student when the decision to axe
| domestic development was made.
|
| His achievement is overstated in Russia (mainly from the
| urban legend that his surname led to Pentium). He is a
| great engineer, but Intel never had a shortage of people
| of his caliber.
| Kafkish wrote:
| But he was still good enough to lead the Intel team that
| developed the Pentium III, or is that an overstatement?
|
| From his Wikepedia page:
|
| > At the beginning of 1990s, he immigrated to United
| States where he worked at Intel and led the team that
| developed the architecture for the Pentium III processor
| varjag wrote:
| He was good enough, what's your point though? That
| Pentium 3 (started well over a decade after Soviet
| demise) wouldn't have happened if he hadn't worked at
| Intel?
| Kafkish wrote:
| You gotta at least get your facts right. The Soviet Union
| collapsed in 1991. The Pentium III was released within
| that same decade (Feb. 1999) [1], not "well over a decade
| after Soviet demise".
|
| In the same manner that the US space program would have
| advanced without input from Wernher von Braun [2], the
| development of Pentium III would have happened minus
| Pentkovski, though their presence pushed development
| faster and in directions that the projects would have
| taken longer to reach without them.
|
| [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentium_III [2]
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wernher_von_Braun
| varjag wrote:
| Pentkovski is no von Braun, just one of scores of
| processors engineers in his cohort. That there was
| pentium 2 before him and 4 after him is a pretty solid
| hint.
| jjoonathan wrote:
| It wouldn't be a proper USSR thread without green
| accounts puffing up soviet accomplishments.
| rini17 wrote:
| Yes, there were computer builders all over eastern europe, then
| it was decided cybernetics is "bourgeois pseudoscience" and
| most of them emigrated. They usually ended up in California.
| orbital-decay wrote:
| This comment is entirely misguided. I recommend at least
| reading Wikipedia before commenting. [0]
|
| Cybernetics has little to do with computing. It's just a
| subset of control theory applied to non-technical areas. In
| particular, politics - which of course was considered by
| Stalin/the party as an attack on their authority. So they
| declared cybernetics as bourgeois pseudoscience, after
| Wiener's book got popular.
|
| Communist party's condemnation of cybernetics, which lasted
| whopping 4-5 years in 50s, got absolutely nothing to do with
| either computers, computer science, electronics, or control
| theory as an engineering discipline. In fact it had zero
| effect on anything, it was simply a moral panic in the media.
| Nobody "emigrated to California" (how on Earth?..) as a
| result of that propaganda stunt, in particular because they
| couldn't. Actually, USSR developed their native computers in
| that period and after that. It was long before they decided
| to copy IBM.
|
| I have no idea why cybernetics in USSR became such a meme.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cybernetics_in_the_Soviet_U
| nio...
| rini17 wrote:
| Might be that the cybernetics was only a meme (even so it
| certainly was misapplied to computers by communists, there
| is plenty of evidence), but for example in the case of
| Prof. Svoboda the environment was so problematic and for so
| long time that it led to emigration.
|
| https://www.root.cz/clanky/prichod-hackeru-pribeh-
| profesora-... https://cs.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antonin_Svoboda
| nivenkos wrote:
| It's a shame things ended up this way. Were it not for the
| May 1947 crises, we might have avoided the Cold War entirely
| (though perhaps not, as the Spanish Civil War shows the USSR
| wasn't great at letting allies stay independent, and
| Operation Sunrise on the US side was already treating the
| USSR as hostile).
|
| France and Italy could have had moderate communist
| governments, Yugoslavia would have had closer allies against
| the more authoritarian USSR. Czechoslovakia and Hungary could
| have remained more independent, etc. - no Vietnam war, no
| Prague Spring clampdown, no Cuban missile crisis.
|
| May 1947 crises -
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/May_1947_crises
|
| Operation Sunrise - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_S
| unrise_(World_War_I...
| kapuasuite wrote:
| The Soviet intelligence apparatus spent a good deal of time
| and effort post-1945 ensuring that pretty much every state
| in Eastern and Central Europe would be dominated by the
| local communist party, parties which largely took direction
| from Moscow itself. In some places, like Poland, the
| process began even earlier when the war was still ongoing.
| The idea that they wouldn't have done so if Communist
| governments reigned in France and Italy is laughable.
|
| Read Postwar, by Tony Judt. It's a pretty good roundup of
| what happened in Europe during the post-war era, including
| the start of the Cold War.
| rsj_hn wrote:
| > France and Italy could have had moderate communist
| governments,
|
| The only way any industrialized nation adopts a communist
| regime is with Red Army tanks. There is a reason why no
| communist government has succeeded in any industrialized
| nation -- and it's not for lack of trying. But you just
| can't convert a liberal advanced economy into an
| authoritarian command economy without massive repression.
| There are too many people who own property and land who
| won't agree to be dispossessed.
|
| There has never been any moderate or mild communist regime
| that didn't start out as a repressive regime and just
| mellowed out as successive generations stopped believing in
| it.
|
| But to make that initial mass confiscation of property you
| need true believers and mass democide as class enemies are
| liquidated.
| Yoric wrote:
| > There has never been any moderate or mild communist
| regime that didn't start out as a repressive regime and
| just mellowed out as successive generations stopped
| believing in it.
|
| As a side-note, on the other hand, there have been plenty
| of mild communist municipalities that worked pretty well
| (and some of them still do) in Western Europe, or in
| Israel, for instance.
| rsj_hn wrote:
| > As a side-note, on the other hand, there have been
| plenty of mild communist municipalities that worked
| pretty well (and some of them still do) in Western
| Europe, or in Israel, for instance.
|
| I don't think so. So what makes this work for, say, a
| Kibbutz, is that it's a voluntary association of people
| donating _some_ wealth, and they can also leave the
| Kibbutz when they want and new people can come in
| whenever they want.
|
| Thus the individual Kibbutzniks are almost all
| capitalists, as they continue to have bank accounts,
| brokerage accounts, pension funds, land holdings, etc on
| areas outside the Kibbutz.
|
| Rather the Kibbutz is like a big coop. It's one business
| run cooperatively for the staff, and it's like a summer
| camp for the visitors. But each individual person still
| has their own bank account, and that bank account
| consists of private ownership claims on productive
| capital outside the Kibbutz.
|
| But in a communist economy, you would not be able to
| privately own capital. The "true" communist Kibbutz would
| have its own currency, its own bank, and you would need
| to sell all your assets and donate them to the Kibbutz,
| holding accounts only in the Kibbutz bank that were
| backed only by the business in the Kibbutz. Then you
| couldn't spend the day picking oranges but receive
| dividends from Walmart at the same time.
|
| BTW, in many countries there are coops of all sorts.
| Housing coops, business coops, agricultural coops.
| Capitalism, as a system, is not about banning corporate
| (e.g. group) ownership according to some agreed-upon
| bylaws. But communism _is_ about banning private
| ownership. So capitalist societies have wide varieties of
| ownership structures.
| int_19h wrote:
| There are different flavors. You're broadly correct that
| communism (and, in general, actual socialism, as opposed
| to social democracy that is often mislabelled as
| socialism) is opposed to private ownership of the means
| of production - but it doesn't necessarily translate to
| _banning_ them. Authoritarian varieties generally
| advocate for that. Libertarian ones are more likely to
| say that abstract private property, on the contrary, is
| what requires state enforcement by violence (e.g.
| evicting squatters) - and thus, if you get rid of that
| enforcement, you get rid of private property as such,
| leaving only personal property / right-of-use in place.
|
| (Anarchists would also add that protecting property
| rights by violence is one of the primary functions of any
| state.)
| rsj_hn wrote:
| > Libertarian ones are more likely to say that abstract
| private property, on the contrary, is what requires state
| enforcement by violence (e.g. evicting squatters) - and
| thus, if you get rid of that enforcement, you get rid of
| private property as such, leaving only personal property
| / right-of-use in place.
|
| Right. That is basically how primitive societies (not
| meant as a value judgement) worked. You could own
| whatever you could physically defend, or convince your
| allies to help you defend.
|
| Unfortunately that means that political considerations
| will decide who owns what, at which point a hierarchical
| group will form, and it will be well organized, and it
| will conquer the decentralized society of individuals and
| small communities. So you are left with the eternal
| problems of decentralized societies, which is that they
| are just weaker than centralized societies.
|
| So then you say, we will have a strong hierarchy, but the
| sole purpose of the hierarchy is to guarantee our values,
| and now you are back in the authoritarian camp, and very
| quickly the party that runs the society will be more
| interested in domination than preserving whatever
| founding values they had before.
|
| There is just a big gap between what is intellectually
| appealing, and what is stable and defendable in a hostile
| world.
| alehlopeh wrote:
| Cuba is going on 4 generations now, and so is North
| Korea. It depends how you define a generation, though, I
| guess.
| rsj_hn wrote:
| With Cuba, it's more about how you define communism.
| China has successfully transitioned into a mostly
| capitalist economy while keeping the one party control.
|
| Cuba has also liberalized their economy but is trying to
| keep one party in control. Cuba recognized private
| property in 2018, but even before that time there was a
| huge black market that was tolerated because it provided
| necessary goods and services.
| AtlasBarfed wrote:
| " China has successfully transitioned into a mostly
| capitalist economy while keeping the one party control."
|
| Well, so have we. I'm being 70% sarcastic.
| rsj_hn wrote:
| Can't really argue
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| North Korea is a straightforward feudal monarchy
| decorated with communist trimmings.
|
| While the USSR was effectively a dictatorship it had no
| mechanism for inherited leadership. It was actually more
| like Imperial Rome, with the nominally elected leader
| acting as Emperor until death, in charge of a semi-loyal
| but fractious Senate (Politburo).
|
| Putin reinvented this recently, but without the friction.
|
| The omens strongly imply that Trump would have followed
| the same playbook if he'd won the last election.
| anthk wrote:
| NK is Japanese Fascism in practice with Communist
| propaganda as a showoff to "calm" China and make it their
| ally.
| int_19h wrote:
| USSR was something else, more akin to oligarchic
| theocracies: a state where the means of production are
| owned _collectively_ by the ruling elites. So party
| functionaries enjoyed a significantly better standard of
| living - the higher in the hierarchy, the better - but
| all of that was strictly conditional on being in the
| party (and helping maintain that state of affairs).
|
| In comparison, Imperial Rome had full-fledged private
| property, and it was entirely possible to be rich outside
| of politics, or for a politician to retire and still make
| use of all the capital accumulated by their application
| of power.
|
| (One could also reasonably argue that this is why USSR
| was ultimately dismantled from the inside by the very
| bureacrats who ruled it: they all wanted to secure their
| slice of the pie.)
| nivenkos wrote:
| They had already been elected to the government in both
| Italy and France though, in a coalition with more
| centrist socialist parties.
|
| In both countries they already held ministerial
| positions, so this just isn't true.
|
| In practice they'd likely end up becoming more moderate,
| like happened in San Marino, and eventually France too.
| simonh wrote:
| I think 'communist regime', looking at what the comment
| says about the practical problems such as confiscating
| property, is the institution of an actual communist
| economic system. It's one thing to have communists in
| government, but quite another to actually implement
| communist policies.
| rsj_hn wrote:
| > They had already been elected to the government in both
| Italy and France though, in a coalition with more
| centrist socialist parties.
|
| Sure, communists were elected to the government of the
| Czech republic up until the latest election. That only
| tells you that a share of the nation is radicals --
| enough to elect some radical candidates to represent
| them.
|
| But to actually become a communist nation, you need to
| confiscate the means of production from the rest of the
| nation. First, you don't get that just by winning some
| seats. You don't even get that by winning a majority of
| seats. That's a constitutional rewrite situation, not a
| political party situation. Something like that requires
| seizing control of much of the organs of civil society --
| you have to get courts to not honor private property, for
| instance.
|
| > In both countries they already held ministerial
| positions, so this just isn't true
|
| Holding a ministerial position does not correspond to
| being able to eliminate private ownership of capital. The
| two are rather different.
|
| > In practice they'd likely end up becoming more
| moderate, like happened in San Marino
|
| The Most Serene Republic of San Marino? The 10 square
| mile tourist trap? Now you've lost me. If your claim is
| that these communist ministers would realize that they
| can't actually make their nation communist and just keep
| the name of communism while advocating for vaguely social
| democratic reforms, then absolutely. But that does not
| make the nation a "moderately communist" nation, it makes
| it a social democracy. Or are you one of those people who
| thinks social security is "communism" and your definition
| of a "moderately communist" country is present-day
| France? Is that what you mean?
| nivenkos wrote:
| It doesn't have to happen overnight, they could just
| provide greater support for trade unions and co-
| operatives.
|
| And nationalisation of "private property" and land
| reforms have happened outside of communist governments,
| e.g. in Nasser's Egypt, the Mexican oil reserves,
| Mossadegh and the Iranian oil reserves, the Shah's White
| Revolution, etc.
|
| My whole point is that communism and communist parties
| didn't need to be seen as some radical "other" system,
| but could have become more moderate as society gradually
| accepted strong trade unions, co-operatives, and
| nationalised resources without the Cold War (much like
| the transitions to parliamentary democracy).
| Unfortunately the Cold War polarised everything, and now
| we're stuck with a society where the existence of
| billionaire is sacrosant.
|
| I mentioned San Marino because they were governed by the
| communist party for 10 years, and weren't so extreme -
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sammarinese_Communist_Party
| rsj_hn wrote:
| > I mentioned San Marino because they were governed by
| the communist party for 10 years, and weren't so extreme
| -
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sammarinese_Communist_Party
|
| Because they never tried to make San Marino into a
| communist economy, seeing as how it is not really an
| independent nation with any kind of economic sovereignty.
| The only thing it does is sell its own postage stamps and
| sell some commemorative gold coins. It's a big castle
| surrounded by some vineyards. They make money from
| tourism and duty-free shopping, and of course tax-
| avoidance.
|
| It's like if you elect a communist to be the leader of
| your Elks Lodge, and then praise his moderate communist
| rule.
| blntechie wrote:
| Well, I have no sympathies to communism but the US also
| has not let any communist country alone without meddling
| in its affairs. So it's hard to assess the true outcome,
| for better or worse.
|
| It's like running a performance test while constantly
| unplugging some instances or knocking out power to the
| data center. The results are tainted.
| CryptoPunk wrote:
| The Soviet bloc was sufficiently large that if communism
| was even moderately functional it would have succeeded
| even if the US had managed to stop it from trading from
| any country outside its bloc.
|
| The destruction wrought by any kind of communist policy
| is so devastating as to make its true effect obvious.
| This is unlike social democratic policies which are a
| weaker economic poison and thus can cause decades of
| stagnation/deindustrialization without total collapse.
| Kafkish wrote:
| > as the Spanish Civil War shows the USSR wasn't great at
| letting allies stay independent
|
| Same is true for the US. Allied countries whose leaders
| take decisions that run contra to what we want tend(ed) to
| be regime-changed and those leaders killed.
| nivenkos wrote:
| > that run _contra_ to what we want
|
| I CIA what you did there.
| gruturo wrote:
| > France and Italy could have had moderate communist
| governments
|
| As an Italian born in the 70's, thanks but no thanks?
| eecc wrote:
| Why? Has the "partitocrazia" first and the '80s
| cleptocracy, Berlusconi's downward spiral, and the last
| attempts an installing neoliberal proxy governments done
| any good to the country?
|
| I guess there's no point discussing impossible
| alternative scenarios - especially given the extremely
| conservative attitude of Italian society - but an Italy
| with a more Scandinavian-like compromise would have been
| an interesting country to live in.
| simonh wrote:
| Scandinavia is in no way communist, not even "moderate'
| communist. For the nearest equivalent to that, Yugoslavia
| would be a better comparison.
|
| If you look at the rapid industrialisation and growth of
| Italy through to the 60s starting from a similarly dire
| start, they leaped ahead of Yugoslavia. Yes Italy
| suffered recession through the 80s and 90s, but the
| Yugoslav economy completely collapsed. 150% inflation in
| Italy spread over a decade? Try 9,000% inflation in
| Yugoslavia over just 6 years in the same era. They were
| even a net importer agricultural produce despite 29% of
| their work force being in agriculture.
|
| More recently since you brought him up yes Berlusconi was
| an idiot that hurt Italy, no question, but to really wipe
| out an economy right down to the roots there's no
| substitute for Marxism.
| eecc wrote:
| Italy also benefited from access to the European market,
| while Yugoslavia was stuck - and even there not quite
| well integrated either - with the flailing economies of
| the Eastern Block.
|
| About your last statement, you seem to forget some of the
| attempts at Neoliberal Edens in South America of the
| '90s. They didn't go that well, haven't they?
| Ginden wrote:
| I'm not sure if any liberal thinker would label policies
| such as fixed exchange rates, constant deficit funded by
| foreign borrowing, military dictatorships, as "liberal".
| simonh wrote:
| Yugoslavia did trade with Europe, it was independent and
| not a member of the Warsaw Pact. Only 25% of its trade
| was with the eastern block.
| thereddaikon wrote:
| Social Democracies are not Communist States. Communism
| requires certain extreme actions, not least of which is
| dissolving private property and seizing it for the state.
| Last I heard, Norway isn't taking everyone's land away
| and forcing everyone to live in communes.
| eecc wrote:
| Sure, but the OP said "moderate communism" and I wrote
| that a Scandinavian-like compromise would have been an
| interesting scenario for Italy.
|
| I didn't quite say the two were the same thing, although
| some - n.b. some - ethical assumptions are cut from the
| same cloth.
| thereddaikon wrote:
| I'm in agreement with another user's opinion that there
| is no such thing as moderate communism given that several
| of its core concepts are radically distinct from other
| forms of government/economic systems. Rejecting private
| property as a concept is a big threshold to cross. So is
| a full collectivization of labor. There is only one
| nation I know of that operated with a similar view but
| wasn't Marxist and that's the Inca.
| fsloth wrote:
| "Italy with a more Scandinavian-like compromise"
|
| Not OP but as a Finnish (so not True Scandinavian but
| close enough)- Scandinavian wellfare state is as far from
| Communism as anything. Please don't confuse our social
| democratic parties with actual communists.
|
| The Scandinavian liberal _and_ egalitarian political
| outlook predates Marx (and Adam Smith in fact) - see for
| example Anders Chydenius
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anders_Chydenius . While
| set in familiar enlightenment milieu Scandinavian concept
| of wellfare-state cannot be understood by labeling it as
| "socialism" which is a later construct.
|
| Wellfare state itself of course was born after second
| world-war but the philosophical basis is more or less set
| in an earlier egalitarian view of man.
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| Yet strangely, if anyone suggests similar goals for the
| US they're invariably attacked as socialist or communist.
|
| It's more accurate to say that socialism is a later
| expression of _the same ideals_ - which actually date
| back to the late 18th century, when they appeared around
| Europe during a period of revolutions and enlightenment-
| inspired liberalism.
| kragen wrote:
| Socialism by that name predates Marx, but (unlike, I
| think, liberalism) you can find recognizable socialist
| thinking in the classics. The impulse toward
| egalitarianism is omnipresent throughout history, because
| equality is such an appealing Schelling point. Marx's
| genius was finding a justification for extremist Digger-
| style egalitarian ideology in the face of such dramatic
| manifestations of the positive-sum potential of voluntary
| exchange; in an earlier era where the gain of one feudal
| lord was inevitably the loss of another, the Digger
| approach is almost inevitable, but in the face of the
| explosive prosperity of the Industrial Revolution, Marx
| had to do quite a bit of work to explain how voluntary
| trade worsened the situation of the working class.
|
| To a great extent he was correct in his analysis of
| existing conditions, but, as it turned out, not about
| their inevitability or about how to improve them.
| jhbadger wrote:
| That was in the 1950s when cybernetics was condemned. At the
| time computers hardly existed. Afterwords, the USSR embraced
| cybernetics -- the former Institute of Cybernetics in Soviet
| Estonia (founded in 1960) is why that country is a star in
| computing among Eastern European countries to this day.
| zokier wrote:
| > including this PDP-11 microcomputer
|
| Notably, a clone of a western design. Which is a recurrent
| theme in Soviet computer industry, there were very few
| indigenous Soviet architectures, and the few that existed were
| mostly limited to high-end mainframes that saw only handful of
| installations.
| kragen wrote:
| It's a recurrent theme in the computer industry in general,
| which is why I'm typing this on an AMD A10, AMD's souped-up
| clone of Intel's i386, a souped-up clone of Intel's own 8086,
| a souped-up clone of Intel's own 8080, a souped-up clone of
| Intel's own 8008, a low-performance but cheap clone of
| Datapoint's 2200 terminal CPU from the early 01970s; running
| Linus's souped-up clone of Unix and Mozilla's souped-up clone
| of NCSA Mosaic, itself a souped-up and crippled clone of
| TimBL's graphical WWW browser.
| retrac wrote:
| Ah, but there are clones, and there are clones. Of course,
| many Soviet designs were literal copies of Western designs.
| This included many of the mainframes and minis copied from
| the IBM 360 or PDP-11 family. The USSR produced TTL
| integrated circuits in number from about 1970 on and they
| just used them to copy Western designs built the same way.
| Sometimes loosely, sometimes exact copies of the schematics
| just scaled around the metric inch (1 inch = 2.5 mm) the
| Soviets preferred. When VLSI came along they also copied
| those designs at the mask level.
|
| But that wasn't always the case. And the K1801VM1 and family
| is one of the exceptions. It's a clone of the PDP-11 which
| was popular in the USSR and they had software that ran on it.
| It has the same instruction set and a Q-Bus-like interface
| like a PDP-11 -- but it was an original design throughout
| electronically and not some mask ripoff of DEC. Originally
| designed as a microcontroller unlike anything DEC ever used
| the PDP-11 architecture for.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1801_series_CPU
| buescher wrote:
| That's pretty wild. Note that the PDP-11 _was_ widely used
| in control and high-level embedded applications, the sort
| of thing you 'd use a nice SBC for today. In a previous
| life, I used an LSI-11 as recently as the nineties that was
| part of an X-ray diffraction machine. But as you said, not
| as a microcontroller.
| flohofwoe wrote:
| Minor nitpick:
|
| "This picture of a parade in Berlin in 1987 shows one of the very
| few original PCs ever produced in a Socialist State, the VEB
| Robotron PC 1715 manufactured in East Germany"
|
| The PC1715 was actually a run-of-the-mill CP/M compatible office
| computer and fairly common (together with the higher end IBM PC
| compatible EC 1834: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/EC_1834).
|
| For some actually 'original' computers, check out the KC85/2../4
| computers (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KC_85) and the extremely
| rare "Mansfeld MPC": https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mansfeld_MPC
|
| Nothing "revolutionary" of course, but also not straight clones
| of Western designs (like the PC 1715 or EC 1834).
| buescher wrote:
| Right - and to get an idea of how behind the times they were,
| in the west CP/M office computers had an extinction level event
| occur in 1981 that some people might remember. The KC models
| were introduced in 1984, a year that saw the introduction of
| another notable personal computer system.
| flohofwoe wrote:
| Yes of course the GDR electronics industry was behind the US,
| but so were most Western countries.
|
| At the beginning of the 70s, Eastern Germany didn't have chip
| manufacturing capabilities at all, and at the end of the
| decade it was able to manufacture Z80 clones along with all
| other chips needed to build Z80-based computers, and two
| years later 16-bit CPUs (the Z8000 clone U8000). What CPUs
| did (for instance) Western Germany build at that time? ;)
| buescher wrote:
| It's lunchtime so I googled - Siemens did have a
| collaboration with Intel and built processors at least
| through the 286 in Europe - I found a picture of one marked
| "Austria". This would have been completely unremarkable at
| the time, nothing to stake national pride on. Given the
| cultural and business style differences between Intel and
| Siemens, that process could have possibly been harder than
| ripping off the masks and pirating the chip! As an aside in
| that vein, it looks like Intel and Siemens caught a real
| cold working together on the project that became the i960.
| One of the pitfalls of advanced development is you can go
| wrong...
| buescher wrote:
| Compare to Japan, then.
| flohofwoe wrote:
| Japan had a much better starting position: it was built
| up by the USA after WW2 similar to the Western European
| countries, while Eastern Germany was looted by the Soviet
| Union. Japan had access to the free market, while Eastern
| Germany had to deal with trade restrictions (especially
| for "sensitive" technology like computers), and finally
| Japan had a nearly 10x bigger population than Eastern
| Germany.
| helge9210 wrote:
| > while Eastern Germany was looted by the Soviet Union
|
| This.
|
| All manufacturing capability of USSR was based on
| equipment looted from Eastern Germany.
| thriftwy wrote:
| I had an answer to you but I deleted it, your claim is
| just too ridiculous.
|
| If "all" of USSR capacity were stolen from the East
| Germany, how did USSR managed to produce all the tanks
| and planes which caused East Germany to start its sad
| communist existence?
| sudosysgen wrote:
| The USSR _massively_ outproduced all of the Reich, let
| alone Germany, much less East Germany.
|
| What they did get from East Germany was a lot of R&D, and
| ok terms of productivity per capita yes there was some
| "looting".
| buescher wrote:
| Yeah, looting has consequences.
|
| The UK did OK - Acorn launched the Archimedes in 1987
| (without a parade) - but the rest of Western Europe was
| never really a personal computer or IC design powerhouse
| either. Commodore did some assembly in Germany, and I
| remember being appalled by the large display of obviously
| horrible Thomson home computers at a department store in
| Germany in the mid-eighties. The store's buyer must have
| been out of his or her mind to stock them, or just
| entranced by the light pen, but apparently they were big
| in France.
| joshmarinacci wrote:
| Holy Carp, those things look so cool. Like from a vintage sci-fi
| film.
| geezard wrote:
| I'll just leave it here for anyone interested in the topic.
| https://translate.yandex.ru/translate?url=https%3A%2F%2Fhabr...
| coolman123 wrote:
| did those things even work?
| papito wrote:
| Off topic, but, the USSR had a brutal education system (as in
| "good"), and lots of stellar talent. It was too poor to have the
| proper tools to widely cultivate that talent. At least the world
| got Tetris out of it.
| dsign wrote:
| With the right outlook, it was the single most profitable piece
| of luck one could have to balance all the other not so great
| things from communism.
| papito wrote:
| Luck had a lot to do with it. Just like Bill Gates was
| stuffed into an ultra-privileged boarding school that
| _happened_ to have a computer, exposing him to an
| opportunity, Alexey Pajitnov was lucky enough to be born in
| Moscow, where he went to the Soviet Academy of Sciences.
| Tetris (I believe) was developed on the Academy 's computers.
| Communism had nothing to do with it - but you had to win the
| Birth Lottery even in a bigger way.
| artem247 wrote:
| Slight correction. Soviet Academy of Sciences is not an
| educational institution, nor it is limited to those who
| were born in Moscow.
|
| A lot of university students in Moscow, Kyiv, St.
| Petersburg or any bigger Soviet city weren't actually born
| there. If you were from another city the university will
| give you dorm room if you pass the entry exams.
|
| In case of Pajitnov luck is more about getting a job at
| Academy of Sciences, but probably it has something to do
| with his talents.
| papito wrote:
| Fair point, but let's not forget the USSR was not a very
| mobile society. You didn't just "move" from your
| government-allocated apartment, if you even had one.
| Where you were born greatly contributed to your
| trajectory, especially if it was Moscow.
|
| Education-wise, YES, the USSR was a meritocracy, way more
| so than the United States. My father was born in a God-
| forsaken Ukrainian village, and he studied in then
| Leningrad.
|
| After you graduate, of course, it's different. It
| requires significant maneuvering in the political system
| and ample butt-licking to get anywhere serious.
| mempko wrote:
| Yes, the only thing the USSR created was Tetris. /s
| [deleted]
| papito wrote:
| Alright. Also - great combat flight simulators and an army of
| world-class black hat hackers. Few people care about either.
| int_19h wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Soviet_inventions
| thereddaikon wrote:
| Sadly, the article and anything else I can find with cursory
| google search leaves out an real specs or capabilities.
|
| The article just talks about design and only briefly mentions
| capabilities.
|
| The Soviets did have computers and did have a semiconductor
| industry. It was a bit behind the west but not terribly so. For
| example the Intel 8080 was launched in 1974 and The Soviets were
| able to fab clones starting in 1979.
| buescher wrote:
| Five years was an eternity back then. Motorola launched the
| 68000 (32 bit registers and 16 bit data bus) in 1979. The Intel
| 8086 was a year old. The first-generation Apple II, Commodore
| PET, and Radio Shack TRS-80 were _two years old_.
| thereddaikon wrote:
| It was and it wasn't. On the consumer level it wasn't that
| big of a deal. 8bit 8080, Z80 and 6502 based machines were
| being sold right up to the end of the 80's. Even though 16
| and then 32bit cpus were introduced surprisingly early. 386's
| and equivalents were considered high end in 1990-91.
|
| That had more to do with cost than it did the advance of
| tech. But it did mean that competitors had a chance to catch
| up and get into the market before they were blown away.
|
| In the case of professional workstations and up, midrange,
| big iron etc the difference was felt far more. This was
| especially true in military tech where NATO forces we able to
| become fully digital sooner than the Warsaw pact.
| buescher wrote:
| The 386 was still kind of expensive in 1990-1991 but it was
| not particularly high end. The high end was the 486,
| introduced in 1989. The 386 had gone into volume production
| in 1986, so in 1991 it was _five years old_. I wouldn 't
| even see a 1986-era Compaq 386 until 1988, when it was
| already kind of dreary next to a Mac II. By 1991 non-
| enthusiasts in the USA who "needed a computer" would buy a
| 386SX with Windows 3.1.
|
| Competing with Apple and "Wintel" - there wasn't much.
| Enthusiast computers like the Atari ST and Commmodore Amiga
| and, in the UK, the Archimedes, targeted a sort of odd
| market of folks who would really have liked a nice
| workstation or big box Mac but couldn't afford one. They
| didn't sell many. There really wasn't anybody who "caught
| up" by introducing an 8-bit after the early eighties -
| maybe Amstrad in Europe? They pivoted to PC clones, didn't
| they?
| kragen wrote:
| Just to be clear, this article is about an attempt to reimagine
| the _peripherals_ (so that several people in a household could
| use the same computer at the same time), not the computer itself,
| as in balanced-ternary SETUN, or the ferrite /diode systems in
| which the Soviets held the lead in the early 01960s until they
| were finally obsoleted by transistors getting cheaper.
|
| The article doesn't touch on the architecture of the actual
| computer at all, but we can presume that, like most designs of
| the era (both Soviet and non-), it followed industry standards.
| sweis wrote:
| I don't think a balanced-ternary Setun was ever built in
| hardware. It was emulated on a base-4 machine according to this
| contemporaneous RAND report by Willis Ware [1]
|
| The Setun creator N.P. Brousentsov made a lot of dubious
| claims, including that Setup "worked correctly at once without
| even debugging" [2].
|
| Balanced ternary was never competitive in transistors. It was
| hypothesized to be more efficient for vacuum-tube based ring
| counters, and even that was "only approximately valid, and the
| choice of 2 as a radix is frequently justified on more complete
| analysis" [3]. [1]
| https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_memoranda/RM2541.html
| [2] https://www.computer-museum.ru/english/setun.htm
| [3] http://bitsavers.trailing-
| edge.com/pdf/era/High_Speed_Computing_Devices_1950.pdf
| kragen wrote:
| Yeah. Balanced ternary clearly makes sense if you were
| getting regeneration, amplification, memory, and inversion
| from your flip-flops and doing all your combinational logic
| with diodes, which was a common approach at the time and
| probably the right choice with tubes (the famous LGP-30 and
| LGP-21 worked this way) and maybe with ferrite logic too. A
| three-state "flip-flop" isn't really just a three-state ring
| counter, any more than a two-state flip-flop is just a two-
| state ring counter, although that's definitely one way to
| configure it.
|
| Ware definitely is not claiming that they didn't build the
| Setun in hardware, nor that they emulated it on a base-4
| machine, only that the circuit elements they used were
| capable of four states. Brousentsov's account certainly says
| they built it. Ware is careful to disclaim, "Among other
| things, the difficulty of communicating across a language
| barrier introduces uncertainties in the information."
|
| As for the debugging, it's entirely plausible to me that they
| debugged the logic equations well enough on paper before
| building the computer, and designed it conservatively enough
| (operating 1 MHz transistors at 200 kHz, for example), that
| they didn't have to correct any design defects after it was
| built. Of course, this would have been very likely if they
| had simulated it on another machine first, as you seemed to
| be saying, but I don't think they had one available.
|
| Brousentsov's other claims (that a balanced-ternary machine
| doesn't have an unsigned type or require unsigned
| comparisons, that rounding is achieved simply by truncation,
| that people common reason informally with three-valued logic,
| and that programming is easier in ternary) seem either
| uncontroversially true to me or subjective; which ones did
| you think were dubious?
|
| The potential economy of ternary, which is marginal to begin
| with (5.7% greater density in one-hot circuits like those
| mentioned), does of course disappear when your "trits" are
| represented as pairs of bits, as in the realization that Ware
| saw. (There's a diagram of a ternary Setun shift-register
| stage on p. 128 (141/205) of Ware's report, figure 53.) But
| it seems from Brousentsov's account that they were able to
| eventually build some ternary gates as well; the machine
| wasn't ready for "official testing" until the year after
| Ware's report. Then they manufactured 50 units in total over
| the next five years, which could of course have incorporated
| hardware simplification. Surely they all had to use binary
| core memory, though, which means the 2916-trit RAM (worth
| about 4621.8 bits) would have been 26% larger if it had been
| configured as 5832 bits instead.
|
| Incidentally, Ware's Appendix III starting on p. 171
| (184/205) is a relatively in-depth look at the square-loop
| ferrite logic ("switching") cores that were a less popular
| alternative to transistors and tubes at the time, the core of
| the ferrite/diode systems that remained popular in the USSR
| until the end of the 01960s. They finally lost out because
| they couldn't scale to the high densities, low powers, or
| high speeds that transistors could (even the Russians had 400
| MHz transistors at the time of Ware's report), and their
| assembly was much less amenable to automation, putting them
| at an even greater disadvantage in the US. They did have the
| merit of being considerably more robust than transistors.
|
| Thank you very much for bringing these delightful documents
| to my attention!
| buescher wrote:
| >"Since a base-3 electronic technique is not available, they
| decided to construct a base-4 machine and to utilize only 3
| of the 4 possible states. The unused fourth state in each
| case is available for some form of checking."
|
| Thanks - that clears some things up. It also appears that
| DSSP (Soviet trinary Forth, yes there was such a thing),
| postdates Forth, was based on Forth, and was not an
| independent discovery as it is sometimes represented.
| http://www.euroforth.org/ef00/lyakina00.pdf
| boomboomsubban wrote:
| What are the white spheres in the picture? They look like
| speakers, but the article only mentions the flat speakers. Soviet
| disco balls?
| pimlottc wrote:
| The article mentions does mention them (emphasis mine):
|
| > A large flat-panel display and TV with *two spherical
| satellite loudspeakers*, for home entertainment, and video-
| conference.
| boomboomsubban wrote:
| My bad, I searched the article for "sphere" to double check I
| didn't miss anything. Thank you.
| bruce343434 wrote:
| Those who are interested in the esoteric computers of the USSR
| might be interested in the Setun 70. [0][1]
|
| [0](pdf) https://hal.inria.fr/hal-01568401/document
|
| [1] http://ternary.3neko.ru/setun70.html
| notum wrote:
| Even the original photos have plastic that's yellowed. UV
| blocking compounds: underrated inventions!
| rbanffy wrote:
| I love this design. Reminds me of the Esslinger's desk-integrated
| Snow White Mac, with a touch of the Jonathan's modular design,
| with a tiny bit of Bibdesign's geometric purity.
|
| Maybe we can take some inspiration on the design utopias of the
| past.
| buescher wrote:
| I like it too, enough that I'm thinking about whether I could
| make a pair of electrostats that small.
|
| The keyboard suggests some kind of awesome galaxy brain user
| experience like the Space Cadet keyboard, but would probably be
| more like operating a phone switchboard.
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