[HN Gopher] The Bulgarian Computer's Global Reach: On Victor Pet...
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The Bulgarian Computer's Global Reach: On Victor Petrov's "Balkan
Cyberia"
Author : martinlaz
Score : 54 points
Date : 2024-04-07 18:37 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (lareviewofbooks.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (lareviewofbooks.org)
| mrtksn wrote:
| Asionometry has a brilliant piece on the topic:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t-UVPw1c_So
| mrkramer wrote:
| Interesting fact about Bulgaria and Amazon, first order on
| Amazon.com was from Bulgaria.
| boulos wrote:
| This is also directly available from MIT Press as Open Access:
| https://direct.mit.edu/books/oa-monograph/5598/Balkan-Cyberi...
| malkia wrote:
| Anyone remembers The Dark Avenger :) - lol, another fellow
| bulgarian!
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Avenger
| thriftwy wrote:
| One of the first Sovirt Union's general purpose computers, the
| MESM[1], was built in some pre-revolutionary mansion outside
| Kiev.
|
| Romania also had significant semiconductor industry and DDR too,
| such as Kombinat Mikroelektronik "Karl Marx" Erfurt.
|
| I'm disappointed the article is so eager to tag late communist
| Bulgaria "repressive". The same myopic vision where Bulgaria can
| be of no significance, but also where socialist regime can
| manifest with nothing but repression.
|
| 1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MESM
| pvg wrote:
| "Repressive" seems pretty accurate. That it had non-repressive
| attributes (what repressive regime doesn't?) doesn't mean it
| wasn't repressive.
| thriftwy wrote:
| With "non-repressive attributes" you're continuing to dig the
| same hole I was talking about. I mean, come on.
| pvg wrote:
| What is the hole in question? You're complaining the
| article calls a repressive regime repressive. What's the
| actual objection? That it wasn't repressive? It was really
| repressive!
| thriftwy wrote:
| That now sounds like that Anarcho-Syndicalist dialogue
| from Monty Python's Holy Grail, where Arthur represses
| peasants by existing.
|
| And I'm absolutely no fan of communism.
|
| The hole in question that absolute majority of
| Bulgarians' experience was shaped by what the economy can
| let them do and what it can't - talking about both
| pre-1990 and post-1990.
|
| Late communism was more like an asylum which is run by
| inmates. It was as repressive as they personally were.
| pvg wrote:
| You've still not said what is wrong with calling a
| repressive regime repressive. Is it because you think it
| wasn't actually repressive? Or maybe because you think it
| got less repressive in its later days? Even that is in
| accurate, there are significant ways in which it got
| _more_ repressive, e.g.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revival_Process
|
| Edit about your edit:
|
| _Late communism was more like an asylum which is run by
| inmates. It was as repressive as they personally were._
|
| I can't say I understand this but it sounds like a
| tautology you can apply to just about any human
| organization.
| thriftwy wrote:
| I'm just not sure what your claims about regime's
| repressivenes are based on. Were you there? Can you
| compare that with your current existence?
|
| > sounds like a tautology you can apply to just about any
| human organization
|
| Exactly! It wasn't much better or worse than your garden
| variety society. That you won't use all the repressive
| words against.
|
| > The "Revival Process" was in turn followed by the
| forced expulsion of over 300,000 Muslims in 1989.
|
| Isn't that exactly the action of post-Perestroika, now-
| democratic Bulgaria? Indeed, as I have heard most of
| ethnic cleansings happen in young democracies as opposed
| to autoritarian states. In young unstable democracy, it
| suddently seems like a good idea for 70% to get rid of a
| 30% minority (numbers may vary). After all, you can vote
| solidly in favor of that.
|
| If Socialist Bulgaria wanted to get rid of muslims it
| would not wait until 1989. They had 40 years to do that
| if they wanted. They didn't. The new, emancipated one
| did.
| pvg wrote:
| _Were you there?_
|
| Yes.
|
| _Isn 't that exactly the action of post-Perestroika,
| now-democratic Bulgaria?_
|
| No. This was done under communist rule, as outlined in
| the Wikipedia page. Many Bulgarian ethnic Turks were able
| to return after the fall of communism as is mentioned
| there as well. A political party representing ethnic
| minority interests was one of the first formed after the
| end of communist rule. It remains significant part of the
| Bulgarian political landscape to this day - https://en.wi
| kipedia.org/wiki/Movement_for_Rights_and_Freedo...
| thriftwy wrote:
| Why it didn't happen in 1949 then, or in 1959, or in
| 1969, or in 1979? What have changed?
|
| I can see a clear link between perestroikas and ethnic
| cleansings, but perhaps you can reason that away.
| pvg wrote:
| It started in the 70s, which is in the Wikipedia page.
| Bulgaria did not meaningfully have 'perestroika' which
| you can google your way to. I don't think I have to
| reason anything away if you're simply unfamiliar with the
| history - you can just look it up or at a minimum, read
| the links we're talking about.
| thriftwy wrote:
| > Though the regime had long encouraged assimilationism
| to some degree, as the Eastern Bloc wavered in the 1980s,
| the Zhivkov regime leaned more heavily into Bulgarian
| ethno-nationalism to prop itself up and stepped up
| repression of the Muslim population in particular.
|
| Wikipedia seems to agree with me and not with you,
| despite myself hearing about the event for the first time
| today.
| gremlinunderway wrote:
| Really cool to see other attempts at historically understanding
| Warsaw Pact and fUSSR tech industries.
|
| Every other treatment I've ever seen for describing the Soviet
| computing and internet development has always just been a lazy
| "well it wasn't innovative like silicon valley" which, while not
| necessarily wrong, sounds more like awkward and insecure attempt
| at justifying our own processes, and also isn't all that
| descriptive or useful.
|
| This isn't surprising because we still have a very heavy Cold War
| stink on history to do with the USSR and just continue to
| discover we were wrong about certain aspects of that experiment
| or didnt quite fully understand it without heavy ideological
| bias.
| pvg wrote:
| _we were wrong about certain aspects_
|
| I think the wrongness of popular perception tends to go in the
| other direction. People often misunderstand just how badly the
| Soviet bloc lagged in high technology, precision manufacturing
| at scale, etc. This makes sense because they remember and have
| read about the military parity, the brief period of (very
| roughly) comparable middle class standard of living, etc. But
| Moore's law (among other things) dramatically exacerbated the
| technology gap - you can have, say, a steel or oil industry
| that's a couple of decades behind the state of the art. An IC
| industry that far behind is barely a meaningful IC industry at
| all.
| svilen_dobrev wrote:
| things worked when there was the state behind it.. Regardless of
| efficiency. cm601 CPU was exact copy of motorola-6800 (with ~10%
| yield - doesn't matter). Pravetz-82 was Apple-][, with M6502
| imported. There was even some DEC micro-VAX being copied, EC-1055
| AFAIR. Then came the PC... and things went more software-ish.
| There was "mikro monitor 1.0" which was.. MS windows 2.0 but all
| in cyrillics and encodings (none in original). Xerox Ventura 2
| was also copied and rev.engineered. "docs 1.0/2.x" was (pre-MS
| and MS) Word. Lots of other stuff. Rev.engineered and
| fixed/enhanced to support cyrillics or else.
|
| Then one day it wasn't anymore.
|
| Actually all that, let's call it borrowing, laid a perfect ground
| for all future versions of those products/companies - with plenty
| of educated and demanding users thereof.
|
| (btw rev.engineering was good fun.. but that's a forgotten land
| now)
| mobilio wrote:
| Well... it's complicated
| stanislavb wrote:
| Are there people who studied in UKTC here? Maybe we could
| connect.
| loopdoend wrote:
| In case anyone doesn't know - Bulgaria is the most beautiful
| country in Europe and is rich with cultural history. Ruins and
| artefacts everywhere. Please come and check it out - Sofia is
| amazing this time of year.
| npace12 wrote:
| It definitely isn't but that's also subjective. There are
| interesting sights to see, but you can see better ones of the
| kinds you are interested in, in different parts of the world.
| The shoreline sucks. Skiing is mid at best. Some good hiking
| trails.
| pvg wrote:
| A thread from a couple of years ago on a related topic
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26107924
|
| And a small historical bit of snark that's probably in the book
| (which I haven't had a chance to read yet):
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26108958
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(page generated 2024-04-07 23:00 UTC)