[HN Gopher] Jacek Karpinski, the computer genius the communists ...
___________________________________________________________________
Jacek Karpinski, the computer genius the communists couldn't stand
(2017)
Author : janisz
Score : 134 points
Date : 2024-07-25 18:50 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (culture.pl)
(TXT) w3m dump (culture.pl)
| darby_nine wrote:
| You can see a modern version of this with all the bleating about
| needing to regulate AI for "safety" reasons. Times and ideologies
| might change but the shitbags running our society do not.
| RIMR wrote:
| Man you really should have read the article to understand that
| the main competitor to the K-202 had ties to the Communist
| government and was able to get production shut down.
|
| There was also some concern over the number of western parts
| inside of the K-202, so a modern equivalent would be closer to
| the U.S. banning of Huawei hardware in U.S. cell networks,
| where the hardware is cheaper and superior, but we ban it
| because we want to protect our own domestic hardware suppliers,
| and avoid letting too many Chinese-made parts into our
| country's critical digital infrastructure.
| darby_nine wrote:
| > Man you really should have read the article to understand
| that the main competitor to the K-202 had ties to the
| Communist government and was able to get production shut
| down.
|
| What do you think regulatory capture is? The exact same
| behavior, and we have it all over our society. The parallels
| to OpenAI are obvious. And if you look... sure enough, the
| board has multiple people connected directly to the bowels of
| federal government.
|
| Granted, I don't think OpenAI is 1/10000th as interesting as
| microcomputers were, but it's still nauseating to see people
| take aforementioned bleating seriously.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| > What do you think regulatory capture is?
|
| Not this.
| M95D wrote:
| The TLDR version is this:
|
| > Karpinski's computer could be so small and resilient because it
| used Western components. Even though they were vital to the
| functioning of the K-202, [...] they were elements imported from
| beyond the Iron Curtain and used in the sensitive field of
| information processing.
| atrus wrote:
| Lets not gloss over this:
|
| >The manufacturer of Odra, the Elwro company, was, however,
| better connected with the regime than Karpinski. Instead of
| improving its product to catch up with the competition Elwro
| began to subvert Karpinski's position in any way they could,
| not shying away from slander.
| skirge wrote:
| Government of Edward Gierek had no problem with buying foreign
| licenses for products which required western components so it
| was not a problem.
| axus wrote:
| Apple built iPhones in China, but the country of manufacture is
| almost irrelevant to that accomplishment.
| HayBale wrote:
| Not that I want to be Debbie downer but as always in case of
| Polish (which I am also are) overexaggerated and having that
| strange believe that if not the communists Poland would be a
| global superpower.
|
| Its enough to go the wiki (both about the computer and the
| inventor) to see that the situation was not that clear. The
| performance was greatly overstated, it depended on the import of
| the component from the west etc.
|
| Moreover the guy was cooperating with the Polish version of the
| FBI so it's not like it was a story of lonely genius vs the
| governament....
| legitster wrote:
| > strange believe that if not the communists Poland would be a
| global superpower
|
| I think it's fair to consider Poland the birthplace of the
| modern computer:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bomba_(cryptography)
|
| Maybe not a global superpower, but it is _very_ easy to me to
| imagine a Poland not destroyed by Nazi then communist rule
| being an innovation center of the world.
| BalinKing wrote:
| According to that link, The Martians were Hungarian :-P
| legitster wrote:
| Oops. Updated to be less wrong.
| HayBale wrote:
| Prewar Poland was a military dictatorship(mild but was) in
| the permanent state of crisis, on a brink of a civil war with
| all of its minorities. And it is a wild take to blame
| communists for the nazi atrocities.
|
| But communist solved most of the problems that prewar Poland
| would have problem of solving. Yeah Polish tech was amazing
| especially if you consider the resources
| linearrust wrote:
| > I think it's fair to consider Poland the birthplace of the
| modern computer:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bomba_(cryptography)
|
| "The first machine was built by the Poles and was a hand
| operated multiple enigma machine."
|
| There were polish contributors to the general idea of
| computation. But computation is not the same thing as modern
| computer. No serious person can view the bomba as a 'modern
| computer'. It took the discovery of the transistor to give
| birth to the modern computer.
|
| > but it is very easy to me to imagine a Poland not destroyed
| by Nazi then communist rule being an innovation center of the
| world.
|
| Poland doesn't that the population, resources, etc for that.
| Whatever great innovators poland would have possibly had in
| your alternate universe would have been siphoned off by
| germany, russia, britain, france, US, etc. There is a reason
| why so many renowned poles pre-ww2 made their contributions
| outside of poland.
| piombisallow wrote:
| Communism certainly didn't help.
| pinewurst wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K-202
| mzs wrote:
| Think more CIA than FBI. He reported back to SB what he learned
| about foreign technology, and that was in the '60s before the
| events around the K-202.
| elzbardico wrote:
| Yes. I love my Polish friends, but some of them have this
| strange mania of exageration and rewriting history as if Poland
| would be glorious empire if not from the subhuman
| soviets(russians actually), or because the envy of the evil
| germans.
| sieszpak wrote:
| Many Poles have distinguished themselves in various fields of
| science and life. I recognize Madame Curie, Copernicus, Ulam,
| Pope John Paul II, Chopin, Polanski, and perhaps Wozniak. I had a
| Polish professor at Mellon University who talked a bit about it,
| and there was a lot.
| jsrcout wrote:
| I don't know the names, but I recall there was a large Polish
| contribution to Allied codebreaking in WWII.
| surfingdino wrote:
| Rejewski, Zygalski, Rozycki
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marian_Rejewski
| jjtheblunt wrote:
| marian rejewski
| TacticalCoder wrote:
| Polish mathematician had the Polish "bomba" in... 1938 (which
| is actually right before WWII):
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bomba_(cryptography)
| TMWNN wrote:
| Don't forget the breakthrough nature of the first Polish
| submarine <http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-s1t9CkrpGsM/TrINhUSZ5SI/AA
| AAAAAABt...>.
| Ancapistani wrote:
| This actually really bothers me.
|
| The Poles have a long history of being a leading European
| nation in many areas. These "jokes" arose in the wake of
| Polish immigration to the US and the conquering of Poland by
| Nazi Germany and then the Soviets.
| TMWNN wrote:
| I am well aware of Polish genius in things like their early
| work on Enigma (as mentioned elsewhere). In the US (I don't
| know about other countries), 100% of Polish jokes are told
| without any inclination, on the part of the teller or the
| recipient, of actually believing that Poles are
| intellectually backward.
|
| I have no idea how/why Poles became the subject matter of
| such jokes, but doubt that the history you outlined was the
| cause; after all, there are no such Czech jokes or Romanian
| jokes. I suspect that just as the jokes themselves are
| memes, at some point in the past Poles mysteriously ended
| up as the putative subject in some random fashion, akin to
| the arbitrariness of the ethnic group in this famous
| _Austin Powers_ scene
| <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zgp-0UxeBK0>, then spread
| as a meme.
|
| PS - Steve Wozniak (also mentioned elsewhere) ran a Dial-a-
| Joke line featuring Polish jokes in the early 1970s.
| troll1000 wrote:
| I don't get this one...
| surfingdino wrote:
| Others include Marek Holynski
| https://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marek_Ho%C5%82y%C5%84ski (co-
| inventor of OpenGL, told by the visiting Russian commie
| inspector to focus his 3d research on "serious" things like CNC
| machining), Stefan Kudelski
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stefan_Kudelski (Nagra audio and
| video recorders), Staniskaw Ulam
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanis%C5%82aw_Ulam (Manhattan
| Project, Monte Carlo methods), Casimir Pulaski
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casimir_Pulaski, Tadeusz
| Kosciuszko
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tadeusz_Ko%C5%9Bciuszko and many
| more...
| NiteOwl066 wrote:
| Yeah you could add many more major names like Banach or my
| favourite (and imo most underappreciated) Jan Czochralski.
| mrcode007 wrote:
| Don't forget a father of a modern oil refinery:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignacy_%C5%81ukasiewicz
| msikora wrote:
| What about Wojciech Zaremba of OpenAI? MAybe not at the level
| of the above yet, but crucial person in one of the hottest
| companies in the world.
| msikora wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wojciech_Zaremba
| fear91 wrote:
| Jakub Pachocki from OpenAI is polish too.
| novia wrote:
| I wish he had chosen to go with the Americans who recognized his
| genius. Having loyalty to his home country set him back. He could
| have returned to Poland after the fall of communism, potentially
| with millions of dollars to invest locally.
| abc_lisper wrote:
| He really loved his country, even if the government basically
| destroyed his career.
| tester457 wrote:
| If he stayed in America he could've been so wealthy and famous.
| His skills must have decayed when he was on the countryside
| too.
| tivert wrote:
| > Thus in 1970, the Microcomputers Plant was established. Located
| in Warsaw, it employed Polish workers but used British components
| and financing - the required parts weren't available in Poland
| and the communists weren't at all eager to throw money at the
| project....
|
| > Karpinski's computer could be so small and resilient because it
| used Western components. Even though they were vital to the
| functioning of the K-202, they might have raised suspicion among
| the authorities of the Eastern Bloc, as they were elements
| imported from beyond the Iron Curtain and used in the sensitive
| field of information processing.
|
| What the superior performance of his machine mainly due to the
| Western components he was using?
|
| The article makes it seem he was treated very unfairly so as to
| favor his competitors (and maybe he was), but it seems entirely
| legitimate to me for the Communists to have favored a more secure
| supply chain, given the political situation at the time.
| novia wrote:
| > What the superior performance of his machine mainly due to
| the Western components he was using?
|
| No. The genius was in the design and how the components were
| used.
|
| > It seems entirely legitimate to me for the Communists to have
| favored a more secure supply chain.
|
| It mentions in the article that the bottleneck with getting
| components that were high quality was that the local government
| did not want to spend the money to develop their own secure
| supply chain.
|
| He demonstrated a proof of concept. If they were concerned
| about national security, they could have made it a priority to
| get him equivalent components.
| cloudsec9 wrote:
| If supply chain was the issue, surely they could have worked to
| create a more local source for things; but it seems like a
| flavour of corruption to use slower and inferior machines
| instead of trying to leverage the best of both.
|
| My feeling from the article was that he worked outside the box,
| and THAT was simply unacceptable to the authorities, no matter
| how good the underlying technology was.
| ordu wrote:
| _> My feeling from the article was that he worked outside the
| box, and THAT was simply unacceptable to the authorities, no
| matter how good the underlying technology was._
|
| USSR had a planning economy, so they decided ahead what good
| and in which quantity must be produced in a coming five
| years. And then comes some genius and makes a computer better
| than planned. What should they do?
|
| Something alike was with Setun[1], there was no place for
| Setun in 5-years plan.
|
| Moreover I suspect that what will be included into the next
| plan was a big politics. No low engineer could change that.
| Centralization is evil.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Setun
| karaterobot wrote:
| > It's believed that Karpinski paved the way for today's common
| use of paging in computer memory systems.
|
| So, I didn't know anything about the K-202, so this is very
| interesting to me.
|
| However, are we sure that it influenced _anything_ , given that
| only about 230 of them were ever made, and those were destroyed
| at the factory? How would knowledge of his team's innovations,
| let alone specific information, have leaked out to western
| computer designers from within Soviet Poland? If it did, was the
| mechanism... espionage, published research, what?
| boomboomsubban wrote:
| From the article,
|
| >Thus in 1970, the Microcomputers Plant was established.
| Located in Warsaw, it employed Polish workers but used British
| components and financing.
|
| The British were involved in every step.
| mepian wrote:
| The Wikipedia page says it was actually segmented memory rather
| than paging as it is defined today.
| mzs wrote:
| More like both, there was a block address register (BAR) and
| when it was 0..63 that was selecting a core memory board. So
| that's sort of like segmentation but core could be paged out
| from and in to tape, disc, or drum. For example the OS
| (OPSYS) could be paged out to free up block 0 of core memory.
| So that's paging and even neater it was basically a page per
| program so independent programs could run concurrently,
| paging core in and out as needed. The paging was handled by
| controllers (disc, tape, drum) with very little involvement
| of the CPU (executive).
|
| See 3.1.1, 3.3.2, 3.4, 3.5, 5, & 5.2: http://www.zenker.pozna
| n.pl/k-202/dokumentacja/k-202-reklama...
| legitster wrote:
| Really good story. I recommend reading the whole thing.
|
| A couple things that I think add some useful context, having
| spent some of my life in other post-soviet countries:
|
| - In Communist theory (at least as Marx and Lenin saw it)
| business competition was a destructive force and one of the
| "inherent contradictions" of capitalism. So if another project
| was deemed to be better, that was justification enough for
| shutting down other enterprises.
|
| - Also, during this time under soviet communism, the most common
| measure of manufacturing was in kilograms output. Karpinski
| working on a small run of small computers would not have looked
| impressive to officials in the least.
|
| - Importing western materials and parts was not expressly
| forbidden (though certainly not politically popular). But Poland
| (like a lot of Soviet countries) was undergoing a currency
| crunch. Possession of foreign currency was illegal and importing
| materials did not do favorable things for their "fake" exchange
| rates. The operation was probably contingent on generating more
| foreign dollars than they spent.
|
| - Computers in general were viewed skeptically as Western
| excesses that either wasted time or stole jobs. So making boring
| calculating machines for accounting or scientific research could
| be seen as acceptable - but small, cheap, Western style micro-
| computers were another matter.
|
| - The fact that Karpinski spent a lot of time in the West and
| knew people and understood English and was not a party member
| makes it shocking he even got to spin up the enterprise in the
| first place. Had he not won the UNESCO award, he probably
| wouldn't have even made it as far as he did.
|
| - Getting banning from your vocation and getting a visa was
| unfortunately a very common method of getting dissapeared. He
| probably also lost housing privilege as well - hence moving out
| to the country and raising pigs.
| Muromec wrote:
| To be fair, competition was very much allowed where soviet
| government needed it -- in design bureaus and sometimes
| architecture. There was more than one firm that designed planes
| and helicopters for the military.
| surfingdino wrote:
| > - Importing western materials and parts was not expressly
| forbidden (though certainly not politically popular). But
| Poland (like a lot of Soviet countries) was undergoing a
| currency crunch. Possession of foreign currency was illegal and
| importing materials did not do favorable things for their
| "fake" exchange rates. The operation was probably contingent on
| generating more foreign dollars than they spent.
|
| Poland was embargoed so it was tricky to obtain western
| components. Poles had to pay for them in hard currency, because
| Polish Zloty was not a convertible currency. There were two
| exchange rates, the official one at which hard currency was
| exchanged into zlotys and the the unofficial street rate used
| by illegal money changers. Those rates varied wildly. Poles who
| did earn hard currency would have currency accounts, but were
| forbidden from withdrawing actual dollars or german marks,
| instead they were given special tokens they could spend in the
| so-called internal export shops selling western food, clothes,
| household equipment, radios, TVs, and even toilet paper,
| because that was one of the things communism struggled with
| near its end. Those fake dollars had a lower exchange rate on
| the street.
|
| Ownership of real foreign currency was forbidden as was
| possession of a passport. There were two types of passports,
| one for the countries of the Soviet block and the other for the
| whole world. You had to bring your passport to the local police
| station for safe keeping and interrogation. Passports would not
| be issued to all members of a household to prevent them from
| fleeing the country.
|
| Economically, Poland was getting massively squeezed by the
| Soviet Union who ordered a lot of ships to be built in the
| Polish shipyards, but would only pay for them in "transferrable
| rubles", the currency which was not convertible and pretty much
| useless.
| https://www.researchgate.net/publication/305054272_The_Trans...
| The exchange rate vs. local currencies was controlled by
| Moscow. In order to deliver those ships to Russia, Poles had to
| purchase materials and equipment outside of the Eastern Block
| and pay for it in hard currency. Eastern European countries
| quickly developed a barter system, but non-Eastern European
| suppliers wanted to be paid in US dollars. Poland tried to sell
| its agricultural and industrial output, but could not compete
| with Western suppliers so the earning were meagre. This has led
| to lowering of living standards beyond which people had enough
| of communists and the party was over.
| mepian wrote:
| The tired cliche of comparing the subject to Bill Gates and Steve
| Jobs (celebrities from the later microcomputer era, one of which
| is not even a hardware guy) made me cringe, why not compare him
| instead to Ken Olsen and Wesley Clark, the men who actually built
| first minicomputers in the West, or to someone like Andy
| Bechtolsheim? I guess the target audience of the article doesn't
| know anyone but Gates and Jobs.
| initramfs wrote:
| the article mentions one other Perceptron of its kind in the
| U.S., and that has another really interesting story (this one got
| downplayed by Marvin Minsky but the inventor died young in an
| accident): https://news.cornell.edu/stories/2019/09/professors-
| perceptr...
| brigadier132 wrote:
| > After World War II, the communist regime in Poland considered
| members of the resistance a threat to its existence, convinced
| that people who had risked their lives to free Poland of its Nazi
| oppressors could also act to undermine the new Soviet regime
|
| Interesting fact from the article...
| toast0 wrote:
| Not particularly surprising, IMHO.
|
| A group that worked against one occupier is likely to work
| against the next as well.
| TacticalCoder wrote:
| > Interesting fact from the article...
|
| That was the case in many countries. In France for example a
| huge part of the resistance was way too sympathetic with
| Stalin's ideas (and btw didn't join the resistance up until
| 1941 and Hitler's operation Barbarossa, when Hitler betrayed
| Stalin) so one of the very first thing the government did in
| France right after WWII was to _disarm_ the resistance as much
| as they could. Most people don 't read about that but it's well
| documented.
|
| These (back then) superpowers were paranoid and rightfully so:
| the cold war started right after WWII and both blocks were very
| careful not to have ennemies from within.
| aaplok wrote:
| > In France for example a huge part of the resistance was way
| too sympathetic with Stalin's ideas (and btw didn't join the
| resistance up until 1941 and Hitler's operation Barbarossa,
| when Hitler betrayed Stalin)
|
| It's more subtle than that. Communist resistance certainly
| existed before 1941. Many of the veterans from the Spanish
| civil war for example engaged quite early, without waiting
| for Stalin's instructions. Repression against communists
| increased overnight when Hitler invaded the USSR, which led
| to more active resistance. But it's not like they just had
| been sitting quietly enjoying life under Petain up to then.
|
| After the war communist resistants, particularly those who
| came back from deportation, were seen with suspicion by the
| party's leadership, and the party ended up at the hands of
| people who hadn't been as active in the resistance, but were
| considered to be more loyal to Stalin. Which suited the
| Gaullists just fine and gave them the opportunity to push the
| narrative that only they had been the true resistants from
| the first hour.
| trwired wrote:
| I don't have anything to add on the subject of the article, but
| just want to mention I really like the site it's published on.
| Alongside przekroj.org (which recently started dipping its toes
| into publishing also in English) it is one of my favorite places
| on the web. No clickbait, no quantity over quality, just (mostly)
| interesting, well researched content. I wish there were more
| places like these around the internet.
| bdjsiqoocwk wrote:
| I wonder if related to the karpinski from the Julia language.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2024-07-25 23:00 UTC)