How Semiconductors Ruined East Germany

[@mbontekoe3358]

Note - every East German company was called VEB - literally "people's own works". I worked In Berlin (west) in the late 70' s and was able to travel to the East fairly easily. I worked in semi conductors. In the late 80's I worked at senior level for Toshiba in Germany when they were then the world no.1 in semiconductors. Around the time of the opening up of the East we were instructed not to make any comments to the Press about any questions relating to Toshiba and Eastern Germany. Quite soon after I became involved in the (previously eastern) German semiconductor industry initially via the Treuhand an organisation set up to get investment into the previously DDR industries -The problem was efficiency within the company there was no commercial understanding, nor logistics. The company at Erfurt was split into 3 separate entities Thesys the major 6" fab , X-Fab made higher voltage Cmos for automotive applications on 4 inch wafer where geometry was not important. and a solar cell company whose name I forget. Dresden site became ZMD with a 5" fab,. The Frankfurt an der Oder site specialising in Bipolar became GED and eventuality purchased by ELMOS. I was involved at the sites in Erfurt, Dresden and F Oder Simply the failure of the companies in the DDR was due to their inability to connect to any of their customers and to produce what their customers needed. Marketing did not exist. Erfurt had around 40,000 employees and a reasonably functional 6 inch facility where they ran 3 micron Cmos which was exactly the Toshiba unified process that allowed migration to smaller geometries, Much of the process machinery was from Canon and had allegedly been delivered as combine harvesters (!) -but on top of this they manufactured the Z80 processor which held around 90% of the local market share without the knowledge of Zilog. They also manufactured a processor "very similar" (hand copied) to the Intel 286. Intel issued a cease and desist order, while Zilog just issued a license and purchased from Erfurt at a very low price. Thesys took only 400 of the 40,000 employees of the VEB workforce and X-Fab and the solar cell company took less - so 39,000 people were made redundant . Dresden (ZMD literally Dresden centre for microelectronics) had been the R&D centre for Eastern Germany and so had a smaller 5 inch Fab - 5 inch was never a popular format - it did still manufacture 256K DRAMs -(the 1M never made production) and some SRAMs - all had very poor yields and each device had to be burnt in even for commercial grade product - so profitability was nonexistent. Their main product became subcontracting TV ICS for Phillips. ZMD received senior management from Siemens/ Infineon for guidance. But Infineon built and opened a huge fab on the doorstep of ZMD and then stole all the competent personnel. AMD also opened a Fab in Dresden with the same result. Thesys was initially backed up by supplying wafers to Zilog and ZMD by selling Wafers to Philips - Both companies followed the idea of becoming mixed signal Asic companies but neither had the engineering staff or the market credibility to get the volume orders in time to grow their businesses to compensate for when the Zilog and Philips business ran out. In 1998 Thesys was sold to the Austrian company AMS but this has failed and AMS was forced to sell back its shares to the minor company X-Fab. X-fab has become like a mini TSMC handling designs customer make - Soon After X-Fab has taken over the Fab in Dresden, and ZMD was sold for 1Dm to a local investing company but it declines and was eventually taken over by IDT in 2016. Xfab has continued to grow is now headquartered in Belgium and has acquired many other fabrication facilities. It is worth ~ circa 750M$ per - but still maintains the sites in Erfurt and DResden

[@mbontekoe3358]

@pegaminiYes I am both serious and factual and No they just offered higher salaries than ZMD could afford to pay. Some ZMD employees were offered 3 times their ZMD salary to move

[@zebedeezebedee]

Thanks for making the effort to supply this information.

[@gertbadger6754]

thank you for sharing your experience

[@alansewards3666]

Pp 9pm

[@daltonagre]

Here in Brazil, I gave you my thanks, for your experience.

[@svdlaan]

A typical joke from the latst years of the GDR I heard back then: A delegation of Japanese visits the GDR and of course is shown many important companies and places. At the end, they are asked "What did you enjoy the most?" "The three great museums: Pergamon, Pentacon and Robotron."

[@redrobur68]

Love it! Many greetings from Göttingen. :)

[@chriswatonek5549]

Another one - Late 80th: "GDR published a satellite image of its first microchip"

[@vitapont7338]

A similar joke from Hungary: a guy comes back from a trip in the Soviet Union, sporting a modern electronic wristwatch, a.k.a. "quartz watch". Family members, colleagues are all in awe, until someone asks the guy: "Nice! And what did you bring in those 2 other big suitcases?" A guy answers: "Those are the batteries necessary for covering the energy consumption of my electronic watch!"

[@LukeVilent]

"Soviet microprocessors - the worlds biggest microprocessors"! Reiterated in 2010, when russia pretended to go into nanotech: "Russian nanobots - the world's largest nanobots!"

[@LukeVilent]

@@vitapont7338 Unrealistic joke. It was impossible to get that many batteries in Soviet Union. I was a toddler in the 80s - my toys, like a steam train or a strangely smelling Kalashnikov that would blink and do some mechanic sound , would work only as ling as a large battery held. There was no way to find a replacement - I reused batteries from other toys. My dad had to go to Moscow to buy batteries for his radio. Many years later, I asked him, where did he managed to find them. He said: "I'd go to all thinkable places, until I find."

[@fsbayer]

As an East German history buff and "insider" of sorts (my dad was East German), this is overall a very well-researched video, but I do have a few corrections near the beginning: 0:40 - East Germany did not inherit a strong industrial base at all. The low population was due to comparatively low industrialisation. Most of German industry was concentrated in the Rhine-Ruhr region in the far west (which is Germany's most populous area to this day). What little industry did exist in the East was pretty thoroughly destroyed by allied bombing, particularly in and around Berlin and Dresden. By 1945 there was literally not a single still functioning heavy industrial facility in the whole territory of East Germany. 1:00 - This is a grammatical nitpick rather than a content correction, but "strike" in the sense of "stop working" rather than "hit" is a defective verb, meaning it has no past tense. So "workers struck" is incorrect in this context, you need to use a circumlocution like "workers went on strike" instead. 2:20 - VEB is not the name of the works. VEB stands for "Volkseigener Betrieb" ("undertaking belonging to the people") and just describes the type of legal entity, much like "Inc" or "LLC" in the US and "Ltd" or "plc" in the UK. So calling VEB Halbleiterwerk the "VEB works" is like calling Alphabet's headquarters the "Inc headquarters".

[@paulklasmann1218]

I'm now learning more about East Germany. I'm British applying for German Citizenship based on my Dads ancestry since he was from Köslin which is now part of Poland. My grandmother fled with my dad and uncle when the Russians were rolling in. So now I find German history interesting, especially East Germany.

[@fj8264]

Thanks, mate. Those inconsistencies also bugged the hell outta me aswell. You were faster.

[@A_Haunted_Pancake]

Also: A lot of what WAS still working after the war, the Soviets disassembled and and took with them as reparations. Much of it ended up serving nobody, as it was either destroyed due to sledgehammer-disassembly or improper transport / storage.

[@chavdarnaidenov2661]

VEB="People's Enterprise"

[@nichderjeniche]

@@A_Haunted_Pancake Yes I still remember during train rides to Dresden in the 80s asking my mother why there are no rails in the other direction and only empty wooden bars. She told me that our best brothers from east took them with them.

[@LaurentiusTriarius]

Great! That's the episode I always wanted you to make one of my grandpa came to Canada after spending a couple of years in France and a decade working as an engineer for various german electronics industries, he had tons of stories about the silliness of different German industrial fighting each other and trying to corrupt different bunches of officials. My grandma always said they moved to France with some secret research but tbh I never believed that story lol

[@OmmerSyssel]

Fighting each other is still a preferred thing in German population and industry.. Get power or die trying is an important secret prescription, for this often weirdly obsessed people 😕

[@klopferator]

The VEB Halbleiterwerk seen at 2:15 was in Frankfurt (Oder), it's not the VEB in Teltow. My brother learned and worked there. Now he's working in Teltow for a chip manufacturer. Some of my professors were working in Dresden on that stuff during the 70s and 80s, they told us how difficult it was because the GDR basically had to figure out the manufacturing almost entirely by itself instead of buying the proper machines on the world market. Growing of silicon crystals, slicing the wafers, manufacturing the chips, bonding the wires etc. They also said that often the "help" from the Stasi wasn't very helpful at all, but they had to incorporate the stuff (even if they wanted to do their own designs instead of just copying Western chips) because the state paid too much for it to ignore. They were proud of what they had achieved, but agreed that economically it was a pointless excercise. One of those professors later was a technical advisor for Infineon.

[@ran2wild370]

It some terms you were lucky to have Germany assembled again. All that science potential was not lost and Western Germany absorbed it quickly.

[@EmilNicolaiePerhinschi]

It was as pointless as anyone else doing it: it was hard and high risk for everybody, and not having them at all, even older generations, was worse. Which were the chips that brought the car industry to its knees last year ? I seem to remember it was chips done with technology from the 1990s and which were still made and used in cars and other electronics because they were a known quantity, cheap and abundant ... or at least abundant until car companies cut orders deeply when the unmentionable started.

[@amazing7633]

"... because the state paid too much for it to ignore. " We know that! It's the "sunk cost" fallacy. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunk_cost

[@heinzletzte.6385]

Ran2wild A substantial amount of east germans is not very happy about being part of the west recently tho.

[@heinzletzte.6385]

@@whocares281 I am pretty sure its not old memories, rather the absurdity of the new era.

[@RsD996]

I used to work for a chip manufacturer in East Germany a few years ago, in a room right next to my office was a western ion implanter from the 1970s which was smuggled to the GDR some decades ago. The implanter was still being used in production :) working in the cleanroom there was like working in a museum 😄

[@matthiasi.r.gendwer7187]

Nun, dann 2ar es wohl vor 1990 6nd das Gerät stand auf de.r Embargoliste

[@laxfich_gecko]

@@nothere4089 maybe just buy an old GDR-Radio or something

[@penskepc2374]

My grandfather was a CIA agent in West Germany. When the iron curtain fell east Germans soldiers were selling their equipment at the border because they weren't being paid and my grandfather bought a bunch of night scopes. Would they have one of these chips in them?

[@maro_from_germany]

@@penskepc2374 I doubt that East German soldiers sold their equipment - the East German military run a pretty tight ship to the very end (and they also continued getting paid). This might have been Read Army soldiers.

[@ilyatsukanov8707]

A few years ago? East Germany hasn't been around for over 30 years. So you were just working in a German chip manufacturer using an ion implanter smuggled (or maybe just bought) by the East Germans in the 1970s.

[@pn2543]

I got to work in the Dresden Global Foundries Dresden factory in 2003, it was pretty interesting to see the remnants of East Germany, and the rebuilding of the Frauenkirch which was about halfway done at the time. Making chips is no easy task, so many intricate technologies are involved, from optics, to vacuum pumps, spectrometry, to mass flow control, and precision temperature, and on and on. I am always amazed anything works at all.

[@OmmerSyssel]

Well, even the beautiful restoration of Frauenkirche were highly supported by Microsoft spending the computer program capable of registering every single stone left from the fire, (and ignorant Ossis...) to be put back in its original place in the Church. That's how, and why, the original black sandstone are seen spread all over today's Frauenkirche

[@fritzit]

@@OmmerSyssel By "spend" you probably mean "donate". False friend there :)

[@markymarc3806]

Great video! There used to be a saying amongst the East-German people in those last days: "Die Mikroelektronik der DDR ist nicht klein zu kriegen." which has a double meaning of "The east-german microelectronics industry cannot be defeated." as well as "The east-german microelectronics can not be shrunk". Still there is an undeniable legacy left behind in the current industry in Germany's east. I would love to see a video about the Siemens-Infineon-Qimonda downfall and partial resurrection...

[@crazythunderchief]

I didn't know how to translate that saying. You can still hear it today from old colleges. You could include the defunct fab in Frankfurt Oder as well in that video.

[@markymarc3806]

@@crazythunderchief That would indeed be interesting as well.

[@effexon]

east germany seemed to be lightyears ahead of common soviet development though.... nothing to speak of elsewhere in this industry in that soviet union area and time period

[@crazythunderchief]

@effexon the underlying problem was the same everywhere. Socialism simply wasn't competitive. The implementation of socialism started much earlier in the USSR than the GDR. The mentioned Ulbricht even tried to revert it (NEP) and thus was replaced by Moscow. From then on it all went south completely. The best word from the video for me is frenemy. The Soviets tried to get rid of the GDR in the 50s and it took the GDR government huge effort to ensure that the Soviets won't enforce reunification.

[@TBasianeyes]

@@effexon They were light years ahead but in a sector which wasn't really needed and which was unable to export goods so it was burning money. The video explained it well, there was no shortage of radios and color TVs but other basic necessities were lacking. Almost every factory in every sector was hopelessly underfunded for decades, using ancient production tecnology. Just look at the car industry as a well documented example, the Trabant had a 30 year production run with little changes and they still didn't manage to produce enough to fulfill demand - I think at the end of the 80s the wait time for a new order was 15 years. When the wall fell we had no choice but to shut down almost everything and to start from zero. It felt a bit like getting colonized, whatever you did for the last years was made completely worthless over night.

[@snap_oversteer]

Great video, it's interesting how much of Western tech managed to get behind the iron curtain, my dad was working in early 1970s as mainframe computer serviceman, on American UNIVAC computers! I have no idea how they managed to get them into Czechoslovakia, but he was even sent abroad to be trained how to maintain them. But with limited parts supply, he had to innovate lot of repairs - substituting unobtainable parts with local production and obviously doing board level repairs, but that was common even in the West at that time. The computer centre was located on Wenceslas Square, Prague of all places. I wish I would've asked him about more stories when I had the chance :(

[@AlexanderSylchuk]

Basically all the consumer electronics were copies from japanese or west german designs, only military equipment was trully developed domestically. Somehwere around 1965 Soviet Union gave up on trying to catch up on computer architecture and technology with the West, started copying aswell. Most things made in USSR for civilian consumers after that time (around 1965) was basically crap. From my personal experiance of working on random electronics projects as a kid, even like in early 2000s it was still a thing when it was cool to desolder old "green" electronic components from some random equipment. "Green" meant military grade and those components were still good after many years of use and with great (I mean tiny) allowances, comparable with modern consumer grade stuff.

[@ran2wild370]

I will give a few clues :-)) 1) IBM had all the information about research results and upcoming technologies on western markets. 2) IBM fully controlled its mainframe "garage" as it was rent model, not selling. 3) IBM knew when it would scrap certain outdated models. 4) IBM knew its tech was reverse engineered. 5) IBM knew how to cause a lot of damage and harm to those copiers 6) IBM did it. When copiers were left with 1960s tech in mid 80s. Try to figure out how much it cost to support all the park which was copied. That was hardware side. Software side was in way more worse condition with poor UIs (because you invested a lot in cracking and hacking 1960s operating systems) and expensive memory and CPU times.

[@ugencz8364]

Our car manufacturer (Škoda) even bought an IBM 360 in 1969.

[@Withnail1969]

There was a surprising amount of trade going on. The eurodollar idea was invented so that the Soviet Union could bank dollars in London to avoid them being potentially seized by the USA.

[@J_X999]

After WW2, was West German technology advanced? After the war, the West German economy grew well, but in terms of technology like computers, were the west Germans advanced and competitive?

[@nvsv_wintersport]

I've worked in Eastern Germany in 1992 at a meat factory, where they used a PDP-11. This was imported from the US and they told me that there was a regular inspection to see if it was still being used driving the factory (and not rockets).

[@OmmerSyssel]

Imagine if DDR had transferred available western technological achievements to its hopelessly underdeveloped country, instead of clinging to ideological maniac ... Luckily it is long dead and gone. Now, only Ossi Merkels extreme damages have to be straightened out 🙋🏼🍻

[@NUCLEARARMAMENT]

leading-edge tech for military usage would have been developed domestically anyways, i feel

[@deNudge]

The famous PDP-11, it gave birth to the Unix system!

[@dawnadmin8119]

13:36 The DEC engineers were actually trying to say, “CVAX: When you care enough to steal the very best” (a pun on Hallmark’s slogan, “When you care enough to send the very best.”) The joke didn’t translate, and the word-for-word translation they came up with didn’t even make any sense, so the East German team probably translated it from pidgin Russian into German in the way that they thought their bosses would want to hear.

[@Pozi_Drive]

If you still have the option to use a VAX system, start DataTrieve and enter 'help wombat'. The help system was pure comedy. These guys had a sense for comedy.

[@poly_hexamethyl]

@@Pozi_Drive Wow, that brings back memories! I used Datatrieve on a PDP-11 (I think) in the early 80's. (We called it "Datagrieve" :-) I seem to remember there was a comand "plot wombat" that would actually draw a picture of a wombat! Small world!

[@Pozi_Drive]

@@poly_hexamethyl Correct. The wombat help menues were very extensive and when feeling a bt depressed 'help wombat' and then decending down the details...

[@Alex-xxxx]

Это фейк.

[@toresbe]

Great video, as always. A fun tidbit: The Norwegian minicomputer company Norsk Data asked the COMECON embargo council what the difference was between a minicomputer, and a superminicomputer - which was subject to strict export controls. They replied, well, a superminicomputer is a 32-bit computer. Luckily, due to the segmented memory architechture of the ND-500 series, one could simply cut wire A31 on the backplane, and it was now a 31-bit computer - no longer a supermini. Nobody needed to map the full 4GiB into memory, so there was just no performance loss. This way, ND sold a great many very high-performance computers - they would run circles around a VAX in floating-point performance - to the Soviet Union, completely legally. They would regularily call the embargo council to make sure they were still within the law.

[@seanm8030]

Norwegians don't know what a 32 bit processor is. They only go to 8. Ask AVR.

[@ВасилийКоровин-г9э]

That's great in many ways. First, no one in embargo council seems to know what the 32-bit computer is. Second, Norwegians did a hat trick to empower their dangerous and unpredictable neighbor and thought of themselves "how clever we are!"

[@IrishCarney]

The more things change, the more they stay the same. In response to the Biden Administration's tough new limits on semiconductor exports to China, chip makers launched new products for China, products that had not existed before, specifically designed to go right to the new regulatory limits.

[@KuK137]

@@ВасилийКоровин-г9э They increased peaceful cooperation with country that liberated them from the nazis, never threatened them unlike USA, and shown middle finger to Raegan's rabid aggression. Yup, they were really clever and good guys, too bad CIA learned from this and made sure current Norwegian leaders are puppets serving Washington, not Norwegians...

[@Heike--]

Well that's absolutely great that Norway helped our enemy, the communists. Way to go! You belong in hell in the same room as the guy who ratted on Anne Frank’s family.

[@charlesrosenbauer3135]

19:30 that 32-bit processor from Intel - the iAPX 432 - is a really great story on its own. What was intended to be a future-proofed magnum opus turned out to be a hilariously bad design, and the purposely-near-sighted chip that was meant to merely fill the market for a few years - x86 - is still with us to this day. If you don't make a video on it, I might wind up writing a Substack article on it eventually.

[@grizwoldphantasia5005]

I was so entranced by the iAPX-432 when it was announced, practically memorized the instruction set. (Helps to understand that I was an assembly language programmer, and liked every single instruction set I met ... except x86, which was atrociously discombobulated). I'd lap up a video or substack on it. I've probably still got documents from Intel somewhere around here.

[@1224chrisng]

as they say, there's nothing more permanent than a temporary solution, and there's nothing more temporary than a permanent solution

[@theprovost]

Do write the article and share it with us!

[@stevebabiak6997]

Intel’s initial 64 bit CPUs also were unable to displace the x86 CPUs. Intel had to change gears and produce 64 bit processors that supported the x86 instructions.

[@dgillies5420]

That mistake (iAPX 432) would be repeated with Itanium (Itanic?), in early 2000 and apparently today, 2023, with the new 60-core Xeon chips intel just released this week. All are/were self-destructive attempts by Intel to become a CISC manufacturer ...

[@NekiCat]

East Germany did not inherit a strong industry after the war. In fact, the few industrial machines that were still functioning were dismantled and shipped as war reparations to the Soviet Union. Even many kilometers of train tracks were dismantled. Overall, East Germans paid 130 times more than West Germans, and East Germany paid the highest war reparations of the century. It culminated in the protests 53, after which the reparations were dialed back significantly. Interestingly, some of the taken machinery lacked operators in the Soviet Union, and so ended up rusting away in fields...

[@minimax9452]

As a West German - I have all respect for the east germans and I am very happy to have their different mindset still alive in deutschland!

[@tituslawoffice4778]

It certainly did rot away, and wrecked by improper transportation and packing, and when the Soviets got what was ultimately used, they used up much of it through poor maintenance... undoubtedly by not taking the technical manuals and the Soviet habit of using equipment until it breaks... because if it's still working, why would one "fix" something that is operating? One exception was the camera making equipment.

[@olasek7972]

IT paid the highest “reperations” because their dear Marxist brothers in arms from USSR decided to simply rob them as much as they could. I was growing up in socialist Poland and however bad Poland looked those days East Germany was even worse, really drab looking Stalinist country.

[@tituslawoffice4778]

@@olasek7972 The Soviets are still stealing, even a raccoon from a zoo.

[@roryobrien4401]

"Interestingly, some of the taken machinery lacked operators in the Soviet Union, and so ended up rusting away in fields." Yep, just look at how their military hardware is rusting away in Ukraine

[@doppelwaffen]

This video somehow misses the story. The GDR knew they would never compete on the world market. But the Soviet Union and other Warshaw Pact states had been embargoed and would have payed any price for second-rate semiconductors.

[@mikewurlitzer5217]

So what? All the embargo proves was, on their own the GDR, USSR, could not come close to competing with the West. Funny how tanks and guns and imprisoning your own people are very ineffective in increasing production, yield, or innovation. The video missed nothing!

[@doppelwaffen]

@@mikewurlitzer5217 Simply put, the GDR's business plan was not to compete with the West, as the video implies, but ripping of their Warshaw Pact comrades.

[@segmentsAndCurves]

I feel like it should be mandatory to put that line at the start of every serious discussion regrading the Eastern Bloc political and economic situation.

[@LagrangePoint0]

@@mikewurlitzer5217 Yep, communists never own up to their mistakes, it's always someone else's fault for their failures. "socialism works great until you run out of other people's money"

[@forbiddenmod]

@@mikewurlitzer5217 The west kind of had a massive head start, with the USA’s economy and infrastructure being relatively mostly untouched by the ravages of WW2, and having already been an advanced industrial nation, while the USSR suffered the most casualties in WW2, and had been a feudal backwater only decades ago. That’s not the fair competition that the west wants you to think it is.

[@oh8wingman]

Back in the early 70's the FBI were surveilling a suspected individual for suppling iron curtain nations with technology, particular computer and electronic items. The FBI became aware of the fact that the person they were watching was preparing a large shipment to go to Sweden. When the two crates were shipped the crates were weighed. When they arrived in Sweden a Swedish national received them and immediately arranged for shipment to the USSR. The crates were then weighed again and sent off to Russia. When the crates were opened in Russia there was a problem. There were no semiconductors or computer parts. Instead, they were filled with......wait for it........rocks. Somewhere along the line some one had removed the contents and then replaced them with rocks that weighed exactly what the original contents had weighed. One has to assume it was the FBI since they arrested the individual they were watching shortly after.

[@johnbrooks7144]

CIA does stuff like that. The Federal Bureau of Instigation (FBI) are mere thugs and murderers.

[@tzenzhongguo]

When the FBI was great.

[@johnbrooks7144]

@@tzenzhongguo The CIA arranged the transfer. The FBI were Hoover's lackeys, political animals. Hoover had them busy amassing blackmail evidence on every government official. That's why he did as he pleased until he finally died. The Pinkertons solved cases. The FBI broke laws left and right and went after political enemies of the director.

[@Shinkajo]

@@tzenzhongguo yeah, nowadays the feds just intercept routers and install spy chips on them to monitor their own citizens.

[@termitreter6545]

@@tzenzhongguo Pretty sure the FBI did a lot of really horrible shit during the cold war period.

[@ArmchairMagpie]

My uncle worked at VEB Elektronik Gera, and in general, my family had a lot of interest in electronics and electrical engineering, a lot of my relatives worked in these jobs. The companies often had very skilled people there who often had to make do with poor quality parts, and it was very difficult to even get the good parts for simple stuff like capacitors. These were always at risk to be traded at black market, especially since there was a big DIY scene in the GDR. Due to poor accounting, it remained that way until the end. I remember the propaganda about the first megabit chip made in GDR, which was to be produced in Erfurt too at even higher capacity. The plan was to cure the economy through cheap sales of Mbit chips. We mocked the incessant trumpeting of progress by state media constantly because we knew how dire the situation really was. My uncle instantly found a highly paid job as electronic engineer at a big company in the Bodensee region after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and remained there until retirement. In general, the electronics sector was symptomatic for the entire GDR system. They had lofty goals that mismatched with their capacities and most importantly: their ideology. Many progresses were hampered because the SED didn't like it. They especially didn't like individual thinking from people below their assigned positions. The GDR was very reliant on exports, which usually happened at a net loss already. They often had to rob Peter to pay Paul. Improving or development of technologies was seen as a waste of money and time. They only wanted to produce according to silly five year plans, and due to the planned economy being extremely slow and inflexible, they hoped for a fairly static world. This worked for the two decades after the war, but eventually the changes across the globe happened too rapidly, too rapidly and too costly to adapt.

[@thomassmitherman9187]

So glad those "silly" Five Year Plans are gone and BRD triumphed over the DDR ... so now the "highly paid job" your uncle "instantly found" has dried up or is a medium-paid job given to a foreigner and our new "technological progress" is largely used for surveillance and data mining. What a horrible world we would have if we had a static economy relying on central planning that didn´t think to develop parasitic technologies that disfavour the production of tangible goods and services. Hey, I heard that in the DDR they didn´t even shut down the whole economy over a mild virus! What evil Communists!

[@ArmchairMagpie]

@@thomassmitherman9187 He is a pensioner now, so I don't know. I know he had to be recalled a couple of times while his company during restructuring hat to digitize data. It's difficult to say whether the job went to a foreigner because the speculation ends with that his department merged into another one. It is rather pointless to speculate about it because when it comes to EU laws, workers enjoy rights like freedom of movement. If a Frenchmen or an Austrian got his job, it would be equal to a German getting it. There are many Germans in development positions in other European countries too. The GDR did one thing well, and that was developing surveillance technologies and standards that were used to spy on citizens. Everyone who ran into the Stasi apparatus would always find out about the meticulously detailed data. These days I am happy that, despite being imperfect, something like the GDPR exists to combat the excesses of some modern technologies. As you may have guessed, I am not a friend of privacy intrusion, but I'd rather see a system that gives guardrails to companies than governments than spy on citizens unchecked. The GDR had shutdown, but they were rather crisis-related. I remember even one event myself. The health sector in the GDR was guided by socialist principles. Vaccinations were mandatory, but as with all things GDR they had no resources to conduct vaccine research, and later lacked the production capacities. In the West they had polyvalent vaccines, in the GDR they didn't have that. So people had to deal with a filled calendar for vaccinations that could be cancelled any time due to shortage. So people slacked as they got tired of it. Shortage combined with fatigue caused the re-emergence of diseases believed to be defeated, like measles and mumps. If COVID-19 were still around you could bet that the GDR would have enforced actual lockdowns rigidly, if a vaccine had come up they would have made it mandatory as well.

[@HDN1956]

Interesting and explained according what really happened. Btw, I too worked for 10 years at VEB Elektronik Gera.

[@drunkenwhiskeyeu]

@@ArmchairMagpie Thanks for sharing the experiences. Really interesting.

[@TestTest12332]

Thing is, looking at GDR alone it might look like a failure. Compared to what Russia and the rest of USSR produced- GDR was quite high quality and advanced. My dad used to love it when he got his hands on any East German kit. As a kid I remember playing with a Robotron 8086 clone at Dad's work- it was standing next to a Russian mainframe using magnetic tapes, with another Russian mainframe still using punchcards a couple of rooms down the hallway.

[@Pozi_Drive]

The DDR produced drop in replacements for the Zilog Z8 micro controller units. Zilog Z8681. Did they reverse engineer a chip? That's a lot of work. Or did they get the blueprints of the electronic designs?

[@termitreter6545]

Tbf it also sounds like the GDR was unique in that it produced semi conductors for the civilian market, and independant from the USSR. So probably a less less concerns about military secrets and whatever, a much better availability.

[@xpusostomos]

8086 was close to their peak,

[@valentinstoyanov304]

My country (Bulgaria) experienced a similar semiconductors hype in the 70s and the 80s, although in a much smaller scale. And this hype is still a breeding ground for domestic myths about how Bulgaria was so "technologically advanced" during the communism. Of course, it wasn't but at least 30% of my compatriots still believe that. And these are the same 30% who believe that Putin is a great leader... Thank you for the video!

[@ВасилийПопов-м5ж]

Its over in 80s with ussr debuilt. Rest bullshit is useless

[@sovietcitizen9450]

What makes you believe they are wrong?

[@polishrocker67]

And today, after more than 30 years of "democracy and freedom" is Bulgaria capable of fabricating anything it did in the 70s or 80s? Let me guess - it is not. So my guess is: in the 70s and 80s it lagged 10-20 years behind the leaders, and now the gap is more than 50 years. Or I would say : it's infinitely large because it will never catch up. NEVER. I was lucky enough to learn from people who developed Polish semiconductor industry in the 70s and 80s. Back then, Poland was capable of fabricating an equivalent of Intel 8080 microprocessor. So the technological gap was around 5-10 years. Which was a stunning success, taking into account that in 1945 the gap was around 30-50 years. As as result of the "liberation from communism" the entire semiconductor industry in Poland was razed to the ground and shopping malls were built in its place. So now the gap is - as in Bulgaria - more than 50 years and rising to infinity.

[@polishrocker67]

And one more thing. You probably think you are very clever and funny. So I am waiting for more of your clever and funny comments. Just to warn you - I hold a PhD degree in micro/nanotechnology (obtained in Poland 20 years ago), currently in charge of a university lab in Western Europe. So how come that such East European morons like me, were welcome with open arms in the West?

[@mangoman667]

The wafer fab in Botevgrad and computer factory in Pravetz were about the most advanced as it got in soviet times. Fed with talent from the nearby university, they were able to reverse engineer the 6502 as well as other popular ICs, and bring them to the soviet mass market. Not too shabby if you ask me.

[@hugodesrosiers-plaisance3156]

Your videos that focus on a historical perspective rather than the more technical aspects of modern tech are really what keep me coming back to your channel. The technical stuff goes *way* over my head so to my ears, you may as well be speaking a language I don't understand, but as a hardcore History geek, I can't find this sort of historical/technological perspective anywhere else. Your video about the Soviet oil industry is another example of the videos I mean. This here video is some really great work. Cheers.

[@V0YAG3R]

no

[@Primarysearchtraining]

Great video, as usual. Just a quick note on pronounciation of some German proper nouns: 0) Jena is pronounced "Ye-nah" 1) Stasi is pronounced "Shtah-zee" 2) Zeiss is pronounced "Ts-eye-s"

[@punditgi]

Bestimmt! 😃

[@tookitogo]

And Matthias is “maht-EE-ahss”

[@tookitogo]

10:55 I literally laughed out loud when you said “and fridges”, cuz no 1970s fridges used transistors. They’re not needed for any key part of a refrigerator, which can be made entirely of electromechanical (not electronic) components. Even today, the transistors in a fridge (if it has any) will only be in a digital temperature controller, and maybe in an LED lamp driver. But simple ones will be purely electromechanical. Like every Asianometry video I’ve watched so far, you get the broad picture right, and find interesting topics, but get tons of little details (and sometimes bigger ones) wrong.

[@CoastalSphinx]

Agreed, my fridge is 100% electromechanical with no semiconductors, and I think it was made a lot more recently than the 1970s. I don't know exactly when it was made because I didn't buy it, it was already in place when I moved in.

[@SianaGearz]

Yeah my early-2000s fridge is semiconductor-free as well.

[@mathiasheyer3079]

The video made it sound like the GDR never achieved anything substantial. But they successfully did produce computers, even a few of what could be called "home computers", sparking a hobbyist computer enthusiast movement - among them my father. I basically owe my whole career to that. I was hoping to learn something about how the GDR cloned the Z80 (in the shape of the "U880" and its companion chips PIO, SIO and CTC) and successfully used it in their own products. But sadly, the video never mentioned them :-(

[@hububö]

Unfortuntaly this Video lacks any depth .. seem rather Like a Wikipedia Page recombined by openai Chat bot ...

[@eliasross4576]

I think it would be worth exploring the hobbyist side of the GDR market, but the video was focused on the overall industry. Asianometry doesn't really discuss hobbyist computing.

[@AmauryJacquot]

@@hububö it also sounds like anti-communist propaganda from the 60's

[@mathiasheyer3079]

The U880 effort definitely deserves mentioning when talking about the GDR‘s semiconductor industry - even when hobbyists are not the focus of this series.

[@SianaGearz]

U880 is a decent chip, this exact die was used under different part numbers across all of Eastern Europe and Soviet Unionn.

[@redrobur68]

By the way, many employees of the "VEB Kombinat Robotron", the leading GDR computer manufacturer, later ended up after the fall of the Wall at a company named Medion. Medion fueled the private customer market of reunified Germany with very cheap and really good PCs, the "Aldi computers". Under the right framework conditions, the employees were able to achieve really outstanding things.

[@redrobur68]

@@pegamini7582 You are basically right there. But that goes for almost all private labels. As far as I know, the system architecture and the assembly of many devices was done by Medion itself. In fact, at the height of the hype surrounding the Aldi PCs, there were similar scenes in front of the stores, such as if a new Apple product was released, with long queues in front of the doors.

[@LMB222]

No, they weren't. This is what the video is about.

[@tmurrayis]

Every once in several million a video restores my faith that KZbin has not completely descended into a (sometimes entertaining) waste of time. Hats off to you for this interesting and informative work.

[@CosmiaNebula]

13:46 The Russian text "СВАКС… Когда вы забатите довольно воровать настоящий лучший" seems to be a word-for-word translation of a jewelry company Hallmark's slogan "When you care enough to send the very best." The Russian translation is "when you забатите(?, not a real word in russian) enough steal real best"

[@Alex-xxxx]

Журналистский фейк

[@jeromebarry1741]

E.G. bootstrapped a good school for EEs. Low-grade production of old semiconductors was what colleges in America were doing and still are doing to train their EEs. I have been in the semiconductor industry designing these chips since 1983.

[@Cetegus79]

My dad was part of that effort in the eighties, very interesting video. I hope he can understand the English in this as I'll ask him more about it and his take on it. Thank you for the video!

[@fabxr]

You mention that by the late 1960s color TVs were widely available in the GDR. That was definetely not the case. The "Color 20" the first East German color TV was introduced in 1969. You had to pay 3.700 Marks for it which was 5.5x of the average monthly gross income. So even in the 70s color TVs were a rare and priced posession for an average East German household. P.S. thanks for the informative video.

[@fabxr]

@@hububö what do you mean by PAL/SECAM technology? This were two different standards. SECAM (Séquentiel couleur à mémoire) was invented by France. PAL was invented by Telefunken which had it patented.

[@janmo519]

Naja ein TV konnte man schon überall kaufen, er war nur zu teuer ;-)

[@WimTon]

@@fabxr The USSR used a SECAM variant (a present from Charles de Gaulle IIRC). Which had the added advantage that the people in the GDR could not watch the neighbor's TV in color.

[@fabxr]

@@janmo519 mein Punkt ist, dass Ende der 60er, Anfang der 70er - also zum Ende der Regierungszeit von Ulbricht - *Farb*fernseher nicht weit verbreitet waren. Und ich bezweifle auch, dass etwas "widely available" ist, dass sich der Durchschnittsverdiener kaum leisten kann.

[@fabxr]

@@WimTon yes indeed. I commented on a deleted comment which claimed that SECAM/Pal was developed in East Germany.

[@swisstroll3]

The GDR invented Value Subtracted Manufacturing, where the final outcome was something that was worth less than the raw materials used. The classic example was the Trabant automobile, but a semiconductor that was 4 years behind the West with a 2% yield rate has to be the ultimate example.

[@maro_from_germany]

Some of those developments even tied into the events of 1989: The GDR was trying to build a high purity silicon factory in Dresden, the so-called "Reinstsiliziumwerk Gittersee". Many people didn't like the idea of having industry dealing with highly volatile chemicals located near residential areas because any accident would have been a catastrophe. This lead to open protests in the summer of 1989. In November 1989 the project was shelved.

[@OmmerSyssel]

The ordinary population were long aware of how ridiculously dangerous toxic waste were handled their corrupt leaders! Today places like Bitterfeld and the entire Baltic Sea is still highly polluted by reckless Communist waste management.

[@LMB222]

That's also why Poland doesn't have a nuclear power plant. The first one started buying in 1978, but by 1986 was nowhere near ready, and protests were heard - the project was shelves.

[@hvodinh]

The Toshiba deal was for 256kbits not 256kbytes memory chip. You got the 1Mbits memory chip correct.

[@hederoth7883]

I met a sales guy from Zilog in the early 90’s. They’d been aware of a reverse engineered Z80 micro processor and were quite impressed. After the fall of the DDR, they bought the factory!

[@jensuwe22]

That east german bootleg chip was used a ton in eastern Germany.. Not only Home/Education computers but also in PCs with a CPM compatible OS. Of course they were some years behind and probably had problems with volume, but it enabled the GDR to make any computers at all. It is not that they could just go to the west and import those chips or computers. In 1989 they even showed a 386 clone (still quite high end in the west), but it was too late and was never produced.

[@cogoid]

13:40 With this inscription on the die, Digital Equipment Corporation engineers brag about their MicroVAX product (CVAX chip) to the Soviet engineers: _"CVAX - When you care enough to steal the very best"_ (The message seems to be translated word by word from English to Russian by somebody who did not speak the language, so one has to guess somewhat regarding what exactly they wanted to say.)

[@teddyshapedsoap]

It doesn't matter what happens. When Asianometry uploads, it's a good day.

[@jkobain]

Soon after the WW3 started, YT recommended me the video about why ruzzians won't have the chips they were so proud of without TSMC. Subscribed since then, since I need something to balance myself emotionally, and Asianometry does help with that.

[@amogusenjoyer]

@@jkobain ww3? Are you from the future, ou just a bit out there? Lol

[@twinssword]

@@amogusenjoyer Ukraine vs Russia obviously... I mean it isn't quite a ww yet but still

[@NexusGamingRadical]

Generic comment 86

[@MegaChickenPunch]

it's a reupload...

[@pedrob3953]

The GDR had a population of only 16 million people. They did as much as any country of that size could do on their own. Taiwan had the full backing of the US to build their semiconductor industry, with engineers trained in the best US universities.

[@yvoferdinandvanderhoek1027]

Look at Netherlands how far we've come with NXP specialisation is an optimal strategy for smaller countries... not be a bit of everything in every field

[@yvoferdinandvanderhoek1027]

@@justinl1880 uhm do you point here to qaulcomm?

[@justinl1880]

@@yvoferdinandvanderhoek1027 Nexperia sorry

[@mikewurlitzer5217]

Guess the "evil capitalist backing" was vastly superior than using tanks, guns and walls to keep people in. The GDR was nothing but a piece of a vastly larger USSR, so your population point is not valid.

[@yvoferdinandvanderhoek1027]

@@mikewurlitzer5217 or maybe it was just a shit strategy to involve stasi and try to start an factory for all demands...

[@crazythunderchief]

Unbelievable good content about such a complex topic that only makes sense when you get the historic context. 👍

[@davidneufeld26]

I was just thinking that it would be great for this channel to do a deep dive into the GDR's semiconductor industry. I was hoping for coverage of how the GDR took apart early western integrated circuites to forensically reverse engineer the technology. In the mid-90s I was gifted some of the early batch germanium transistors, schematics, and populated PCBs from the GDR. It was fascinating to identify the Z80-like system; all the chips were analogues of a western Z80 computer system IIRC. Curiously, the EEPROMs were Russian, while all other IC components and PCB were East German.

[@cogoid]

In late 1980s in the former USSR it became *extremely* popular to make clones of Sinclair Spectrum ZX computers. It was a very simple single board Z80 machine which could be built using around 40 of ordinary TTL chips (plus, of course, ROM, RAM and the CPU) but it had color graphics with an output to a regular TV set, and there was a huge number of games available for it. At the time, Z80 was not produced in the USSR and people used German-made chips -- I think the part number was U808 or U880. Later, chips imported from the West became more widely available.

[@AlexanderSylchuk]

​@@cogoid One of my professors (he had courses on introduction to programing and system programing) have developed (not sure if singlehandedly, but I'm sure he was capable of such thing) an operating system to one of the first soviet ZX spectrum clones. One wiki page quotes that it was actually the first such soviet clone. Interesting to me is that the clone of i8080 processors were made first in Kyiv, and then in different plants accross Ukraine (Kherson, Ivano-Frankivsk, Zbarazh, and on another plant in Kyiv, and on one russian plant as well). Here's wiki page for that clone: uk.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%9F%D0%9A_%D0%9B%D1%8C%D0%B2%D1%96%D0%B2

[@dgillies5420]

This I studied in the mid 1980s at MIT when it was still possible. Basically you take photo micrographs of the chip, then etch away another layer, photo micrograph, and repeat. Also perhaps in some types of lighting, you can distinguish which areas of silicon are doped and which are not. As a result you end up with 2 or 3 layers of images in black/white and you print them on top of each other, as a single plate. In memory designs back then the only really magic thing was the geometry of the each DRAM cell (which is just a single transistor and a single capacitor). That geometry had to maximize charge storage in a minimum amount of square or rectangular space. The rest of circuit - sense amplifiers and muxes - is so basic you really didn't have to steal it. I remember MOSTEK DRAM it looked liked they smoke a ton of weed to make their design it was so strange compared to everyone else ...

[@cogoid]

@@dgillies5420 Z80 design already incorporated intentional traps to make reverse-engineering slightly more difficult. There were elements in the circuit which looked like real transistors, but their threshold voltage was set differently, and they stayed permanently off, if I remember correctly. When somebody scanned only the obvious layers, that resulted in a circuit with the transistors which turned on and off, and caused the behavior which was different from a genuine part. As a result, everybody trying to copy Z80 had to do extra work to find and eliminate the traps, and that bought Zilog another half a year or so of exclusivity. (At that time it was not only the Soviets -- many Western companies reverse-engineered each other products and put out functional equivalents. Zilog was worrying about this competition at home, not the Soviets, when they came up with the idea of fake transistors.)

[@cogoid]

@@AlexanderSylchuk Cool! I have seen 8080s and some EPROMS made in Kyiv, by "Kwazar" factory. If somebody is interested, one can still find antique chips made by them on Ebay -- their logo looks almost like a diode symbol with the leads wrapped counterclockwise into nearly a full circle. But there is no cathode in the "diode", only an arrow.

[@nipa5961]

Dresden is my home town. I was so proud to buy a Athlon64 in the mid 2000s that was (partially) made in Dresden.

[@aoeuable]

Outro addendum: The last remainder of the original GDR microelectronics industry besides Zeiss (I think you already made a video about the two Zeiss) is X-Fab, doing 1 µm to 130 nm high-voltage and MEMS applications. Not very glamorous, but dignified. And I'm not really sure about bankrupt -- The GDR never went bankrupt as in not paying debts. After unification the economy collapsed due to monetary unification involving having to pay staff in DMark meaning that goods which they exported previously now were uncompetitive, and it didn't help that the Treuhand sold off state-owned companies to their western competition for cents on the dollar -- who then shut those companies down instead of developing them. Overall the whole unification was mismanaged, it both cost the west and hurt the east way more than it should have, though there's the occasional foreign takeover or management buyout which went very well. Directly before unification West German mail order catalogues were full of East German fridges and washing machines and those were gone pretty much over night, it's not like their products were bad from a consumer perspective. Those fridges were CFC-free -- the east developed that technology before anyone else. *Not* producing Z80 clones etc. would also have been a huge issue to the GDR much earlier as their primary export by value was industrial machinery and importing chips to export your CAM etc. stuff would not have been feasible, and noone (with deep pockets) wanted to buy non-automated machinery. For quite a long time VW used GDR machinery with exactly those Z80 clones in them. And in the meantime, the GDR was trading cars for canned fish with its socialist big brother and the resource stream (metals, oil, etc) became spotty. I certainly don't envy the position of the GDR planners. One last quaint positive note about central planning: To get that canned fish out of the shelves (nobody would buy it because people didn't know what it was, even when they could read Cyrillic) the people running KONSUM simply called state TV which then readily dedicated two or three episodes of their cooking show to those cans, stocks soon were gone.

[@20chocsaday]

Looking at it from the outside, that merger hurt the Germans. But then the whole country got a Chancellor they could trust who understood living in the east.

[@kiennguyenanh8498]

How can you not sure about their bankruptcy. Their economy was basically gone before the reunification even started

[@aoeuable]

@@kiennguyenanh8498 They never defaulted on debt. That's what not being bankrupt means. ...and, no, their economy wasn't "gone". It was still the country with the highest GDP/capita in the Marxist-Leninist sphere of influence.

[@fsfs555]

"Those fridges were CFC-free -- the east developed that technology before anyone else." You sure they weren't just using CO2 or hydrocarbons? Because that's not very impressive if that's the case. Hydrocarbons have been used in refrigeration systems for ages, but obviously their flammability makes them less than ideal, and the synthetic refrigerants were often more efficient, so most manufacturers went away from them. They were only brought back in modern years because CFCs and HFCs are so environmentally damaging.

[@aoeuable]

@@fsfs555 Propane and Butane, yes, the original mixture was called greenfreeze, the technology also includes the insulation foam and piping. "But those will explode" is exactly what western companies said to badmouth them when the amount of flammable gas in a fridge is maybe two lighter's worth, not enough to generate an explosive mixture in any reasonable scenario. What I was mistaken about is that this was strictly speaking after reunification, 1992. The whole thing was co-financed by Greenpeace and saved the company from immediate closure, it was then pushed out of the market by western competition and Greenpeace's insistence that the thing would not be patented. Wikipedia's article on refrigerants actually has a paragraph about the story including a couple of citations you might be interested in.

[@bambangl]

It's not Telefunken and AEG. Telefunken was a subsidiary of AEG and later fully merged and known as AEG-Telefunken. It was German's leading manufacturer for Radio and Telecommunications equipment on that time.

[@DrNIx123]

I once read that even synthesizers (the music instrument) were disallowed to be exported to East Germany. Because by the end of the 70ties, those instruments started using 8086 or 68k processors for controlling settings. It is questionable how these could ever have been reverse engineered, but still.

[@maro_from_germany]

This wasn't much of issue - comparatively few synthesizers used 68k processors. Various Kurzweil products come to mind. The ever-popular DX7 used an 8bit processor, so did the D50.

[@OmmerSyssel]

@@maro_from_germany Actually much needed development to common good wasn't really a topic in crappy DDR.. Imagine cardboard Trabi with a bit of this technology, would have won Formula one 😁🏎️🏎️

[@fiedel]

I don't think so. You could pretty often find them in second hand shops, where lots of western electronics stuff was being traded. Bigger acts allowe to travel also just bought them if they happened to play a gig in the west and just brought them back. Fun story: musician friend of mine married his first wife because you were entitled to get a "marriage loan", 5000 Marks if I remember correctly (worth roundabout 8 months of normal 1 worker's salary), usually intended for the fresh family being able to buy new furniture and maybe baby stuff, but he married&took the loan to buy him a Yamaha DX-7 :)

[@maro_from_germany]

​@@fiedel 5000 Marks wouldn't get you a DX-7 then; they were usually sold for around 30k and more. Even comparatively low-level stuff like the Poly-61 sold for more than 15k. And (as usual for the GDR) there's another angle: There was an Intershop in Berlin-Altglienicke specializing in musical instruments. They had all the standard stuff sold in the west; I remember testing a DX7II and a Roland D-50 there. The "official" state-sanctioned second hand shop was also in Berlin, at the Strausberger Platz.

[@petesmitt]

Odd how you shortened Seventies to 70ties; it's usually shortened to 70's.

[@johnathanwright2126]

I think this channel has the best comment section I've ever seen on youtube.

[@h.b.5577]

Really curious topic, something you won't expect to be covered by most.

[@DataWaveTaGo]

Asianometry - A study in captivating, engrossing accounts of technological & political interplay. Should be a Nobel Prize for this category. You've earned it.

[@josephkoppenhout6034]

As I understand it, the industry was founded because of the need for foreign currency, especially dollars. The need to service debts and import high tech products in foreign currencies was a big problem for Eastern Bloc countries. The East German chip industry was a huge economic opportunity as they could sell to Eastern Bloc countries, who wouldn't need to dig into their valuable forex holdings to pay for it. For East Germany, these exports would ensure the smooth inward flow of needed resources in from the USSR and other countries. The innefficency of their production, protected utterly from world markets was insane, and it was unsurprising the sector proved uncompetitive. Source: dissolution, The crisis of Communism and the fall of East Germany

[@dgillies5420]

With their expertise in optics (Zeiss), they had the possibility of mimic'ing japan (Canon, Nikon) who went into VLSI imaging whole-hog. But it turns out that just having DRAM is not enough you need a whole ecosystem and especially a domestic source of microprocessors and a killer app (visicalc) and a communication technology (2400 baud modems) to grow a high-volume microprocessor industry ...

[@Ascania]

Two more points: East Germany just didn't have the foreign currency to buy the chips needed domestically on the world market in the amounts required. And the stuff was on the COCOM list anyway.

[@1873Winchester]

Three posts in a row and all it sounds like are people repeating portions of what the video said. Feels like bots talking to each other.

[@peterb.5284]

@@antoniomontana397 I'm sorry, but you do not know what you are talking about.

[@IrishCarney]

I remember one East German who admitted the fear induced by political repression and how that caused people to be extremely cautious about speaking out on politics, but claimed that the opposite situation prevailed at work. That in general nobody feared being fired (except for political reasons) so nobody feared the boss. You could slack, mouth off, etc., and not much got done. Think like those movies of slum classrooms where the kids are rowdy and backtalking and the teacher is helpless.

[@leyasep5919]

Another top quality report !!! Excellent story telling again...

[@JonMartinYXD]

Note how often Zeiss shows up. Today all leading edge microchip fabs rely on ASML for their production equipment, and ASML relies on Zeiss for the lenses required in that equipment.

[@Martinit0]

The history of Zeiss itself is an interesting story. Asianometry has a couple videos on that.

[@SianaGearz]

Two different Zeisses in a way. The Zeiss spoken of here is now known as Jenoptik. The real Zeiss ran off to the West, and the East German Zeiss was whatever remained.

[@d4rktranquility]

@@SianaGearz the know how for Zeiss SMT is build by experts of both ZEISS companies reunified in the 90s however.

[@germansnowman]

I haven’t watched the whole video yet (only two minutes in) but I’m excited to see this topic covered. I grew up in East Germany, not far from Dresden. When you mentioned Walter Ulbricht and his goal of passing the West, I had to chuckle. What he actually said is: “Überholen ohne einzuholen”, which means “to pass without catching up”. He wasn’t the brightest :)

[@prabuddhaghosh7022]

To pass without catching up translates as leapfrogging in American English. Companies regularly leapfrog by skipping a certain generation of tech so its not as silly as it you make it sound.

[@germansnowman]

@@prabuddhaghosh7022 I am aware of that and I thought of it once I had written my comment. However, among the parts of the population which was critical of the regime, it was considered in the “silly” sense because we knew that the country really was unable to catch up with, much less surpass the West.

[@_sabot]

Ulbricht was undoubtedly in one way or another a terrible man, but I don't think he was silly.

[@germansnowman]

@@_sabot Agreed. I originally wrote that he was not the brightest. The statement was silly, in the sense of “stupid, not thought through”, not in the sense of “funny”.

[@hahahaha5444]

Horni war auch nicht schlauer🤣🤣

[@luizmenezes9971]

Funny thing to add. Brazilian's failed semiconductor foray was made thanks to tech transfers from East Germany. To this day, LSI labs here still use aging East German equipment. I have done lithography in one of such museum pieces back in college.

[@uncovidvaxxforthestrongand3582]

omg

[@uncovidvaxxforthestrongand3582]

wtf brazil lmao

[@AlexB-dl5ou]

Maybe its outside your normal topics, but what about a video on headphone technologies, Germany and Japan in particular have quite a history

[@Hansengineering]

Well now I am interested.

[@seanm8030]

My preference is knowles.

[@dgillies5420]

That would be quite timely! Headphones have been revolutionized in the past 20Y !!

[@Hansengineering]

@@dgillies5420 No?

[@adamesd3699]

19:55 Wait, I’m not sure if there is a mistake here. This seems to be implying that a 1 Megabit chip is the next step after a 256 Kilobyte chip. But that makes no sense. 1 Megabit is only 128 Kilobytes (there’s 8 bits in a byte). 1 Megabit = 1024 Kilobits = 128 Kilobytes Should this be referring to a 1 Megabyte chip instead? That would make more sense. (Also memory chips are usually categorized by bytes, not bits). Am I missing something?

[@JohnHughesChampigny]

Actually I think it's the 256 kilo *byte* that's wrong -- it should be kilo *bit* . Most RAM memory chips were 1 bit wide at the time, allowing you to assemble whatever word size (8, 16, 24, 32 bits) you wanted.

[@Curt_Sampson]

@@JohnHughesChampigny Actually, sometime in the early to mid '80s the 4464 64K×4 bit DRAM chips, and other sizes that were also four bits wide, started to become common. This really helped to reduce the chip count in 64K and 128K systems. But yeah, either way, I'm pretty sure he meant 256 k _bit_ when he was saying 256 k _byte._ Oh, and the narrow sizes were generally just dynamic RAM. Static RAM at the time, like ROM, was almost invariably 8 bits wide except for very small (< 8 kbit) devices.

[@cogoid]

@@Curt_Sampson You are right about older DRAM chips being single bit output. Density of DRAM chips continued to be specified in bits, regardless of IO width. This video means bits, even when the author says bytes.

[@RelakS__]

I was just looking for a post like this.

[@the_kombinator]

I had a 386 by NCR specifically made in West Germany. I recently sold a 286 that had a LIM/EMS expansion board that had 2Mb of RAM on it made by Siemens, in, you guessed it, West Germany. Printed right on the chips.

[@20chocsaday]

You can store a surprising amount of data in one of those chips if you read it. I have never dared take a label off a chip because that is the obvious way to kill it. If you want it to do that of course.

[@sahhaf1234]

"...bigger than any single country can handle...... they never should have try it......" The last few sentences hit like a hammer.

[@averegeyoutuber9133]

Hammer and sickle perhaps

[@A54729]

I love yours channel a lot. Can't get enough of your videos.

[@mrlucasftw42]

Everybody else builds walls to keep people out. What a system.

[@RalfStephan]

They wanted to keep people IN, the keeping out was just the story to justify the wall.

[@martinusher1]

if you substitute "Britain" for "East Germany" you'd be describing the history of the British semiconductor industry. (Only in the UK would you plan your prototype wafer fab plant to be placed next to a Readymix cement plant......)

[@alastairzz1]

sadly true. Remember GEC Semiconductors?

[@AnthonyHigham6414001080]

My favourite joke from the era; Erich Honecker is with his mistress and he says "My darling Helga, I love you and will do anything for you" Helga says "My sweet Erich, I want you to tear down the Berlin wall" He thinks about it for a moment and says; "Ah, this is good. You want to be alone with me"

[@TCTerribleDog]

It ended up as a incubator for future manufacturers. I am in the semi business and I always wondered why Dresden is the place to invest in semi manufacturing. Now I know.

[@novakattila]

Nice video. I’d recommend making a video about the audio industry (going from vacuum tubes to solid state then Japanese companies like Roland, Korg etc appearing).

[@corneliushojl7994]

I had no idea how this debacle happened, I even knew that the DDR strove for industrial robotization. There is much to learn, thank you.

[@mungo7136]

When you see photo what is supposed to be leading edge electronics factory - with parking lot swarmed by Trabants (and one or two Wartburgs) - you now something is terribly wrong.

[@bassobalalaikka5005]

the salaries must have been so low, that none could afford a imported Skoda or Ziguli (Lada).

[@dougkahl8124]

Wow, great history lesson! I heard that DEC also put the Russian phrase for "For those that copy the best" on their VAX chips. We used to think that a VAX was so powerful, but now a toaster contains a more powerful processor.

[@internetcensure5849]

Even if true, can do only toasting, while DEC computers ran whole businesses and plants. Only the technically illiterate can make such comments.😂

[@richteffekt]

Great video. Not a likely topic given not all sources may be readily available to you. Your broad-strokes-history on East Germany checks out and as for the tech side - at this point I basically assume you the authority on the matter since I'm getting so much information on semiconductors and tech from your channel. You are easily the single biggest source of info on the topics for me as of today. Thank you.

[@barbadolid5170]

0:40 a non-existant industrial base, starting with the fact that the west has always been more industrialized, the stealing/transfer of industrial facilities and machinery to the USSR was devastating. They had some of the manpower that existed before the war, that was their only card to be played

[@CLS-hj1ev]

The USSR was leading the space race as it boasts among the greatest if not the greatest mathematics and applied mathematics community on Earth during the golden era of Kolmogorovs and Vladimir Arnolds while recovering from the tremendous damage of its past, transforming from an agriculturally based society into a technological advanced industrialized society - even today, that the Russian Federation demonstrates surprising industrial prowess is in part due to the tremendous successes of the Soviet Union.

[@stygian4011]

Saxony was more industrialized than the Rheinland before the GDR. After Soviet takeover it lost most of it's industry to west Germany and over half of the industrial facilities were dismantle and shipped to the USSR for reparations. Maybe do some research...

[@marco21274]

I lived in the GDR and the biggest problem was the internal mismanagement. Think about a big western company without compitition. People in big organizations optimize their own benefits instead of the common benefits of all people in the organization. If their is no pressure this gets worse and worse.

[@oohhboy-funhouse]

@@CLS-hj1ev The space race is weird in that it was declared when SU was already ahead on certain metrics. The starting line was different, but it was what it is. The fact US overtook SU despite being that far behind showed that had they both started in the same position, SU never had a chance. Despite trading safety and a willingness to take on more risk, SU couldn't make up for other industries' inability to meet the demands. You ended up with monsters like the N2 as that was the only way to met arbitrary deadlines and when it blew up, that was that. In comparison, Apollo One roasted its crew in a test, it caused massive delays for the crew module, but had limited effect overall. SU kept throwing their designers into gulag for one reason or another, kneecapping the efforts, one of the many self-inflicted wounds. As for the claim SU prowess has carried on to RF is questionable. Soyuz post SU has a good legacy despite its sad end, it couldn't have continued without western finance. That the fact I don't have any Russian consumer product nor anyone else I know is pretty damning.

[@CLS-hj1ev]

​@@oohhboy-funhouse I would argue that a lack of popular Russian consumer brands has limited bearing on its innate engineering capabilities (which is not necessarily equivalent to its industrial capabilities, but engineering capabilities contribute to such nonetheless), since the Russian Federation now has rediverted its relatively limited industrial capabilities into various projects and advanced military projects in particular - despite the propaganda that may permeate western media, it is clear that the Russian Federation still retains some amount of mathematical and applied mathematical talent as developed during the Soviet Union era, thus its technological/industrial capabilities continues to show itself in a few isolated domains as in aerospace (prior to the Soviet Union, Russian academics are commonly limited to a few relatively secluded institutions, as in St. Petersburg University boasting of the likes of Chebyshev and Markov). Ultimately, Russia carries significant cultural trauma and baggage not necessarily all of its own responsibilities, and for the Soviet Union to achieve what it has achieved is tremendous despite all the obstacles. Today, due to its limited population coupled with an aging population, it is understandable that the Russian Federation cannot dominate in every domain, and Russian STEM subcultures tend to specialize low-level (e.g., as in, stochastic analysis and functional analysis that are utilized in the high-level sciences, such as artificial intelligence, etc.). Incidentally, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the immigration wave of former Soviet STEM human capital had displaced their American counterparts due to the greater STEM competence of the Soviet Uninion (for example, see www3.nd.edu/~kdoran/Doran_Math.pdf - notice that Soviet mathematicians had predominantly specialized in applied areas relative to their American counterparts, as in the theory of integral equations or differential equations).

[@stingginner1012]

In the early 1970s the USAF received a functioning SAM 2 Missile curtesy of North Vietnam. It hit a B-52 but didn't explode. Examining the electronics, it was found to contain Texas Instrument microchips. Further inspections found that they were clones copied in the Soviet Block down to Logo and part numbers. In the early 1980s some Soviet Block electronic testing equipment was made available to the US curtesy of Egypt. The multi meter contained resistors, capacitors and transistors which also had western part numbers. The Soviet Block had a hard time keeping up with the west in microelectronics, but were 40 to 70 years ahead in tube technology. The Soviets were able to do things with tubes we were never able to accomplish. Tubes have an advantage in a Nuke/EMP environment because they return to operation after the EMP is passed. This bit history was very interesting and filled some gapes I didn't know.

[@NGC1433]

@13:43 - the message on the die in russian is hilariously badly worded. I can barely understand the idea, despite speaking russian natively(I touch-type in both latin and cyrillics). If I try to translate it to English preserving the mistakes it is like "When you fed-up stealing real best" All the words except one are spelled perfectly but no russian-speaker would put them together in that way. This was evidently translated with a dictionary word by word, by somebody who probably never heard the language. And in that case - that's an excellent job! Chinese people still cannot figure out cyrillic fonts in car entertainment systems and such, for example. But these guys did it in perfect type and kerning!!! Absolutely amazing!

[@Martinit0]

Looks like can't blame a semicon guy on getting the geometry wrong, no?

[@cogoid]

It is indeed a word by word translation, and it was supposed to mean "CVAX -- When you want it enough, steal the really best!" (The is a misspelled "захотите".) CVAX is the CPU chip for the famous Micro VAX, which Digital Equipment Engineers were very proud of. The message is not an admonition against stealing, but bragging about the product being the best, which is what makes this chip, and not some competitor, worth stealing.

[@adrianalexandrov7730]

@@cogoid nah, looks more like "заботитесь" -- "care"

[@cogoid]

@@adrianalexandrov7730 Maybe you are right -- nobody really knows for sure. I can see how "б"->"b" and "о"->"а" and "и"->"н" But what to do with the extra "сь" in the end? It is kind of hard to drop two letters without noticing: "заботитесь" "заbатнте" These two are at lest equal length, but at the cost of "х" becoming "b", which is also not an easy mistake to make: "захотите" "заbатнте"

[@adrianalexandrov7730]

@@cogoid both versions are plausuble, IMO. And they'd have to miss "x" for "б" if we think they meant "захотите", which is quite a mistake. I lean towards tge version of them doing a wordplay on a Hallmark's slogan "when you care enough to send the very best"

[@MikesTropicalTech]

AMD's plant in Dresden in 1996 was leading-edge. It was the precursor to Global Foundries that you mentioned.

[@gumse666]

Back in the 80's you could buy DDR copys of TTL circuits here in Sweden.

[@TeaDrivenDev]

I grew up in the GDR right until its end, and over 30 years later, I'm still learning new details about it all the time.

[@Pommes736]

I am working in the successor company x-fab in Dresden. Interesting to hear this historical view.

[@jaysmail]

How I found this channel I don’t know. But his work is fabulous and gives me joy. Thank you.

[@mjouwbuis]

To be fair, Philips also failed at megabit memory mass production. I think in the end they converted the production lines to produce CCD chips.

[@KepZubel]

Thanks! Great content.

[@msimon6808]

The f sub T (frequency response) of transistors you could get from distributors in America was 500KHz around 1960.. That number was watched closely by those interested (Radio Amateurs mostly). The CK722 was my first transistor. And I am, personally, older than transistors which were invented in America in 1948. .

[@brianletter3545]

It is so reminiscent of the UK. I graduated in the mid sixties when the master industrialist, mightily favoured by the UK Civil Service was Arnold Weinstock, the guy who eliminated competition for govt. contracts by having his company GEC, with enthusiastic cooperation from the UK civil admin., unite many rivals in GEC. To cut a long story short, Weinstock's, who only 'invested' in secure govt. cost-plus contracts, went bust shortly after he died. The govt. put it about that the collapse of GEC was due to shortcomings in the management who struggled with their inheritance. Because of Weinstock's complete aversion to investment, GEC never had a chance, being lead as it was by govt. favours. The parallel with the GDR is clear, even if the exact model differs in detail.

[@izbavitelj1464]

Watching this brilliant video and amazing comments from great people is the best history lesson one can imagine. Thanks good people!

[@w0ttheh3ll]

Would've been nice if you had spelled out what WBN stands for (Werk für Bauelemente der Nachrichtentechnik), was a bit confusing this way.

[@tadashiogitsu]

Now it seems to make sense why Toshiba got huge fine for selling IC chips (for something like radio or tape recorder) to East Germany. I thought it must be scapegoat back then since US-Japan trade war was ongoing...

[@rajsrivastava5287]

Just love these rabbit holes you send me down. When I first saw the title of the video, I thought, meh, that sounds boring. Now I'm semi-obsessed with the East German high tech industry. I want to know more about their cloned IBM 360.

[@rogerbeck3018]

I really enjoy ALL Jon produces, always educational and entertaining thanks heaps

[@the123king]

I have a few boards from a West German Wagner computer. One of the coolest bits, is the Transformer ROM array. ROM chips were, i believe, very hard to find in this era, so to work around it, they "wove" the bits through transformer rings, with whichever ring it went through signalling a 1 or a 0. I can't begin to imagine just how much it cost to make, but i'm sure you could have bought a few megabytes of silicon ROM in the USA for the same price this 2KB transformer array cost

[@michaelrenper796]

This is a completely diffrent technical discussion. Those are a variation of Core memory and by no means exotic. Very common in the 60s and on niches into the 70s. The advantage was they they were very fast to ready and robust (thermally, mechanicall, well).

[@the123king]

@@michaelrenper796 This board had chips with 1974 date codes on it, and i believe worked differently to Core Rope i.redd.it/h9sb550uhnm61.jpg

[@Curt_Sampson]

@@the123king That sure does look like core rope memory, though, with the caveat that in this particular implementation a wire runs through one of two rings, rather than running through or outside a single ring. But each pair of rings appears to have a transistor driver that would drive the output signal, and the rings are in eight groups of eight, for 64 bits times the number of wires going through the array, which is 256 from the looks of it. (That would give a total capacity of 16384 bits or 2048 bytes. Below the array of rings the number 128 appears, with (according to Google translate) "Toroidal cores with read windings (12 turns)."

[@michaelrenper796]

OMG, how did you get your hands on those boards? The founder, Wagner, started all kinds Enterprise based on bizarre, defrauding investors for hundreds of millions. Fascinating story.

[@the123king]

@@Curt_Sampson i believe transformer and core rope work on different principles. Core Rope relies on magnetic inductance, whereas transformer induces currents in the wires. Transformer has no x, y or sense wires

[@masteryoda394]

Thanks!

[@w0ttheh3ll]

VEB is not a name, it stands for the type of state-owned company.

[@moestrei]

People owned: Volks Eigener Betrieb (People Owned Operations).

[@CakePrincessCelestia]

21:26 I can still remember when AMD produced their CPUs in "East Germany" in the late 90s and early 2000s (AMD Saxony) and when Infineon was the way to go for DDR RAM (made in Dresden; DDR pun intended). All of that is long gone... Infineon still exists and produces stuff there, but they've completely left the consumer market almost one and a half decade ago. PS: Instead of spending billions of Marx, they maybe should have tried spening billions of Engels instead :P

[@java4653]

Many of the issues were human management. Irony. You can't create a New Man if you can't get people to use rulers or simply cooperate.

[@mikewurlitzer5217]

Guess E. Germany/USSR tactics of Tanks, Guns, Walls to keep people in, were poor human management. That lesson always seems lost on countries following the ideology of Marxists, Socialist, Communists, Maoists.

[@gubr]

My dad brought a few dozen of these megabit chips home after the wall collapsed. We used it to run our 286 PC with 4 megabytes of ram, which was worth quite a lot of money back then. Gave most of them away in 96, the guy probably junked them soon after. I still got a few.

[@simon.voggeneder]

Thank you for this video. The economic history of the GDR is fascinating, I spent a lot of hours reading about in on Wikipedia, especially the attempt to manufacture semiconductors. It was such a desperate move and doomed to fail despite all the work GDR scientists and engineers put in. The isolation and stiff central planning never gave them a chance.

[@Game_Hero]

Just a tip, you should look into more professional sources than Wikipedia if you can.

[@williamlloyd3769]

Companies weren’t scamming the Stasi on price, a western company willing to break the export law has to be compensated for.

[@hububö]

I find the introduction quite inadequate and lacking important facts: the Sowjet Union literally disassembled all Industrial plants after ww2 as reparations on a large scale only in east Germany. There was no Marshall plan for east Germany , Just for the Western counterpart , which gave the West German Economy a outstanding Kickstart. Short Said, there was really almost nothing in the beginning 1945 for east Germany exept outstanding Work Ethic and a very educated engineering force

[@michaelberry950]

You have an interesting way of presenting things, almost leaving some doubt in the viewer's mind that peaks curiosity. Refreshing

[@chrishoff402]

The good old days. I remember my first pocket sized 6 transistor radio. Back then it was like being a first time PC owner.

[@christiang9843]

Where you got those informations for your video? Historical basicly correct reported but i partly don't agree of your inferences.

[@Diego-zz1df]

Isn't this a success story then? If the DDR's investment in semiconductors made it possible for the region to become a major manufacturer post-unification, then they succeeded. They were constantly getting blocked by the USSR and the west, lacking trade partners hemorrhaging manpower and still they built a semiconductor industry that endured after the dissolution of the DDR.

[@LMB222]

No, blooms wasted so that a.regio could become a factory decades later is not a success.

[@JohnDoe-jq4re]

This was extremely competent very nice doc

[@_RedWizard]

I'm enjoying the video so far, but one correction- eastern Germany was historically the more agricultural and less industrialized region. It was also the most devastated by the war. So I wouldn't say that they inherited a strong industrial base. Rather, they were rebuilt with Soviet subsidies though not to the degree that the West received. But they were still propped up by the Soviets heavily.

[@rzul]

I'll just point out that Stalin forced East Germany to not participate in the Marshall Plan.

[@KiwiMC99]

Fascinating! Thanks. More of these historical insights and shenanigans would be very welcome.

[@dulio12385]

Putting your Semi-Conductor in the hands of someone named Falter might not have been the best choice. 🤣

[@geneballay9590]

A great report. Thank you for all the work and then sharing.

[@diggleboy]

Bravo! 👏 Excellent essay on the East German semiconductor effort since the industry’s inception. Nice to see how Japan contributed so much to their efforts. Infineon is now one of the worlds leading chip manufacturers in MEMS technology and also in producing chips for the automotive industry. I really enjoyed this one, John. Keep up the great work! 👍