Why the Soviet Computer Failed

[@davidgates1122]

I once worked with a programmer from Russia. One day I marveled at his skill in reading English, which far exceeded his ability to speak English. His response was that all Russian programmers could read English well because they used computers smuggled from the West and all of the manuals were written in English.

[@vvdvlas8397]

Я до сих пор являюсь таким программистом. Начиная с FORTRAN. I am still such a programmer. Starting with FORTRAN-4.

[@vvdvlas8397]

@uNnHkP8mza assembler for PIC and C for STM32, PASCAL for MSDOS

[@vassiligolikov4401]

Trust me we had computers with Russian interfaces in regular Soviet schools in the second half of 80s so knowledge of any English was not required at all. I started programming in 1988 being in the sixth grade when I wrote my first two BASIC programs to solve quadratic equations and to convert year numbers into Chinese Zodiac calendar. We considered English-based constructs the same way as we used Latin/Greek letters in math and physics. Americans invented BASIC and the most of the great programming languages so be it! All the operators made sense by understanding their functions not their natural language semantics. Though of course the leadership of the US in IT world was indisputable.

[@alexeyb6129]

Yeah, For us russians, English language - just for bussiness and Russian - for soul ( Dostoevski, Nabokov , Chehov, Tolstoy, Pushkin )

[@gregkMos]

Yes, It's our feature - listen English speech is so difficult for us because another pronunciation. But reading manuals is easier - in technical documentation so much same words

[@gregorymalchuk272]

The Soviet Union was 9 to 12 years behind the West in semiconductor device fabrication. But they did manage to do creative things with the transistor budgets they had, like superscalar architectures in the Elbrus supercomputers and the native Elektronika microarchitecture. The real thing that inhibited progress was the factory managers' hesitance to computerize factory accounting, because it would hamper the graft and corruption in resource allocation which happened with central economic planning.

[@anfrex3342]

USSR scientists pushed the development of their computers in the most ingenious ways... in the end they were backstabbed by politicians who knew nothing about computers. Regardless of whether it was a central economic planning or not, this would have happened to any project if the organic development of technologies were interrupted.

[@seanm2511]

Sure. I think there's a principle here related to moore's law that is worth mentioning. That is; transistor density may double every 18 months, but the motive force behind that doubling is competition.

[@steveunderwood3683]

There are many smart well educated Russians to produce excellent paper designs. The ability of the USSR to turn those into polished, reliable and affordable products was the key problem. Without a mass market to drive things to scale it's hard to get anywhere. The USSR would have done much better by illicitly acquiring and copying western hardware, and developing a strong software industry to apply that hardware in innovative ways. They had the right human capital to succeed at that.

[@gregorymalchuk272]

@@steveunderwood3683 The lack of software copyright in the Soviet Union was another huge problem which disincentivized native development of software. The history of Tetris is a microcosm of this phenomenon.

[@Grak70]

I’m sure the discomfort with automation that would eliminate labor was not lost on the management with a resident Party member standing behind them at all times either.

[@seeratlasdtyria4584]

Shortly before the fall of the USSR, I happened to be traveling there meeting with officials and notables from St. Petersburgh to the Altai, and had the occasion to have dinner/drinks (LOTS of drinks:) with a group of Soviet scientists meeting in Yalta. During that evening, an issue came up having to do with the then oil/gas pipeline being constructed thru the Caucasus. During the discussions between them, which quickly grew into a rather heated argument, I was amazed when several of them whipped out their slide rules in order to support their respective positions. I said nothing till things were winding down later( I had not even seen a slide rule, well, for decades.) Having resolved their argument, we returned to the meal (long, long, meal) and near its conclusion, I rose and announced that I had a parting gift as a token of my appreciation for the chance to meet and confer with the group. I then opened my briefcase, reached in , and presented to the groups' principal scientist and leader, the latest (and just released in the West) solar powered Casio Scientific Calculator (which surpassed the comparable HP products at the time). When he realized what I had just handed to him, quite literally, tears came to his eyes, and for a few moments, he could not speak. The rest of the group surged around him in astonishment and excitement as he opened the box and fired it up. :) Needless to say, the post meal celebration went on for some time:) JESUS could these men Drink! I've gotta say, it was one of most memorable, productive, and satisfying encounters with intelligent people of my lifetime, and frankly, let me tell you, THAT is saying something:)

[@jamesburleigh7059]

Wow..... Just wow.

[@InVinoVeritas540]

Awesome story

[@hotjazzbaby]

Thanks for sharing 🌟

[@horrorspirit]

Nice story man

[@americanstarman4418]

Now there calculating the losses there having with Putin .

[@jonnsmusich]

I had a dear Russian friend, now passed, who grew up in the USSR as a computer engineer. He told me that whenever the main computers in his department went down a notice would come up with the IBM US service phone number.

[@michaeltotten7508]

ha ha ha ha ha!

[@martist911wasits-not-real4]

My dad, who worked for Sperry univac/Unisys was one of the computer electromechanical engineers sent to "repair" them. I also found out when I was about 40 years old through a private discussion that he was also employed by the cia as an operative.

[@Olgasys]

IBM was always interested in these computers not to sue but to provide service.

[@ducknorris233]

My father in law worked for the railroad in Houston in the late 50s. He worked in the money counting room and one day the big bosses came into the room and told them they we going to computerize things and did any of them have a interest in computers. He raised his hand and for the next 40 plus years that was his career. It’s especially interesting that he was born into a rural home without electricity only to have his life’s career be in computers.

[@stevensprunger3422]

This is a fascinating story but I’m related the guy that invented the videotape machine was a rural farmer that stayed at home at nights and studied physics and electronics and when he came to explaining a technical problem in a group of his peers, They rather smirk because he had that hillbilly accent talk slow etc. and he stood up to explain and blew their minds….with his answer I’m sorry I can’t tell you the name of the guy this is told to be my my boss who work for Ampex who is also relatively uneducated but he was a really good intuitive man that new electronics and video and he sold the first video records for data crunching to Edward‘s Air Force Base to take up and their plans to record data from the plane anyway that’s my story for now…

[@ducknorris233]

@@howardsontz983 Amazing how things work out when standing at the right place at the right or wrong time. I got laid off and went to take my fiancé to lunch and her boss happen to be in her office and offered me a job. I had zero experience and 35 years later am in the same field but an owner.

[@leogura6580]

Nice

[@ducknorris233]

@@howardsontz983 very cool, do you remember what year that was?

[@HenryHoffman]

full on real testimony..thank you..god bless your father in law..wherever he is

[@bahamut149]

As a Vietnamese, this is the first time in my life I hear about Soviet computer. All we have back in the day are Soviet made cars, and Aluminum wash-tub. The wash-tub is indestructible and the car was unbearable.

[@Proton_N]

Still better than gallons of napalm US gave you guys.

[@digitalcitizen4533]

The soviets were definitely years ahead of the west in wash tub technology.

[@bobs_toys]

@@digitalcitizen4533 I think the general rule was that if it was good for something to resemble a tank, then that thing was good.... At least as far as its tank like qualities went. Otherwise, results varied.

[@glurgbarble7268]

@@bobs_toys they were good at simple consumer electronics like fridges and fans and things, often built far tougher than their western counterparts, but once things got too complicated they tended to lose the thread

[@bobs_toys]

@@glurgbarble7268 I obviously haven't had personal experience, but from what I've read about east Germans finding their stuff in western bargain bins... No they weren't. A lot of consumer stuff was really, really, really well maintained, but that was more because if it broke, you weren't getting another one.

[@shroedingercat]

Great video. However, it has several issues. With so many comments I think nobody will ever read this, but anyway. 1. At the moment of Stalin's death there were 4 computers in USSR. Not four models or types, just four computers. 2 in Moscow, 2 in Kiev. 2. MESM was initially decoded as a Model of an Elecrtonic Machine, not the Small Machine. 3. There were 8 Strela computers ever made. 4. Not all ES computers were copies of IBM-360 and also not all were IBM-compatible. 5. The newspaper shown is not Pravda, but Pionerskaya Pravda. The difference is like that between The Times and The Washington Times. Otherwise everything is almost correct.

[@posticusmaximus1739]

Yeah well I have an issue with you: IT's KYIV!

[@sakatababa]

@@posticusmaximus1739 i have a "nope" on that one. it is кијев град (kijev's city) or, in genitive, кијево (kijevo). if you want to argue about how it is written, go argue with khazars. they named it after one of their own, after all.

[@zero-zone4911]

@@sakatababa Whoa, imagine having so much confidence in the bullshit you're spewing. >kиjeв град You know, it looks like a bad attempt at serbian. It doesn't even make sense. And on top of that, you didn't even bother with etymology. Wowise, and you even did make some appealing fallacy here. Aka it was some khazars who named the city, which is simply not true, both from linguistic and historical perspective.

[@Bwize716]

@@sakatababa named after KIY

[@sakatababa]

@@Bwize716 wrong alphabet. y is u. it should be j and read like y in yesterday.

[@JackMenendez]

From what I know, this is an outstanding representation of what happened up to a point. I worked with a former Soviet computer scientist. He told me some great stories but adding to your account. As you said, the Soviet Union built the equivalent of the IBM 360 CPU but did not have IBM's latest operating system, MVT. MVT had virtual memory allowing a computer that had only 4 megabytes of memory to act like it had 16 megabytes. The Soviets had obtained MVT and the more advanced MVS through clandestine means; although they did not have a complete version, they could make it work. The Soviet Union bought most of its peripherals on the black market. However, their domestically built CPUs were excellent. The showstopper was that they could not purchase disk drives on the black market and failed to produce Winchester disk technology on their own. Disk technology allowed the US to run more advanced operating systems like MVT and MVS and, importantly, solve more advanced problems that depended on fast access to large amounts of data, such as seismic analysis of oilfields, heat flow, aerodynamic drag on wings, physics particle collision analysis, digital image analysis, etc. The Soviets did manage to get a few disk drives from the black market but never enough to make wide use of the capability.

[@barbaranostrand4214]

Oh come on! Around 1980, US research groups were still using CDC 300 and 600 MB disk drives the size of washing machines. Not Winchester disk drives. CDC 600s were what were connected to our pair of VAX 11/780s for large speech model analysis. While I did a few things with the 780s such as writing a driver for a graphics printer, doing about 6-9 months of software updates over a 2 week interval after the person who the company hired from DEC resigned, and installing EUNICE (a UNIX emulator), I also worked on a computer architecture project, and later a full custom VLSI design project which had its own VAX 11/750.

[@Dan-kr9bm]

On a sidenote, the largest computer manufacturer in East Germany was called "Kombinat Robotron", which is just objectively a rad name.

[@tyrantfox7801]

We've got a company named ' Keltron '

[@061Hitachi]

Kombinat is generic term for Socialist conglomerates. Kombinat Carl Zeiss for e.g, Robotron is fantastic name especially in the 80's. They also had good products but the yields and production outputs were extremely low while the demand was high.

[@Ndlanding]

Smells of Half-Life to me.

[@Anvilshock]

@@Ndlanding That's because Half-Life, certainly in the later titles, is actually made to smell of Eastern Bloc.

[@gregd6022]

there's a "Robotron" still in the video... i noticed immediately and thought the same... "cool ass name" ;)

[@lukeo5908]

My father-in-law frequently travelled to Moscow for his work as an aeronautical engineer in the 1980s. The Russian engineers were known for saying "we may not have the best computers here, but we do have the biggest". You can't fault their sense of humour!

[@AcTpaxaHeu]

Soviet microchips - the biggest microchips in the World!

[@bobroberts2371]

See also the DUGA radar system.

[@novemberalpha6023]

@@AcTpaxaHeu Soviet microchips = Macrochips

[@michaeltotten7508]

And the "heaviest", "most cumbersome", and "most difficult to mass produce", too! ha ha ha ha ha...(and probably, "most unreliable", and "most expensive", as well!)

[@viconichol]

There is another joke: a russian nano-bolt (screw) is the biggest nano-bolt in the world.

[@ernestuz]

When I was a child in the 80s my family bought a bright red portable TV of Soviet origin, a really portable one, I didn't see anything similar in the shops for quite a while. But one day, after a few years, it broke. The technicians we brought it to told us it wasn't economically feasible to track the fault and repair it. We thought at the time that it was too advanced for the local repair shop. Actually it wasn't, instead of using ICs as their western counterparts, it was built using discrete transistors and the miniaturization was accomplished carefully crafting an incredible mess inside the device. I doubt the factory could produce many units per year. Still a remarkable feat of ingenuity and craftsmanship.

[@L1ven]

We have a TV museum in town. Salora and Nokia mobile phones originate from here. Salora was one of the first companies to develop a commercial color TV and was one of the most sold TV company in Europe for many years. In the museum there was a really old TV stripped so you could see what was inside and I can tell you that most of the TV's were total mess back in the days. At least the ones from 60-70. I dont know how old was that portable TV tho xD

[@andremorr]

Most of Soviet electronic stuff was sold with lists on which you could find a very detailed schematics and stuff. I don't know if it was a worldwide practice, but probably it was because of the lack of standardization. If you wanted to repair something, you'd need a guide every time you open a new device

[@juanignaciocarrano860]

The Ministar 405, maybe? The board is built like a tryptich, with hinges folding in three around the CRT. The only ICs are for decoding the FM audio subcarrier. The schematics fit in a single page.

[@ncs8730]

@@andremorr Every Soviet TV set was sold with the manual and electric diagram.

[@Vousie]

@@andremorr I have an old radio, not soviet and it also came with detailed schematics of every single component. Just like cars used to come with full instructions on things like how to adjust the gap on the spark plugs or something. Companies used to give proper instructions for a DIY-focused customer to be able to do their own repairs. Nowadays they treat us all like goldfish.

[@sthed6832]

I did my PhD research on microprogramming in the late '70s. Many years later I met someone who worked in a facility in the Armenian SSR who used some of my papers. They had a 360, a lower end one, and were modifying its microcode to support later peripherals they were able to get from the West. All of us working on microprogramming in my department got postcards from behind the Iron Curtain asking for reprints of our papers since they were not allowed copiers to do it themselves.

[@dimrub]

Interesting review of the Soviet computing efforts. My first computer was a BESM-6 - I was at school, and would write my programs in a notebook, in Fortran, then travel by metro once a week to the institute that had the computer allocated to us, to type in and attempt to run my programs. It was around years 1987-88. You would have been well advised to show the video to someone who speaks Russian though, prior to publishing. The pronunciation of some of the relevant names is unrecognizeable, and what you claim to be a headline of "Pravda" was actually "pionerskaya pravda", an entirely different newspaper, targeted at the younger audience.

[@fowlerfreak7420]

His pronunciation of Russian words and names has always been terrible. I hurt inside a bit every time, but thankfully I use subtitles and the rest of the material is interesting.

[@cuervoblanco71]

Fortran 77, don't forget it !

[@tunaconsuma]

Very interesting. Thank you for sharing.

[@Anuclano]

1987-1988?! Huh! In 1988 I wrote a video game on a Yamaha MSX-2 while studying in 2nd grade. All, MSX, IBM PC/XT, DVKs, Agats, Korvets were freely available for unlimited time in youth clubs and at schools at the time.

[@someoneforone1]

There was few personal computer models close to 1990 with Basic - domestic "Partner" or japanese MSX wide available in schools!

[@mike03a3]

Back in the mid '70s my brother-in-law was one of the Secret Service agents detailed to escort Soviet space scientists while they were in Houston planning the Apollo-Soyuz orbital rendezvous. He said while they were filling blackboards with mathematical equations the Americans stunned the Soviets by pulling HP scientific calculators out of their pockets to solve the equations. The Soviets said they'd have to beg for time on a mainframe to solve them back in the USSR. Before they left they went to a local store and bought every HP calculator they had on the shelf.

[@miamijules2149]

Wow. I’ve heard so many stories like these from Cuban relatives; from my own father and grandmother. It’s crazy just how far head of the rest of humanity we were - leading the way - only to drop the ball 4th quarter and fuck it all up! Lolol Still greatest country on Earth

[@sv1201]

I wonder how they were able to do that because they were paid very little per diem and HP calculators were really expensive, besides they had orders buying jeans from their spouses and kids and that was their spending priority...

[@robertsansone1680]

@@miamijules2149 Amen. During the Cold War I had many "people who weren't as Anti-Communist" as me (if I call them Communist Sympathizers a Leftist would brand me a McCarthyite & automatically "win" any argument in their minds) ask me why I was against them simply because they had a different economic system than us. My response was always, "As long as they are hostile to our way of life, I hope they keep their idiotic economic system". This is the problem with China for instance. They have defacto admitted that Socialism is retarded & now have a mixed "Hitlerian" economy which makes them all the more dangerous. In a strange way, I almost miss Brezhnev & Mao.

[@sashasade6485]

Holy shit.. all this happened in my parents time..

[@user-ty2uz4gb7v]

Amazing story!

[@MoritzvonSchweinitz]

I can't find it online right now, but I believe the Soviets reverse engineering was also sabotaged quite smartly by letting them steal modified and flawed IC designs back in the day. It was a fascinating story.

[@seanm2511]

The victims were not just the soviets. Many (Most?) designs contain a few dummy transistors that serve no function other than to catch patent infraction.

[@Laotzu.Goldbug]

It also handicapped their own internal development because they tried to skip steps instead of being forced to organically develope the full capability tree.

[@gorillaau]

That wouldn't surprise me. Remember the failing capacitors with stories of stolen incorrect, or incomplete, recipes for producing the capacitors.

[@richpryor9650]

Yeah, the same thing was done during the Space shuttle development. NASA would leave their specs open source and the Soviets would immediately copy them for the Buran program. But the US caught on and started deliberately posting flawed designs like the wrong formulation for thermal tiles and so on.

[@SianaGearz]

@@gorillaau that is potentially a myth, at least Teapo has indicated that Japanese companies blew the story out of proportion, possibly to push up their own profile and generate more sales. It's possible that Taiwanese companies ran into the same issues formulating and characterising capacitors as Japanese did in the early 90s, just later. Indeed there were some truly funny batches from unknown brands (not major Taiwanese brands) which measured "ultra low ESR" right off production line but just wouldn't last but they would have been gone by 2002. The continuing capacitor plague story is probably down to not observing the maximum ripple current and derating by electronics manufacturers, and then shifting the blame.

[@greenrachel769]

i love your documentary style, detailed, no excessive audios and great for learning english structures

[@IOOISqAR]

That wasn't the title page of the Pravda but rather the *pioneerskaya* Pravda, a children's newspaper, published by the pioneers organization (similar to scouts).

[@Bialy_1]

Pravda="truth" and there was lack of truth in every newspapper that was forces to name itself "truth" just to give some credibility to all that fake news that they were printing there...

[@kwgm8578]

I00I SqAR - I've heard that the Pioneers are coming back.

[@VeganSemihCyprus33]

They want to keep you as slaves! 👉The Connections (2021) [short documentary] 🔥

[@sv1201]

@@kwgm8578 The entire USSR ver.2 is coming back.

[@brokentower3148]

​@@sv1201 God willing. That fucking tricolor and the republic over which it flies is an affront to all that is good.

[@alzaidi7739]

I can add, I worked with a former Czechoslovak electrical engineer. He was part of the effort to reverse engineer the Intel 8085. He would mill off 0.0001" off the top of the chip and take a photo. Repeat until they got to the bottom of the die. Though not mentioned, the failure to develop domestic photo lithography equipment was significant. His 'personal computer' was horrific. It was a paper tape programmable machine. He'd have to literally cut and tape pieces of paper together to make a program. He later came to the USA and enjoyed success on may projects here. If I suspected a $10 Intel chip was bad, I'd casually toss it in the garbage. But to him, it was still practically made of gold and he'd have to resist the urge to go and fish it out. :-) He made several trips to the Middle East to buy Western chips and smuggle them back to Czechoslovakia.

[@muhazreen]

Some people starve of food but i feel bad to see people starve of revolution tech i hope we could achive more so everyone could innovate even tho nuclear war capable of wipe humanity

[@HA7DN]

Wow. I am currently studying EE at Budapest, and some of the older professors were also worked on reversing the 8085. Looks like it was a popular chip. I've heard these guys even fixed a few issues of the 8085 and Intel was even going to license the new version...

[@bluefalcon7782]

Thats fascinating update to knowledge I have about Czechoslovakian computers so far. I know that same reverse engineering was used to get a clone of Intel 8080, which resulted successfully into 2MHz TESLA MHB8080A. This was the only processor used for all Czechoslovakian school and home computers for most of the 80s; in 1987, Didaktik Scalica gave up and reverse engineered ZX Spectrum, while purchasing some original parts (Zilog Z80) and some clones (Ferranti ULA). No home 16-bit computer was ever made. There was one local manufacturer of IBM PC XT and AT clones, but they made it from parts purchased and imported from west.

[@prutok]

@@bluefalcon7782 Didaktik Skalica could have U880A, unlicensed Z80 processor made in VEB Mikroelektronik "Karl Marx" Erfurt. In the Communist East, the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (RVHP for its Czech acronym) was in operation. Due to delays, they agreed on a single system of computing resources (JSEP) on the then obsolete i8080 processor, which Tesla was able to reverse engineer under the designation MHB8080A. A joke circulated that the i8080 was chosen because it was like Marxism-Leninism. It also has three sources. (+12V, +5V and -5V) and three parts (8224, 8228 and 8080).

[@davidhawley1132]

Paper tape used to be a thing. I learned programming on paper tape TSS at high school in Canada around 1970.

[@arzen9835]

My father during the USSR worked in the Far Eastern Cybernetics Ministry, FECM. He began as a scientist - he was engaged in the development of programs for soil analyzers and in the creation of a mathematical model of permafrost soils depths - it was important for construction, drilling and mining, farming, paleontological and archaeological excavations, etc. But quite quickly my father became one of the directors, since he was practically the only one who understood Soviet computers in the entire ministry. According to him, they recruited ordinary employees by acquaintance - they did not understand anything in computers, and he had to constantly tinker with them, instead of actually developing and distributing computers in Siberia and the Far East, as well as lobbying for the interests of cybernetics in Moscow. Although, after a while he succeeded. He participated in the secret operation of the KGB, to steal a huge number of IBM documents, instructions and manuals from India, with help of their communists - the legacy of the Comintern. He was not an operative, but was involved in the technically correct translation of successfully stolen papers from English and Hindi. My father succeeded, so he was offered to go on an official business trip to the United States and Europe (naturally for industrial espionage). But his friend's friend was imprisoned for owning forbidden memoirs of Stalin's daughter, which father briefly read, for which he had been scolded by the KGB. They said there would be nothing punishment for him, but in fact they cancelled father's business trip a year later and forbid him to go abroad for 15 years. He remained in control, once told how they brought from France an machine for creating extra thin crystals and crystal films, a very important thing for research in microelectronics. Agregate was big, which is why... it didn't fit into the doors of the lab. Therefore, a wall was demolished in the laboratory, and a dozen people in their arms dragged the unit inside. They scratched the rest of the wall with a vacuum chamber and pierced it. Due to delays, French specialists replaced it only a few years later, and it turned out that almost no one can handle it, and only a couple of colleagues know for what this thing is used! In general, while they were messing with it, it managed to get technically outdated! But then the 90s have begun, and he and his colleagues PRIVATIZED this ministry completely, and turned it into ДВЭК, Far Eastern Electronic Company, FEEC. It still exists to this day, but in the 2000s father was driven out of the leadership, and he was forced (his apartment was robbed twice by bandits. Very unequivocally, but it turned out later that they were not connected with FEEC in any way, anyway this frightened the father) to sell his stake and remain a manager. When he suffered two heart attacks and quit, the company ceased to engage in any innovations (When my father was in charge, this company computerised whole region) at all and turned into a simple landlord, because the company owned a bunch of expensive office space, from the lease of which money flowed in millios of dollars. Now he is retired, sits in the next room, drinks Coke - illegaly imported from Kazakhstan due to sanctionsa - and watches KZbin 24/7, due to the consequences of heart attacks. Bright, interesting life and inglorious end. But his business lives on - I enter the university for applied mathematics and computer science. Upd: I chose aerospace engineering & software profile. Hope to get a master's degree abroad in 4 years. I translated some parts of the story with online translator, 'cause I am not that great in English yet. I hope it does not sucks.

[@toddkes5890]

Much better than my Cyrillic. Very good story, I am sure your father has good stories

[@arzen9835]

@@toddkes5890 yeah. He also climbed some mountains in Tibet and tried to climb Everest, but... Another story

[@arzen9835]

@@toddkes5890 I am studying English, 'cause I decided to study rocket sciense, but under sanctions my talent is not that needed. And I do NOT want to make anything for military, so I'll try to immigrate somewhere to Europe or US

[@be12]

Fascinating story. The KGB had infiltrated the left here in India, just as the CIA and its subsidiaries (anything with "Democracy" in the title) have now. Some irony there. I wonder how much American tech passed through here en route the USSR (and vice versa)

[@JohnDoe-si5vr]

You're English was perfectly fine and understandable. Thanks for sharing you're dad's story and I hope you do well in university (:

[@clutteredchicagogarage2720]

This is quite interesting. I'll have to read up on this history further at some point. My family emigrated from a former soviet-bloc country to the USA when I was a kid. My father told me that one of my uncles worked in some program to reverse-engineer IBM computers in the 1970s and 1980s. I don't know the details of his projects. I was told that he traveled to Moscow several times and that he worked on a team that used to disassemble and study IBM computers. I don't know which models. I worked as a professional software engineer in the USA for quite some time as an adult. One project that comes to mind after reading the comments below was for a big state government agency. The government agency relied on a mix of old software written in COBOL and developed on mainframe computers in the 1980s (or even the 1970s + 80s) as well as a mix of Microsoft technologies from the early 2000s. At the time, I worked at a small consultancy + software development firm that was brought in to develop some new systems in Java. I wrote some code to import and synchronize data from the old mainframe systems every day, and then we wrote a bunch of web-based software tools to allow people in this very large government agency to automate a lot of manual processes, develop new auditing protocols, and generally improve the efficiency of some government programs that were coordinated using the new software systems that we built. A lot of middle-managers at this government agency were thrilled with my team. We delivered features that the internal teams could not build, and we did it quickly. A lot of stakeholders in this government agency wanted us to continue to migrate some of the older government systems to new web-based systems that we developed. Then some of the older managers at this government felt threatened. They really had no understanding of the newer technologies that we used to spin up new systems. We used open source frameworks + programming languages. Newer systems used open source databases. We deployed our java systems on Tomcat fronted with Apache's web server for static content (this was maybe 15 years ago when these systems were still gaining in popularity). First, the head of the state's IT office asked us to migrate our web servers to IIS running on MS Server. We migrated our postgres databases to MS SQL Server. We still ran Tomcat + Java on windows server. We wrote REEMS of documentation on our systems. But then they realized that the internal groups still could not really understand how to maintain and develop our software. The internal IT folks felt threatened because the stakeholders at the government agency didn't respect their skills, and they wanted to continue to use our small outside team to develop all the new software systems for the government agency. So the internal IT folks eventually managed to terminate our contract. They tried to hire people to continue to develop the systems that we had built, but the internal IT management didn't have the competence to find people who could do it. I kept in touch with some of the non-IT stakeholders at this big government agency. I had lunch with one of them a couple years later. She told me that basically all new development had halted at this government agency. I head like 10 years later that they were still using some systems that I had built to calculate payments to hundreds of small companies in the state that provided services for this government agency, but the internal IT team at the government agency had not developed any new features for the system in a decade. I try to keep an open mind when I think about how the personal interests of individuals in positions of power are sometimes at odds with the interests of a larger organization or group. On the one hand, I would entirely support moves by the government to bring development of technological infrastructure in-house to reduce its dependency on outside private contractors, but if this is just done to increase the job security of some older bureaucrat at a massive loss of capabilities that serve the interests of the government's constituents, I think that's a real shame. I have seen this happen at private companies as well, although the most egregious example I've ever seen was within a government bureaucracy in which there were really no consequences for IT management if the managers made decisions that benefited their personal job security and advancement above the interests of the effective operation of the government agency, its broader workforce, or its constituents. I'm certain that this must have happened quite a bit in the soviet union. I've heard examples of how this continues to happen in Russia's crony capitalism today at companies like Rostec and even Gazprom when the government will spend massive amounts of money on wasteful projects that benefit politically-connected government contractors.

[@michaeltotten7508]

Excellent analysis, of the futility of government bureaucrat-controlled operation, as opposed to that of free market enterprise operation!

[@calvinminer4365]

I recommend "How Not to Network a Nation: The Uneasy History of the Soviet Internet" from MIT Press. Fascinating book and insight into the Soviet economy and leadership ideology.

[@jamesjensen5000]

My dad was required to drive a different route to work each day to conceal his location while working at a special plant facility for Univac in the early 1950’s ... as a child I was given “toys” from his work... transistors the size of pocket watches, solar cells to power my small electric car and printed circuit boards... after hours he drove my by the location and pointed it out.

[@uzaiyaro]

Nice! Any idea on some of the stuff he actually worked on specifically? I’m rather curious now.

[@Geopholus]

@Retired Bore Yes 2N404's, a very popular germanium PNP switching transistor used in lots os computer circuits, sometimes along with it's compliment a 2N388 (NPN). I still have perhaps 1,500 of the old 2N404A's. They are still available , and yes a lot are from Russia. Pretty damn big, by today's standards. Now IC's with billions of transistors fit in the same size package,.. about 3/8ths round and 1/4 inch tall. I believe that they could operate at a couple of MHz in standard switching circuits of the time.

[@colors6692]

@@Geopholus Turn off Wikipedia🤦🏿‍♀️

[@epajarjestys9981]

@@Geopholus *complement (not compliment like "you're looking good")

[@damm41]

I’m curious too.

[@JerryEricsson]

You know I have never seen a computer made in the USSR, however I did buy an old transistor radio made in that nation when it was still under the rule of Communists. I was greatly impressed with the quality and workmanship of this radio. It arrived very well used from Ukraine a month or so ago. When I opened her up the quality compared to those made in China Hong Kong, and even Japan look like throw away machines, which in fact is about what they are. The USSR Radio, made in the 70's was built like the FM Radio Transceivers I used to work on in the US ARMY back in the 70's. Most of the parts appeared to be from military stock, the circuit boards are thicker, the traces much thicker, the parts extremely well made. The only thing wrong with it was one bad capacitor. The radio worked but was rather quiet. When I replaced that cap, she came back to life. It will receive stations that my other radios only dream of receiving, I have an external antenna for AM/FM reception, the little transistor gets stations without the use of that antenna where my other sets have to be attached to get much more then local radio in my house. The case is built of a much heavier plastic, the radio was well used and along the line, the lock for the battery case was lost but I have it in place and it works fine with my little home built latch. She runs of a 9V battery I recently get a new Lithium rechargeable to use in her and that works fine. That radio is my bedside set and although I am an old fart of 71 I still like laying in bed, late at night tuning in to the shortwave band on the set, and I am not disappointed with that reception either. The little radio amazes me every time I turn it on. With Shipping the set cost me 40 bucks and man is she worth it. I wonder why the same quality is not present in soviet computers.

[@jn1mrgn]

It is important that radio works well so you can hear Fearless Leader.

[@iam8401]

Soviet personal computers took off in early 1980s but all production was halted then Gorby came to power(1985) and decided that buying from West is better idea. It took 4 years to realizie that this was bad idea as he emptied all coffers on buying expensive Japanese tech toys, American jeans, bubble gum, and computers... Only recently people of former USSR realized that his team were moles of CIA and Mossad.

[@MrDeicide1]

What brand is it, Jerry?

[@ShimmeringSword]

And there you can see why the computer failed in the USSR. If a technology wasn't 100% clear as something to defeat the west with, the political bureaucracy would hamper it. They clearly needed radios, so they got good radios.

[@lololounge8281]

Can you link me to this radio or tell me its model/make?

[@petyavodolaz]

In a Uni I had lectures for Computer Security and the professor was 75+ yo guy who lived thru all this soviet computing era. He was a pretty chill dude and liked to tell stories from that time. One of the stories was: He was invited in a science group to reverse engineer a computer from a captured remotely controlled submarine. The task basically was: Dismantle - Gather as much information as possible - And put it all back together. 🙃

[@michaeltotten7508]

...only to find out, of course, that the Soviets didn't have the devices or the technology, to copy it, right? Too bad for the Soviet military...now, in Ukraine, a new "weapon" has emerged: millions of Ukrainians using social media to display what camouflaged Russian fuel trucks look like, with easily implemented instructions how to destroy them; or wonderful smartphone pictures/videos of Russian troop positions/movements, shared with Ukrainian defense forces, etc. And, again, our former Soviet enemies, have no way to counter that, either...all due to Western technology, created in Western capitalist democracies, motivated by PROFIT...while the "centrally planned" invasion of Ukraine, is falling apart...

[@voicegain9427]

I did a course in Informatics at the Wroclaw Polytechnic in Poland in 1986-87. We had access to a Polish Odra computer which still used teletype terminals. The advanced classes had access to a Soviet Riad (or Ryad) computer which had CRT terminals. The year before, in 1985, the computer classes still were using punch cards for programming. In 1986 we were lucky to able to save our code on a disk. In think in 1987, the Polytechnic acquired a very modern East German computer that had a color CRT terminal. It filled an entire room and was made from simple integrated circuits (in the style of 74LS30).

[@РяхаИгоряхи]

It was really ES, yEdinaya Seria computers, Soviet clone of IBM/360+ systems rather than Riad brand itself. Riad term meant something like a generation of systems. Riad-1 was clone of IBM s/360 irons, Riad-2 was clone of s/370' irons, Riad-3 was difficult to match exactly with IBM production

[@andrewkondrash1642]

In the late 1980s, I worked on the ES-1036. It was the second generation of the ES series and was an analogue of the IBM370. These computers eventually became increasingly used as servers and communication centres for users.

[@Porkcylinder]

What a funny story

[@sliout]

In the late 80s, I worked on ES-1045. Way more advanced than ES-1036, NOT!

[@julianfp1952]

Fascinating. As a little anecdote in the early 1990s I worked for a US computer company and made a business trip to our office in Budapest. My main contact there was about my age so he would have been at university (studying computer science) in the early/mid 1980s. I remember to this day the story he told me about how he and his friends earned a bit of extra spending money while at university. Apparently at the time the Austria/Hungary border was quite easy to cross so most weekends they used to drive to a very small town just over the Austrian border which despite only having a population of a few hundred people had three shops on the main street all specialising in selling electronic components to service the market of all the Hungarian university students (there were lots of people doing this apparently) coming in to the town to buy electronic components to take back to Budapest and sell on to the local research institute that was using them to attempt to reproduce a DEC VAX.

[@gregd6022]

thanks for sharing man.. great "tidbit" of a story.

[@redthrow9827]

i love to read comments like this, it gives a real-life perspective of history that you wont find in history books. thanks for sharing!

[@DuRoehre90210]

Right. Something an old colleague (originally from Ukraine) has told me long ago. He was working for one of those "computer development" institutes in the 1980ies. I asked around about the same topics as explained in this video, and eventually why they kept cloning Western stuff rather than developing their own, since he was a fairly smart guy. The answer was that at the time he learned the business, this was the main strategy and basically the only the main thing they have been taught. It was just the norm and nobody dared to deviate from it. End of story. So in my opinion, in the ideological world of USSR, all incentives were set on improving reverse engineering process instead of improving independent innovation.

[@sangkang6294]

I heard MIT ran some mainframe or VAX non stop for 50+ year before shutting it off. Anyone know the details?

[@VeganSemihCyprus33]

They want to keep you as slaves! 👉The Connections (2021) [short documentary] 🔥

[@nenadstevanovic6797]

Great video! Please continue to make this Sovietometry content.

[@VeganSemihCyprus33]

They want to keep you as slaves! 👉The Connections (2021) [short documentary] 🔥

[@johndoyle4723]

Thanks, I started learning computing in the late 60s using Fortran and punched cards, you used 3 fingers in different combinations to punch the cards. It often took weeks to get past the syntax errors, and then compilation errors before it would execute. A few years later , Basic came along, if you knew Fortran, then you could use Basic straight away, error checked as you typed it in, and you could debug in a very short time,such progress in a few short years.

[@michaeltotten7508]

Well, John Doyle, I did the same thing, having learned Fortran in 3 weeks at Stevens Institute of Technology, during an NSF-sponsored course, in 3 weeks, during the summer of 1969, when I had just turned 17--my very first electronic computer programming language--on an IBM System 360 mainframe, which I believe had 64K of "core memory"--and filled the whole computer center building. By 1982, I had bought, and was using, a Commodore 64 home computer (similar to an Apple 2-C, or a Tandy Radio Shack Color Computer 2), with the same 64K of memory, also (but all semiconductor electronic, and much faster), in a small box, sitting on top of my table, underneath my tv (and using it as a monitor), operating "interactively" using an "interpreter", enabling me to write and debug a program in Commodore Basic, in half an hour, in 1982, instead of 3 weeks, like in 1969. And now this android "computer" that I am using, has 16 BILLION bytes of memory, in 2023, not just 64 THOUSAND bytes, as was the case, in 1982...

[@EndingSimple]

1976, I was in college for a BS in Computer Science. Fortran through punched cards. It was a horrible experience and a real step down. In my last year of high school I had Basic on a remote terminal that corrected my inputs on the fly. This totally deceived me about what I would find in college.

[@robdom91]

This reminds me of a joke back in my day: The Soviets were the first to invent the microchip! Why didn't it take off? Cause they couldn't fit it through the hangar doors of the facility...

[@Bertiesghost]

Gotta Iove those old Soviet jokes. Most still applicable to modern Russia sadly

[@jasonking1284]

Hehehe.. that's a good one. Gotta tell it to the next Russian I meet and get their reaction...

[@zoltanantal-kis7905]

Exactly my first thought. They did not fit through the factory's doors :)

[@srjskam]

That reminds me of another one: What's a Soviet ass-buzzer like? It doesn't buzz and it doesn't fit your ass.

[@supergub]

Needed more wheels

[@jaymacpherson8167]

“10 kF was thoroughly unnecessary…” reminds me of overhearing an Intel engineer at a pub in Hillsboro, Oregon about 1987 say something like “why would anyone need more than a 32 bit bus?!?” I was so flabbergasted at the narrow mindedness that I almost interrupted his rant.

[@tygerbyrn]

This reminds me of a scene from ‘Pirates of Silicon Valley’ where a Hewlett-Packard manager asks a young Steve Wozniak, “What would ordinary people want with a computer?”

[@steveunderwood3683]

In the late 70s someone I knew pretty much described where we are now in electronics, saying only a major unforseen roadblock in scaling things could stop it. He expected a few things that haven't happened, like wafer scale integration becoming common, but he had most things about right. You should have seen the negative reactions his presentations got.

[@tygerbyrn]

@@steveunderwood3683 Are any of your friend’s presentations online? I’d love to read them.

[@steveunderwood3683]

@@tygerbyrn This was the 70s. There were no presentation creation tools. If you had something to say you just got up and said it. He was quite specific about many things. At a time when CMOS was a very low performance technology, and the first isolated CMOS products had yet to appear, he said around 1990 geometries would cross 1um, and CMOS would be pretty much the only kind of logic still standing. That was amazingly accurate. We did our last ECL part in about 1988.

[@tygerbyrn]

@@steveunderwood3683 wow, those were the days. The early pioneers at work on the technology we have now and take for granted. Thanks for sharing Steve.

[@Patton1944]

I think it's interesting how the Soviet's big computer accomplishments were part of the official state apparatus, while the USA's great computer leaps came from businesses, mainly IBM. The Soviet Unions wasn't just competing with the US gov't, it was competing with the entire US computer industry.

[@v44n7]

Capitalism vs Communism. They had no chance. You can find all evidence in this video video how the soviet union failed. Not only on the computer industry but in pretty much everything.

[@michaeltotten7508]

Hey, Patton1944, not just mainly from IBM, my friend. Perhaps you are forgetting about the roles of Steve Jobs (Apple) and Bill Gates (Microsoft), as well. Yes, today there still are a lot of "wired" computers in use, in business (that mostly run Microsoft software, on machines originally made common by Apple microcomputers, known as "personal computers", or "pc's", today, and Microsoft did get its start on an IBM pc, whose whole hardware setup was similar to Apple's pc--but Microsoft software quickly left IBM pc's behind), but there are more "wireless" computers in use now, worldwide, also known as "mobile devices", and this was pioneered by Steve Jobs, with i-Pods, i-Pads, and i-Phones, and now continued in the form of mp3 players, tablet computers, and smartphones, both Apple i-Phones, and Google android. And I am writing this on my android, right now, texting at blindingly fast speed. So, Google has played an important part, in the Western capitalist democracy computer revolution, as has Apple and Microsoft, and Cisco (for networks, and network devices), not just IBM. I would venture to say that although IBM is still an important company today for business users, it is no longer the dominant power in the computer industry, that it once was, decades ago. And others, in the past, like Xerox and DARPA and AT&T, have also contributed to the development, of our great computer industry, as well. But the important thing to realize, is that without profit motivation, and freedom--none of this ever would have happened. Our freedom to engage in enterprise, and freedom of speech, travel, assemble, and freedom from egregious government interference in business, and freedom from government control, is what has made this country great. Free market capitalism works, not government mandated and controlled social bureaucracies...

[@bighands69]

@@michaeltotten7508 Jobs and Gates developed products and were not cutting edge computer engineers. IBM, HP and several other counties played a more important part in early computing.

[@michaeltotten7508]

@@bighands69 absolutely ibm, hp and other companies, like burroughs, were very important, in the early days--all companies (not "counties", like you had spelled, in your reply to me), that were fostered in a free market enterprise system in Western democracies, that had freedom of speech, assembly, religion--and the freedom to keep and enjoy the profits of developing and operating such companies. And yes Jobs was a marketer/salesman/entrepreneur, not really an engineer--but he partnered with engineers, to develop, then market his products, which, by the way, ended up creating huge industries/markets, that (along with other entrepreneurs, in the past, present and future), brought tremendous wealth and prosperity, to those same Western democracies (as well as taxes, to pay for social programs, infrastructure, and governments). Thousands, if not millions, benefitted directly or indirectly, from the markets/industries that he alone created, as high paid employees, sales commissions, taxes on his corporation, etc, etc, etc. And, of course, so did Western democracies benefit tremendously, from all the other innovative entrepreneurs like him, such as Rockefeller, Mellon, Carnegie, Kaiser, Ford, Bell, Edison, Marconi, Gates, Dupont, Morgan, etc, etc, etc. The oil, steel, railroad, automobile, telegraph, telephone, television, radio, computer, smartphone, software, and electronics industries are gigantic, in Western democracies, thanks to capitalist innovators, like those listed above--and have brought tremendous wealth and prosperity, to those countries that have embraced free market enterprise, in a democracy that has liberties and freedoms, such as the U.S.

[@bighands69]

@@michaeltotten7508 I meant counties in the context of places such as silicon valley and Boston but it was not a very well made statement as it was difficult to read. I do think that Jobs and Gates were engineers but they used existing market products and did not invent anything really. What they were good at was taking existing platforms and then developing them into products.

[@karlbark]

I went to the Soviet Union in the very early 1980's. -and I was presented with one of the first private computers that existed in that country. (A country in the Soviet Union). -That was a very cool experience that I'll never forget ❗ Cheers all, from 🇮🇸 Iceland

[@grimwaltzman]

My grandfather did a lot of work on computers around SU in 70s and 80s. He spoke quite a bit about the gap between soviet and western capabilities. Also about how part of his job was reverse engineering the ICs "acquired" from the west and that it was really, really difficult. I still have a decent amount of soviet ICs he stole from his work to tinker around for his own purposes.

[@psalc1]

the hobbyists in the soviet union did some pretty incredible things. the soviet electronics industry did develop a pretty good 386 processor at low cost, but someone decided to engineer on a socket that required an extra pin so no one else in the world could use it. what? computer hobbyists were considered to be indulging in a sort of fetishism. what? probably nervous about open architectures and networks. huge mistake. but then, the UK uses Win2k on it's newest nuclear subs... what?

[@singular9]

My grandfather did the same. Reverse engineering american telephone technology to bring telephones into every household.

[@stevensprunger3422]

Wow Soviet ICs I love to see those!!!

[@slevinchannel7589]

In this world where Capitalism has failed us +made the USA have the Worst Covid-Response in the World, one word is still demonized-as-f-ck: Socialism. ...Bezos and people just like him... Mind how these people do not 'disagree' with it but 'hate it with a burning passion beyond all burning passions'... interesting, huh? Whetever you realize what this says/tells/means by itself or if you just like to listen to Someone talk about Issues of the Workerclass and average Citizen: "Second Thought" is your guy. He and "Some More News" get much Praise for the Videos being for Workers and from Workers. Food-Waste, Worker-Rights, these 2 talk about it on their channel so well and non-patrionzingly, it gets them much praise. But oh well, one of them has such 'extreeeeeme' ideas ACCORDING to everyone-greedy-who-ever-lived that you should not hear him, cause he WILL come for your Babys. So i guess... dont listen to him?

[@faradaysage15]

what?

[@parrotraiser6541]

A Latvian colleague once told me that peripheral manufacturing was distributed around the Soviet bloc, and disk drives were allocated to Bulgaria. The nicest thing that could be said about any of their products was the less they had modified the originals from which they were reverse-engineered, the more likely they were actually to work.

[@arctic_haze]

I think it was the floppy drives not hard drives. I remember them. They made the sound of sawing the wood. The institute I worked in has made its own CP/M computer using parts available behind the Iron Curtain. It worked well but the Bulgarian floppy drive could be heard at the other end of the corridor.

[@parrotraiser6541]

@@arctic_haze Obviously that was one with "local improvements". :-)*

[@SKa-tt9nm]

As a Bulgarian, this made me laugh out loud. I’m sure your Latvian friend is correct. Bulgarian manufacturing leaves a lot to be desired at present as well.

[@AlexBoneff]

That is indeed true. Floppy and hard disk drives were produced in the so called DZU stara zagora. Plenty of BG made 8bit apple clones and later on 16bit XT clones have neen made in Bulgaria as well - under the Pravetz and Izot brands. They were everywhere in the late 80s.... Schools, institutes, factories.

[@totenkopfgrgdfhb1336]

@@AlexBoneff и после унгарците го приватизираха и изнесоха цялата техника в унгария и сега те произвеждат електрониката за инфинеон ;)

[@dinos9607]

Their electrical engineers knew where things were heading, but the Soviet political class was reticent. There is a parallel story to this which may also explain why, on top of all other issues regarding lack of incentives and productivity, the Soviet political class never really loved the idea of the proliferation of computers. Back in the late 1950s, early 1960s, around the time in the US they were designing the first computer networks, a Soviet electrical engineer whose name I forget (one may search for it though) had sat down and designed quite thoroughly a theoretical but very much realistic plan of connecting every single production unit with every single warehouse facility and every single sales point, including the last supermarket (whatever they had as "supermarkets" anyway back then!). His system did not just include the exchange of production and sales data but also an extensive service of direct communication including person to person chats so as to facilitate the flow of both tangible and intangible information. Basically, much of what he proposed were to become features of the WWW, precisely because his system was not centralised but rather decentralised based on the idea of individual nodes. Well? Guess what! The Party commissaries did not like it. Not because it was decentralised. Afterall, it could still be monitored centrally and every one could be spied upon - if anything computer networks facilitated spying, especially on systems that permitted "chat forums"! The actual reason they did not like it was because... it was increasing productivity unecessarily too much and above all eliminated the need for intermediary Party commissaries since suppliers and clients, producers and consumers would be communicating directly to each other. I.e. they feared that it would turn their economy from a planned one into a Just-In-Time demand-based economy (i.e. much like the Japanese one). As such their fear was political, they really feared computers would remove their power which in a straight line goes against general wisdom (i.e. that you can spy more easily through computer networks used by the general population). I would argue that one of the key aspects of the reticent of the Soviet leadership, next to a number of other mentioned in the video and in the comments here, is that the Party feared the sociological changes that could appear as an outcome of a wider proliferation of computer usage outside the strict boundaries of the Soviet military. They viewed computers only as a military application not a civilian one.

[@himanshusingh5214]

Sounds like excessive control of the state over all the resources of the country leading to money being invested less efficiently.

[@ibubezi7685]

If there's one thing socialists/communists fear it is the spread of information - sure, 'educate' people - but only with controlled info and 'news'. Imagine if that 'internet' would have taken off - how much data they would have to check. It's the exact reason why the current web gets censored more and more...

[@dinos9607]

@@ibubezi7685 Correct and to the point! Indeed, this what I aimed next to highlight! That just like Soviet leadership feared the social changes that a decentralised computer network could bring, similarly the US establishment, even if itself fostered the usage of computer networks worldwide to die the world in its web and thus monitor it closely, it also has had since the beginning a reticence as per the degree of freedom that should be given to users. In the beginning in the early-mid-90s, as part of the proliferation campaign they advertise it as a "virtual place of freedom of expression" and of "endless possibilities' but it was clear to us, early users, that this would not last long. The first step was of course to curtail activities of copyright infringement nature which were easily defined as illegal (the legal attack against Napster was a flagship in this effort) but it soon jumped on limiting free speech and on defining what was permitted and what not. By 2010s, it was clear that the world wide web is clearly not a space of unlimited possibilities and of freedom of speech. It is a place of indeed many possibilities but one of some but certainly curtailed freedom of speech.

[@maxmccullough8548]

@@dinos9607 damn I miss the 90's internet.

[@VeganSemihCyprus33]

They want to keep you as slaves! 👉The Connections (2021) [short documentary] 🔥

[@Nobodyknowsmeanymore-n4f]

Brilliant briefing, thank you. Was in Moscow in 1987 as a tourist and wandered into a computer facility... with an invitation. Amazed to see the IBM kit I worked on back in the UK replicated almost exactly. Apart from being painted red not blue!

[@charlesjmouse]

There's a cognitive bias that we tend to equate the every day with being unremarkable. I would suggest this subject is a good example. We are all surrounded by computers, our society couldn't function at all without them. But the 'silicon chips' these devices run on remain so difficult to make that there are only a handful of facilities churning out the more complex devices in the entire world. It's not a exaggeration to say that if just five or six specific factories burned down tomorrow the production of most computers and practicably all smart phones would cease for years.

[@tanyablonska5747]

that is such a good point. most don't realize how fragile this "system" is.

[@OscarSommerbo]

Covid, showed us the fragility of the chip foundries. And thusly expansion took off, not only in Taiwan (which produces most of the higher end chips) but in South Korea, Japan and even the US. We are slowly recovering from the chip shortage, and ironically it wasn't just the most advanced chips that became scarce but older, less profitable dies were not produced impacting car manufacture. Even more impressive is all the computers we just ignore. A laptop is just one computer, right? Well, no. It has a CPU, and a GPU both full-blown user interactable computers, then it gets trick what is a computer and what is a microcontroller? LCD driver board, USB controller chip (1 per two ports), hard disk drive controllers, TPM controller, the list goes on and those are just the ones I am certain can run custom code. Our smartphones are much the same, but that is only four or five discrete computers/microcontrollers (cpu/gpu/radio/usb connection/sim card). You need to look at really simple electronics to get back to just one computer.

[@TheKazragore]

Actually just one (I think). The Dutch company whose machines are used to make those very semiconductors by the likes of TSMC.

[@pirobot668beta]

During the hey-day of VHS tape, there were precisely two manufacturers of the 'dive unit' that handles and reads the tape. If either one of the plants were to burn, the other would not be able to keep up with demand. In a wise move, both manufacturers agreed to standardize the majority of internal components; swapping parts between makers was a breeze for technicians.

[@effedrien]

It would only be a temporarily issue for the more specialised components in your phone, like the sensors and stuff. The rest can be produced in any fab, it are all almost same machines, and they are relatively quickly changed to another product. And like you said, society became very dependant on this electronic technology. So dependant that governments will support the industry in case of such calamities. The industry has now already been recognised as 'essential', similar to the food industry, thanks to the lockdowns. No, at this point only a nuclear worst case scenario can stop us. Simply because you are all craving this technology now, like true addicts. From the military to governments and industries and individuals, they all need this technology so bad that they will not allow too much disruption in the underlying industry. Besides, who else would be able to convert the current mess into a sustainable future?

[@0nearmedbandit]

Crazy to think these giant, room-filling computers, only managed to do Kilo-flop level calculations, whereas nowadays we have phones that fit in our hand that do TERA-flops... that's such a big improvement!! We went from measuring in thousands of calculations per second, to Trillions, in the palm of your hand rather than an entire room. This is why I got into IT/Hardware... because it fascinates me and I'm obsessed with hardware and how it all works.

[@fftv7863]

and yet, those days they were calculating big nuclear reactions on those kiloflops, and we are using our teraflops in hands to ... scroll a tic-toc etc...

[@38911bytefree]

One kiloflop against hand made calculation most have been shocking. Japan made relay based computers .... Anything that can run faster and "error free" compared to hand made calculations would have been welcomed. Even mechanical calculators.

[@tomast9034]

the apollo program run with computers slower as my wristwatch....

[@0nearmedbandit]

​@@tomast9034

[@GregBrownsWorldORacing]

Yes me too, (but it's the software control that I liked to 'optimize') At my time in 1978 University, we had advanced all the way to the IBM 370. Programmed it on punched cards and did time sharing with 4 other Universities. While my job may have only required .63 seconds of CPU time, Job turnaround from card reader to printout could be 3 - 6 hours, just for an ABEND due to a stupid syntax error. (like forgot a semicolon) This agression cannot stand, man. That's what awakened my inner hacker. Sending the printouts in front of my job in the queue to the printer at Duke could move my job right along. Poor victims who never got their printouts and the confused operators who looked in vain in the 'wrong' computer center. Then there were those poor secondary victims (I never saw), the Operators at Duke Operations distributing printouts that would never be picked up. Sometimes it's just about (mis)using all available resources to get the best possible throughput/ bandwidth (a term nobody had heard of back then) so you could go back to your dorm room at 3am to get a few hours of sleep.

[@kjamison5951]

Soviet achievement: The ZiL-114 was the first automobile fitted with 24 valves. 16 were in the V8 engine and the other 8 were in the radio.

[@Peter_S_]

@@sem_skywalker Humon Sem..... Humor.....

[@randyrobey5643]

Hey! Don't pick on vacuum tubes. There are still applications today for which they are unique solutions.

[@VeganSemihCyprus33]

They want to keep you as slaves! 👉The Connections (2021) [short documentary] 🔥

[@nooboftheyear7170]

@@randyrobey5643 still make the best amps imo

[@jayrogers8255]

🤣

[@tobene]

My former computer science Professor always told us about the skills of Soviet programmers. They often had less hardware power to work with so they often had a much greater focus on efficiency

[@bighands69]

I am afraid that is just nonsense.

[@SueFerreira75]

The only time efficiency can be applied to anything Russian is mass incarceration and murder.

[@VisonsofFalseTruths]

When starting a fire without a lighter, two sticks CAN get the job done, but will never be anywhere near as efficiency. You can only get so efficient with subpar equipment before the the bottleneck strangles further progress in that regard

[@KvapuJanjalia]

I have a relative who worked at the local "Institute of Cybernetics" during Soviet era; he told me that they mostly read magazines, listened to radio and drank coffee during working hours. He never even touched a computer.

[@alexleibovici4834]

In the light of my own experience, this is entirely plausible.

[@huoltokatkos]

why would they drink coffee instead of tea?

[@petrichor259]

They should be drinking Vodka

[@robinwells8879]

They pretended to pay them so they pretended to work! That said, there’s no problem so great that you cannot solve it with some clever minds grouped together with an endless supply of slide rules and coffee (or tea). Adversity is the mother of invention also. I have heard that the Soviet military were very aware of the vulnerability of microelectronics to emf pulse weapons. We laughed at the valve technology in some of their aircraft but they would likely take off after the detonation of a thermonuclear weapon in the magnetosphere. I recall my own Father using a slide rule well into the seventies. For some things he said that they were quicker.

[@molybdaen11]

Why is that - lack of knowledge, money or ressources?

[@gspaulsson]

Beg pardon. IBM's first commercially successful computer was not the 1401 but the first-generation 650, with tubes. It had 1000 words of 10 decimal digits each stored on a drum. I saw one in action in 1968 when I was looking for my first programming job, though the first computer I worked on was an IBM 1440, a scaled-down version of the 1401, with a card reader-punch, tape drive and printer. The console had sense switches to control the tape drive and printer: you could stop the tape drive and rewind it manually to zero in on a particular record. They also had a roomful of unit-record equipment (punch-card readers, punches, sorters and collators). But as I recall, the 1440 was used in parallel with a /360-40. My first assignment was to flowchart Autocoder 1440 programs, then recode them in /360 Assembler. I may have some of the details wrong: it was a long time ago. However, the first commercial computer was the British Ferranti Mark 1, introduced in 1951.

[@miamijules2149]

Q: ‘Ohhh my God, how did you ever get anything done back then.... how could you live like that?’ A: ‘.... so joyously’

[@VeganSemihCyprus33]

They want to keep you as slaves! 👉The Connections (2021) [short documentary] 🔥

[@alzaidi7739]

@@miamijules2149 Hardly. I programmed a 1401 in school. what a PITA.

[@JerryEricsson]

When I was Stationed in Camp Haskins Vietnam my unit had a VHF Radio Relay station atop Monkey Mountain that rose above Da Nang. Occasionally we would have to do service on the 2 radios that made up the relay station (much like the Ham repeaters of today) so we would drive through Da Nang and up the mountain road to the top of Monkey Mountain, then down what looked like 2 footpaths through some jungle, across a couple of streams and to a spot deep in the overgrown vegetation to a small fiberglass semi-mobile hut build up on top of a cement floor with a doorway that lead below camouflaged under a bunk in one corner. Our radios were deep underground with large cables running out the building and into the overgrowth of a jungle quite hidden from view even when flying over the top. The spot was on loan from the spooks who did covert radio against the enemy below. They had one wall of their center lined with old computer tape drives with large reals perhaps 14 of 16 inches that spun as the fellows at the console did things that only they knew on the machines. Funny the place was so damn hidden to be almost invisible yet driving up the mountain some old tape from the machine lined the road.

[@MaidensWorldOfWax]

I got to work with some of the Russian computer engineers that came post 1991. I have to say they were some of the brightest most innovative people I ever had the pleasure of learning from and working with.

[@irgendwieanders2121]

Creativity is more often born out of lack of things, not out of having everything...

[@basillah7650]

Had to be bright to trick idiots into handing over their stuff to save them time in doing the work themselves.

[@spencerstevens2175]

@@irgendwieanders2121 yes but when you limit to who can exercise their creativity it doesn't matter how creative they get. They're still very limited overall

[@irgendwieanders2121]

@@spencerstevens2175 Missed the point?

[@spencerstevens2175]

@@irgendwieanders2121 I think you missed mine

[@volodymyrdrobot9454]

Thank you for the overview. I started my software engineering education in Kyiv in 1985. We had ES-1060 though it was barely available for students and took punch cards. But we also had several SM-4, and analog of PDP-9, and those seemed to be more widespread at that time as opposed to much larger ES-1060. Even some schools had SM-4-based computer rooms. Those computers were made in Kyiv. Also, the same factory made Mir and Mir-2 computers back in 1970s, and my high school had one of those. Those were developed under Dr. Glushkov's patronage and from what I have heard were not Western copycats like ES-1060 or SM-4. Where the gap really showed up was the personal computers market.

[@rambler05]

Makes me appreciate what I had. Went through engineering school at Ohio State 1964-1966. First year, we could not use calculators on exams. In 65, they were optional. By 1966-1967, we were required to use them. During that time period I went from a fixed point 4-function calc costing $25, to a TI Datamath, to a TI SR50 full engineering calculator for $150 in lieu of the more expensive but equally capable HP-35 for $395. At that point guys with slide rules hanging from their belts became real nerds! Quite a rapid step forward in technology over those three years. After four years in the service, I came back to the US and bought me a programmable HP-65 with card reader for that same $395 by 1975?

[@jerrymiller2367]

Interesting about the guys with slide rules hanging from their belts being the nerds. I went to college a little later than that, which was solidly in the pocket calculator era by that time. I was having trouble in a chemistry class with equations so went to see the professor for some help. He recommended I work out some problems by "using your slide rule." I was shocked at his advice.

[@josephdbishop6576]

My first TI-50A calculator had one memory and was $99. The TI-51A was $149 with 3 memories.

[@leej350]

I’m one of those nerds that came up with slide rules during grade school in the late 60’s early 70’s. Was introduced to one of those early HP calculators in our trig class in a USAF Tech school in ‘73. The instructor would set up games for us to race each other, slide rule wizzes vs the HP. (Later during my USAF time, we used a circular slide rule called a ‘Wiz Wheel’, had to stay proficient in case our radar station’s computer system went down.) Fast forward to engineering school, somewhere in ‘80 or ‘81; Engineering Economics final was a sheet with an equation at the top, 25 or so lines to fill in. I was carrying around a TI Compact Computer; given to me as a technician in a EE program (TI had a program for technicians in engineering school). I recognized it as a power progression, programmed it in BASIC on my TI CC so that all I needed to do was hit Enter and fill in the values on the sheet. Finished in about 10 minutes; Prof gave me a dirty look (or was he just acting?); waved me out of the room. :-D Started work at IBM at ‘84. Went 31 years with them; now back as a retiree-contractor. (I still have my old slide rules. I play with them or demo them to kids every once and a while.) This video showed me some special things I didn’t know even as an IBMer. (Much of the described history started before I was born, continued while I was in grade school.)

[@MichaelDembinski]

Excellent video - many thanks - appreciated. I'm reminded of the moment in Soviet history when the Politburo realised the game was over - the aftermath of Operation Mole Cricket 19 (June 1982), when the Israeli Air Force slaughtered the Syrian Air Force and air defences in the Bekaa Valley. The Syrians lost 85 Soviet-built MiG fighter jets; the Israelis lost none of their US-built fighter jets. The MiGs were faster, more manoeuvrable, faster climb rate, cheaper to produce, easier to maintain in the field... but their electronics were primitive, no match for the sophisticated computer-controlled radar guidance systems the American planes had. A few days later, the Politburo met to discuss the debacle - the largest jet-to-jet aerial battle in history - and concluded that the reasons behind the technological gap were systemic. In a Second Wave economy, you can herd workers into factories to build more and more tanks, artillery and aircraft - but you can't build good computers or force IT guys to write write good code in the same top-down, hierarchical way. This 'got-it' moment eventually led to Perestroika, Gorbachev - and ultimately to the breakup of the USSR. It was not a system that could survive the Third Wave of human development.

[@user-yv2cz8oj1k]

The biggest shift in Russian computing in the late 1980s was probably through the z80 clones of the ZX Spectrum, they increased the speed and created extensions and wrote software that really pushed the architecture.

[@Boris_Belomor]

My father had one. He made it himself with details that he "borrowed" from radioelectronic factory he was working at.

[@SudrianTales]

You know things are bad when the calculator is one if the best things you use

[@user-yv2cz8oj1k]

@@SudrianTales some high end mathematics problems are best solved with a human mind and a folio of paper and a pen. Brute forcing answers to complex designs is often a really bad idea.

[@mattbite]

What also made situation worse was denying the need for personal computers as a thing of oddity. With more people keen on programming and using them perhaps the whole industry could at some point benefit from the fact that there are skilled people using relatively simple computers on a regular basis.

[@DASDmiser]

Back in the 70s I was a programmer for one of the five sisters. One of my colleagues was an ex systems programmer from Moscow trained on the Soviet S/360 clones. He claimed one of the major duties of the USSR diplomatic core in the USA was to go dumpster diving at night at data centers around Washington DC for installation and maintenance tapes, manuals and TNLs.

[@neville132bbk]

"diplomatic core">>>",,,corps"

[@shriekinambassador5042]

thats what they usually do to this day. Embasies are among others intel collection.

[@choigold5094]

That sound stupid. As a software developer myself, I know that Soviet scientist ( and today Chinese) are NOT monkeys who just imitate without using their brain. That's some bullcrap anti-soviet myth

[@DASDmiser]

@@choigold5094first of all, the video and my comment was in regards to the state of software/hardware development as it existed 45 years ago in the Soviet Union. As was pretty well documented in the video. The video wasn't about China, China was still stumbling out of the cultural revolution. I made no comment about the abilities of the Soviet programmers, merely the Soviet's IBM MF clone industry and their inability to even develop an independent operating system and system support utilities for domestic business systems. I found it ironic an ironic story that Soviet Embassey officials would be stumbling in the dark, dumpster diving for media and support dock. As for China, I lived and worked in The People's Republic of China for almost a decade. I find your insinuation that my comment would in anyway equate Chinese as monkeys as beneath contempt. I have the highest regard for the abilities of Chinese technicians, their abilities and initiative. I still have on my office wall a old license recognizing that I was critical to the economic success of The PRC, and allowing me to live and work, as I pleased, in the PRC. Did you have one?

[@joshm3342]

@@choigold5094 The Soviet scientists had to abide by the directives of the Soviet leadership.

[@007nadineL]

My Aunt said in 1980 one of her classmates, a Chinese teenager, told their math teacher that he had bought a computer and it was at home. The teacher mocked him and said what on Earth did he need a computer for? How ridiculous of him. I've never forgotten her telling us that. I love computers.*

[@krashd]

That is what killed all of the British computer makers like Sinclair, Acorn and Amstrad, their CEOs saw computers as a fad that would go away, they didn't but these companies did.

[@John.Doe.2025]

Oooollllld legend. I hear it when haunted dinosaurs.

[@TimoNoko]

Did they mention "metric" chips and circuit boards? Soviets were using 2.5 mm pitch instead of 2.54 mm. So parts were not interchangeable and there was no much international demand for non-standard components. In 1970s Soviet SN7400's were very cheap (in Finland at least) but you had to twist them legs sideways, which was annoying and potentially harmful.

[@SianaGearz]

Yeah my genuine Z80 never sat or worked right in a Soviet socket. But the whole computer had issues, the semiconductor quality was low.

[@noop9k]

@@SianaGearz Yes, they had very low yields. Also, there were no USSR Z80s anyway. U880 was East German, and its exUSSR versions came after 1990

[@jimsvideos7201]

The knock-offs of the US-made B-29 bombers they had after the war suffered the same problem; metric aluminium sheet for the skins wasn't available in the same thicknesses so the Soviet aircraft were apparently some 1000 kg overweight.

[@VeganSemihCyprus33]

They want to keep you as slaves! 👉The Connections (2021) [short documentary] 🔥

[@mxMik]

ah, yes, the "metric inch"!

[@davianoinglesias5030]

Command economies have one huge problem, lack of incentives and flexibility.

[@Korn1holio]

I laughed about how you pronounce "Big Electronic Calculating Machine" in Russian, also, you show "Pionerskaya Pravda" (Pioneer's Truth) newspaper when speaking about "Pravda" (they were two different newspapers), but anyway, great video!

[@dennislbrown]

A company that manufactures frames from us is located in Moldova, part of the old USSR. I visited the plant almost 20 years ago. The plant from was an old Soviet computer factory in Chisinau that was abandoned when the Soviets pulled out. The computer factory had razor wire and two sniper towers. Very ominous place with earthen barriers and all that security. The concrete floors were coming apart and the brickwork was haphazard. The building's condition looked like it was from the 1930s, but it was built in the 1980s.

[@timdunn2257]

To defend against the West finding out just how inferior Soviet technology was, obviously. We are seeing Putler trying to use Soviet weapons against Ukrainians armed with modern Western weapons. The contrast would be funny if it weren't for the deaths of innocent Ukrainians. Viva brave little Ukraine! Viva!

[@deadprivacy]

that wasnt brickwork, it was a genuine soviet mosaic.

[@2011Azure]

@@deadprivacy Visited a former SSR (Western) just after the breakup. Watched the daily work of a bricklayer at a new building. He seemed to be the only one. Each day a different truck would deliver bricks. Not on pallets, just dumped loose on the ground. There were four sizes, depending on the day. Each corner of the building had been started with a different size. The structure was being awkwardly "stitched" together between corners, but he was tending upwards in the safe zones. I imagine that was his survival mode after the second day's WTF moment. The Soviet methodology survived for quite a while.

[@2011Azure]

Same visit ... 5-6 yr-old apartment buildings were losing their facings & mortar was crumbling. Where a friend stayed, a bathtub fell through the ceiling. Local authority advised that someone would come to assess the damage in a couple of weeks. Repair ? Depended on the assessment, which had to be reviewed by some committee of course.

[@dennislbrown]

@@2011Azure we did a grand tour of Chisinau. Large bridges that were abandoned a decade before, half finished. Several apartment buildings made of concrete, but never finished past the primary structure, so no windows or doors, but people squatted in them anyway. Back then, unemployment was 50%, wages were about 5 US$ a day. Met with a bunch of engineers, but their inability to see out of the box, to be creative was astonishing. They only thought in a linear fashion. They could make anything you gave them the specs for, but had difficulty creating anything new. There was a lack of finesse in their designs. This was from decades of Soviet philosophy, where coloring outside the lines would get you in big trouble, so it was ingrained in the culture. Sadly, we couldn't engineer anything there, had to go to Europe or America, then let them build it. They simply lacked the imagination after decades of brainwashing that told them imagination was bad.

[@miroslavhoudek7085]

I really enjoyed "How not to network a nation" by Benjamin Peters. It's basically the same thing but with more details on the infighting and important and interesting details of the whole discourse. There actually was a lot stronger pull towards cybernetics because central planning is a very clear use case for it. Just, can't be done without computers and it's very obvious to almost anyone. When you have a building full of people trying to make a "database" with supply and demand for next 5 years, make "predictions" based on "models" and get "inputs" from factories ... but Stalin didn't like it. And so it begun.

[@BobHannent]

Did you watch the Asianometry video "Why the UK's IBM failed?" it's a great precursor to this video?

[@kenoliver8913]

A really good way of understanding these points is the novel "Red Plenty" by Francis Spufford. It gets the way bureaucratic politics, economic theory and computing theory were all clashing with each other (with the doomed hero Leonid Kantorovich - a real mathematician). One of those novels where you learn a lot about the real world.

[@kimobrien.]

@@kenoliver8913 When you revise Marxist theory into one of building "Socialism in One Country", destroy the Parties Revolutionary Cadre and proceed to more and more reliance on incentives eventually you end up seeking advice from Bill Clinton and Milton Freedman on how to solve your economic problems. Naturally they will tell you sell off state industry for a song and a dance close your factories as unprofitable and Buy American!!!

[@barahng]

What struck me the most was how they couldn't get vacuum tubes because every vacuum tube in Russia was made by the state, members of the state that happened to be political rivals. If only they had dozens of private companies capable of manufacturing them...

[@kimobrien.]

@@barahng If they didn't have all the secret privileges and a bureaucratic leadership there would not be political rivalry like that you find in the capitalist world. I doubt that the US ever had more than a half dozen manufactures of vacuum tubes with some brands just names printed on them for brand recognition.

[@natashatercera8536]

I wish you left in the long, meandering section on cybernetics. I think this is vital to understand the discrepancy between the US and USSR.

[@quequotion6862]

Those BESM-6 terminals look very much like the computer terminals of the silo missions in Goldeneye on the N64. First time I ever saw what they were based on.

[@e1n17g13l1i14sh]

Thank you!! I’ve been wanting information about this for so long. This is my dream video

[@joannehart9624]

Ironic that ICL was mentioned. My first three years in IT was programming one in assembly. That laid the groundwork for my 40 years of software development. It has been a great career.

[@rs8197-dms]

In the very early 80's I spent about 3 years programming ICL mainframes. The first one - a very primitive machine which if memory serves ran an operating system called DME - was very basic and rather a pain to work on. The second one, which ran (I think) VME (virtual machine environment) was a dream to work on, absolutely fantastic machine. That was, in fact, my first memory of really enjoying working with a computer. (The second was when I started working on a DEC VAX machine in the late 80's)

[@crappychannel643]

Once again reminded of just how brilliant this video is

[@pubwvj]

Fascinating. I lived through most of this and have been in computers fo half a century but you taught me some new history and tied some loosens together in my understanding. Thank you.

[@andondragomanov4921]

I'm simply amazed at the capacity you can do quality research, and on such a consistent and rapid rate. Incredible!

[@wishusknight3009]

Not really. This video got at least several claims flatly wrong.

[@totenkopfgrgdfhb1336]

@@wishusknight3009 which claims are wrong?

[@fatetestarossa2774]

INDEED

[@VeganSemihCyprus33]

They want to keep you as slaves! 👉The Connections (2021) [short documentary] 🔥

[@Amidat]

seems like wikipedia

[@ronaryel6445]

Very interesting video. One minor point: ENIAC was the world's first all-electronic computer, not the first digital computer. The first digital computer was Karl Zuse's Z-1 in Germany in 1941, which used electromechanical relays in place of vacuum tubes that the Nazis could not obtain. It was slower than the later ENIAC but was sufficient to help design the V-2 ballistic missile.

[@m_lies]

yea, I also already have written a comment on it. But one correction for you "Z1" was 1936-38 it was semi-programmable and later "Z3" -1941 was the fully programmable and automatic digital computer.

[@michaeltotten7508]

Oh yes, for sure. The ENIAC was the first general purpose, all-electronic, digital computer--but definitely not the first computer, by far! The Chinese (I believe it was from them) used an abacus, possibly thousands of years ago, and slide rules were an early form, of a computer, long before anything electronic. The Greeks had that famous all metal computer device, for navigation, based on star positions, I believe. And the Egyptians had a similar device, for calculating positions of sun, and moon, based on earth rotation, etc. Even during WWII, the British had their "Bombe" computer, long before ENIAC, to break Enigma codes, based on their brilliant computer scientist, who didn't get much recognition, for his great work, because he was gay--and the government claimed his work was secret--but that secrecy, about his particular contribution to the war effort, wasn't necessary anymore, after the war was won...and so, throughout history, there have been many different forms of "computers", the ENIAC (from MY alma mater, btw) being just one, in a long and almost continuous chain, of computing efforts, down through the ages...I also remember constructing an electro-mechanical toy computer, called Brainiac, and a mechanical-digital plastic toy computer, called Digi-Comp, both while on Christmas vacation, during 9th grade, in 1966, as a project for my accelerated algebra class, in junior high school, as well. And they both worked, in their own limited ways, to do simple addition, one form of "computing". Of course, Digi-Comp had come, in the box, in 50 different plastic pieces, without instructions (from the last user), and I had only 2 photographs of the assembled version, on the outside of the box, to use, to assemble it, and get it working--but I was successful, nonetheless (needless to say, I got straight A's in algebra, that year...ha ha ha ha ha...)

[@sthed6832]

The Z3 correction has been made already, but my research showed that the Z3 was considered a research project and never used for the war effort. It was destroyed in a bombing raid in 1943.

[@michaeltotten7508]

yeah, for sure the ENIAC was not the first computer, not even the first digital computer. Interesting to note the German's work, on the Z series, but, what about Turing's work on the Bombe, used to de-cypher enigma code? Did his work, or its beginnings, pre-date Zuse's work? And, although the work on ENIAC began during the war, and was purportedly built to calculate trajectories of artillery shells, it was not completed, until after the war ended--but, I'm guessing that it was the model for IBM and Burroughs, etc.--because they were not using relays, like Zuse or Turing, but tubes, then transistors, then IC's with multiple transistors in them, all purely electronic devices (although "core memory", was not, initially...fortunately the electromagnetically charged, read, and reset miniature rings, suspended on wire arrays, that made up "core memory", were eventually also replaced by semiconductor memory, as well). But, I believe that early in the war, Alan Turing was cracking the enigma code, to direct Allied efforts, to cut off Rommel's supply line, via Italian shipping, intercepted by Brit aircraft, destroyers and subs, operating out of Malta. In fact, the Brits got there first, best Enigma stuff, from captured German weather ships, early in the war, as well as the help they got from the Polish, who had first recreated an Enigma machine, I believe, before the war began, in Europe. So Turing had to have created the Bombe, pretty early, in the war, possibly simultaneously with Zuse's efforts, to create his digital computer. Personally, I believe Alan Turing's work had much more of an effect, was much more important, on the course of the war. But Zuse's work, might have had much more of an effect, on the computer industry, as a whole, after the war, perhaps.

[@sthed6832]

@@michaeltotten7508 I'm not sure I'd call the Bombe a computer, but more special purpose hardware. Colossus was. I'd give credit to the ABC machine at what later became Iowa State, which Mauchly visited. This visit, which he did not mention on the patent application for ENIAC, was one of the reasons it was invalidated. Alice Burks wrote a book called "Who Invented the Computer" in 2003 which goes into the patent trial in great detail. Her husband worked on ENIAC. She is quite anti-Mauchly so I'd be cautious in reading it. My first PhD advisor was a student of von Neumann's at Princeton and also worked on the IAS machine, writing an assembler for it, so I have to be careful not to be biased to von Neumann as the inventor of the stored program concept. Which, interestingly, was considered important because there was no index register in EDVAC and to walk through an array in memory they looped and changed the read address in the instruction!

[@stanislav7920]

Good video. Great research. I lived in the USSR, saw and worked on Soviet made computers. Planned Economy sucks. Genuine competition is the thing that creates progress.

[@Commissar_4735]

But u can have competition within a state owned enterprises like between groups, dude do you think that those computer engineers working at Apple and Samsung are sitting all day thinking about the free market

[@pranavmanie1479]

​@@Commissar_4735 the ideology that the Soviet Union followed explicitly did not believe in competition and dismissed it as a "bourgeois" invention. so nope, not really

[@NathanOkun]

When I started UCLA in 1966, UCLA was building a two-story connection wing that connected the nearby Math Department and Engineering Department buildings into an "H" building with the wing being the cross-bar portion. It eventually housed not one, but TWO, IBM 360 Model 95 super-computers, pne on each floor. How could UCLA afford such machines? They had the Math and Engineering students create and debug the Operating Systems for this class of machines: Essentially an army of FREE and highly dedicated programmers and operators, saving IBM MILLIONS of dollars and YEARS of development time. I am willing to bet that UCLA got its machines at a big discount below actual hardware cost and IBM still made out like gangbusters financially, expanding their lead over any rivals. The earliest kind of hacker is one you hire to get your machine done ASAP and they really want to do it!!

[@fergiepicachew]

WOW! Very interesting insight. As a CS Engineer from India, I shudder to think the gap there exists in tech. It feels there's no point for India to try playing catch-up. I wonder then, is betting huge on R&D and emerging techs (quantum, 6G, etc ) is the way forward for my country rather than try to "catch-up" today's Western tech & Production using PLLI schemes in 5-10yr plan phases. But the ppl in India won't take too kindly to the waste of resources that R&D requires. It creates an image that the leaders approved sci/tech budget over food/job/home/edu/health infra needs.

[@NathanOkun]

@@fergiepicachew You cannot excel without taking risks. Putting your tech resources to try to go "cutting edge" is always the way to go. Look at China from the 19th Century to today; the bottom of the barrel against European aggression then to near the top today, economically, if not politically.

[@fergiepicachew]

@@NathanOkun Indeed. Well, India did take risk and tried to create its own semiconductor industry in the 80s but that failed badly due to same reason as in USSR -- "politicians, and not technocrats, deciding what to build and RnD" That failed. Now there's the current risk Indian Govt in taking in Hydrogen and Ethanol to stop reliance on middle east oil. Oh, and despite IT being India's biggest export, IT degree holders are not eligible for civil services jobs. The civil servants are mostly from political science, History and Arts background. And prob not gonna change much. I think Indian Govt is not interested in risks associated with RnD overall. Better to import mfg goods/tech as its cheaper than buildup an industry at home --seems to be the thinking for now. Thx for taking time to reply :) Cheers!

[@AKHyder01]

@@fergiepicachew I'm an IT consulting engineer in the USA. I really hope the leaders in your country wake up and realize that focusing on critical thinking and innovation within education is the way to go. The IT staff for my clients in India are always very well trained in specific software, technologies, and frameworks. But when you throw something new at them or ask them to find ways to integrate two disparate technology areas, it's like starting from scratch! They've explained to me that their education system (and for that matter, their IT industry) is very focused on getting certifications and passing exams. But the best you can hope for with that approach is maintaining what others have developed, rather than being a leader that others will follow. The good news is that there seem to be many Indians getting their education (and working) in the West - hopefully some of them will return to leadership positions back home and bring the Western "innovation first" mentality and high-level design approach with them.

[@johngeverett]

Yes, I remember when 'hacker' was not such a pejorative term, more like 'geek' or 'nerd' is today. I considered myself to be such at one time, but PCs aren't as personal as they once were. My first PC was an Apple II+ with 8-inch (YES - 8-INCH) IBM 3740 compatible diskette drives.

[@RedIria]

Let me tell you what the problem of the Soviet Computer was.. which is the fact that my mother *was* the Soviet Computer. -- My mother was a top student at one of the top Civil Engineering colleges in the BSSR (Belorussian Soviet Socialist Republic) and one day the director of the department comes in and says that the government wants to test their new resource planning computer for railroad projects and that my mother has been chosen to evaluate her results against the computer. -- When my mother completed the exercise she gave the results to the director and the director said "these are flawless but we can't use them" and when she asked why the director said "because this computer comes from the government and is not allowed to be wrong". -- So what she did was go to my grandmother, who was a secretary and had legal access to a typewriter (another story) and asked her to type up her resource allocation analysis on her typewriter paper because the computer at the college used the same kind of paper with the holes on the sides. Her director was then able to submit the evaluation and get it approved. -- How many other projects that computer allocated the wrong resources for? ..who knows.. but when my mother left the USSR in 92', the "computer" went with her..

[@molybdaen11]

When you have to break the rules to keep the system from collapsing.

[@c94d44027]

Excellent analysis, thank you. PS: it would be worth mentioning Viktor Glushkov and his work in creating a networked OGAS (kind of state-wide ERP) done in Kiev Institute of Cybernetics and later in Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology. It is also worth mentioning the infamous article in Times magazine, which stated that he wanted to replace Politburo with computers. Glushkov was certainly one of the visionaries.

[@liammeech3702]

Is there a link to an article online?

[@c94d44027]

@@liammeech3702 unfortunately I do not have it. Read it in another book, partly covering Viktor Glushkov’s work. Entertaining benefit of doubt, could be a historical anecdote. However knowing an attitude towards cybernetics which was around in early 1950s (“genetics and cybernetics are harlots of bourgeois science” - no joke), one could imagine how Communist top brass thought of it despite the obvious benefits. You stirred my curiosity further and I will go through whatever online archived available.

[@goekhanbag]

@@c94d44027 Would be nice to read!:)

[@МаксимГрищенко-н1с]

Я разбирал на компоненты несколько советских компьютеров, качество микросхем просто ужасное, большая часть микросхем была на тот момент деградировавших из-за прошествии времени. Самые лучшие компоненты в этих компьютерах это разъемы и переключатели, остальное годиться только как источник драг. металлов.

[@nickjansen1783]

I saw a soviet ESM. It was pretty big. Work with unknown shell and command line. I saw a Lexicon program for text and typing, and saw compatible printer with it. It was in 2003! It was working

[@tofu_golem]

It sounds like a lot of economic problems in the Soviet Union could have been solved by better metrics. Steel manufacturers were judged by steel quotas, not by what others could do with their steel. Computer manufacturers were judged by production quotas instead of what clients could do with the computers, so they didn't help customers with training.

[@think2invest]

Almost like the top down socialist system didn't work at all to determen needs and uses of materials. The west figured this out in the 1800's. The free market (profit and loss system) does all of the things above.

[@alan5506]

Yeah, and do you know what metric measures how useful your product is to other people? Money. But money doesn't solve the innate cutthroat self-interest that some people have which is witnessed as corruption, hostile business practices, deceitful litigations, deceitful advertising, conflict of interests, lobbying and the list goes on. Transparency and free speech helps minimize the aforementioned issues. Unfortunately, one party states aren't so big on transparency and free speech.

[@leonscheepers5350]

Better metrics - and still the usa uses imperial

[@chucktangy]

Better metrics helps to a point. The biggest issue was data collection, data quality, and data processing that fast enough to predict demand. The actual people doing the work in the Soviet Union were very thoughtful about how best to measure things, but the politicians and managers of the state enterprises were excessively corrupt. The corruption stood in the way of gathering better metrics because if the metrics highlighted the corruption the political class wouldn't go for it. Computers were stamped out, or held back because of this fear they would expose the corruption. While the Soviet Union is gone the underlying corruption still infects post-Soviet territories especially Russia. The planned economy had serious scaling issues where market based economies didn't. It was sometime in the 1970s when Russia began to realize that the Central Planning Authority would have to hire ever person in Russia for it to grow larger. But, if you had a more honest and transparent society with today's technology you probably could scale much much higher. But there might be a limit to the size of the economy even then that market based ones won't hit.

[@alan5506]

@@chucktangy Planned economy don't have "scaling issues". Planned economy simply don't work. Otherwise, North Korea or Cuba might be able to do better for themselves. You might want to mention something about corruption again, but I'd answer that corruption is independent of planned/market economies. Authoritarian market economies likely have just as much corruption as planned economies. Once more, I'll reiterate that money itself is a metric and exactly the metric that is needed here.

[@mrdovie47]

I worked on computer graphic equipment at Ford Motor in Dearborn MI from 1978 to 1989. One of the techs I worked with was a German who's brother had just come over from East Germany. My co worker from Germany lit a cigarette in the computer room at Ford Research and his brother freaked out, dragging him out of the room into the hall. Smoke particles can crash a disk drive and that would be a big problem for the Soviets, not so much here. We had drives crash but mostly from power failures.

[@ooltimu]

Super in-depth analysis. Good job! Really enjoyed watching this

[@stevesmith7839]

My uncle worked for a company rhyming with west sing house. In the mid to late 70's, he and his family moved to Romania for about 3 years to teach the (people) there how to build and program modern computers. I suspect that this was an official state secret on both sides. It would be nice to learn why this was done.

[@francishunt562]

Probably some trade off, I'm sure there was some mutually beneficial deal. Your Uncle was most likely never told the real reason.

[@calvinminer4365]

Romania under Ceaușescu, like Yugoslavia, kept a fiercely independent foreign policy from Moscow and would often play the capitalist West against the Kremlin for leverage. He condemned the USSR in it's invasion of Czechoslovakia, joined GATT (precursor to the WTO) and had trade deals with Western Europe. The fact your uncle went to Romania for Westinghouse in the 1970's isn't actually too surprising. After all, Richard Nixon visited Romania too.

[@spacemanmat]

Interestingly as a result the Soviet war aircraft were much more radiation hardened because they were full of valves not integrated circuits.

[@malectric]

I've serviced guitar amps fitted with their 5881's Tough as nails. I think they were used in the power stages of servo systems in aircraft.

[@Dowlphin]

Steampunk FTW 😆

[@casab654]

This is the Reason why Russia valves amplifier is still the best quality & good brand till today. They know how it works

[@jjtimmins1203]

Also defense against EMP pulse which can take down aircraft when a nuke goes off

[@dmitryberdnikov9130]

“Soviet MCUs are biggest MCUs in the world!” That was a common joke at those time. But indeed no one could imagine that electronics industry in Russia will collapse so quickly after Soviet Union was gone.

[@piotrmalewski8178]

A Polish computer engineer told me how he lost his job in the 80s; One day the director of their company, invited the research team, and told them they were not going to design any computer ever again. He said; '' It doesn't make any sense anymore to design a computer on our own, when it's much cheaper to buy one from Taiwan and it will be years ahead from anything we could come up with.''

[@samanthaqiu3416]

collapse universally builds up slowly, then suddenly

[@Americanpatriot-zo2tk]

In simpler terms, the Soviets didn’t have the economic per hours to our produce the Americans, and it didn’t fit in with the Soviet idea of what amount to waves of tanks.

[@vpatryshev]

Very interesting; thank you! As someone who participated in that reverse-engineering, I'd stress more the problems with the whole system, when competition lead to shutting down all independent development. Say, you, as an engineer, find a solution to a problem that everybody has with this kind of hardware/software. There would be no way to spread this around the country, even for free. You could only, if lucky, promote it within one company. And the Academy of Sciences was mostly occupied with fighting each other. Even setting up a conference was impossible without having someone "above" interested in having it, and promoting their agenda. Getting professionals together meant attracting the attention of KGB - what if they talk not about drivers, but about politics. So, it was doomed, as anything is doomed in that ancient culture.

[@u.v.s.5583]

- What are you talking about??? - Drivers. - Good. Just let me have something to write in the official report about drivers. - Right. So, comrade Khruschev is driving through the countryside. His driver runs over a pig, the pig dies. Comrade Khruschev says his driver to find the collective farm where this pig is from and pay them. So the driver goes into the collective farm and says, I am driver of comrade Khruschev and I killed that pig. The workers of the collective farm embrace the driver, kiss him and start a wild party drinking vodka.

[@firestorm165]

@@u.v.s.5583 I speak 3 languages and that made no sense in any of them

[@jerrymiller2367]

That's an interesting example of a system stagnating because of the way it was designed. But their system was designed on the ashes of an exploitive worker/producer system geared for agriculture and labor-intensive, crude industries like steel-making. Friendly competition and rewards for innovation are really the way to go when it comes to higher tech. If Russia would adopt China's model of capitalism and innovation in the economy (while preserving their government), then Russia could (have been) an economic powerhouse. Those people CAN innovate; they're clever and smart, but their system holds them back.

[@vpatryshev]

@@jerrymiller2367 Oh, don't mix Russia with China. Very different cultures. In China people don't mind working. In Russia they do. Traditions of slavery, you know what I mean. A slave does not want to work, it does not pay.

[@bobcastro9386]

@@u.v.s.5583 Still laughing a minute later.

[@Dmitrij1]

Спасибо. Отличное видео. Очень печальное, но отличное. Чистая правда.

[@gore0ru]

Чистая правда, с некоторым количеством брехни. Хорошая пропагандистская работа.

[@skpavlenko]

@@gore0ru чоправда? Так что, совок победил США в компьютерах, да? Может и на Луне вы первые высадились?

[@mallninja9805]

@@gore0ru Легче назвать аргументы оппонентов пропагандой, чем оспаривать факты

[@demonsaint1296]

@@gore0ru of course the Soviet Union isn’t known for propaganda. It’s good to listen to the failures of the Soviet Union as there are so few successes. One could learn the successes of the Soviet Union in a weeks study while failures would take years. One such failures is language’s. This video is in English.

[@shadesoftime]

@@demonsaint1296 everyone's got their own propaganda

[@boogerie]

Tragic when you consider that Victor Shestakov (re)discovered the possible application of Boolean logic to relay circuits in 1935--three years before Claude Shannon

[@politicsofAbrahamVwi300]

I disagree about Soviet rocket technology gotten from conquered Nazi rocket scientists. When it comes to that, America got the scientists after Germany's surrender. The Soviets had been working on rocket theory long before the Germans. Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, Yuri Kondratyuk all Soviets. Korolev, Glushko, were geniuses. The Americans on the other hand couldn't have done a thing without Werner Von Braun. Computing, yes but not rocketry. In terms of rocketry, I think it's America that is still playing catch-up.

[@beachbum4691]

As a historian, I am not going to risk missing content of this quality. I just subscribed; and I did remember to hit that little bell so that I get updates. This brilliant comprehensive insight has a place in the educational curricula of all schools in the West. Thank you for the research work, the compiling, the editing, and posting. :)

[@criztu]

Well, the fundamental bit of history when we're talking about USSR, is V.I.Lenin was trained in Switzerland. that is, USSR is a creation of the West, precisely to hinder the development of the nations within the former Empire of Russia, ruled by House Holstein Gottorp.

[@Merilix2]

In my opinion this vid shows a bit biased sight of the whole story, starting from the clickbait title through the very first statements about first computers till the end. By the way, there are no such things like "the soviet computer" nor "the usa computer".

[@SpectreOZ]

As a historian you should also know the British developed the first programmable digital computer Colussus in 1943... not the Americans 👍

[@Merilix2]

@@SpectreOZ Please don't forget the first programmable digital computer Z1 developed by the German Konrad Zuse in 1938.

[@SpectreOZ]

@@Merilix2 Ah... but that was a *mechanical computer* and (by Zuse's own admission) didn't work particularly well, the earliest mechanical computing device AFAIK is the Antikythera mechanism from around 100BC however, it is Jaquet Droz of Switzerland who is credited with making the first programmable computing device (the writer automaton) around 1760 👍

[@sonichuizcool7445]

I've had the chance to work on a vintage 80s soviet built computer. After getting past language barrier it was actually (for the time) a well thought out experience. The computer itself was easy to work on should repairs be needed and it served its purpose well.

[@jjtimmins1203]

Russian / Soviet things have these characteristics: reliability and easy repair.

[@sonichuizcool7445]

@@jjtimmins1203 I wish I had the money to buy it... Unfortunately is was insanely expensive. Given the rarity I guess played into it. I have an appreciation for oldschool computing.

[@jamesrotary7274]

Soviet computer industry was HORRENDOUSLY inefficient, even by Soviet standards. The output of working CPU chips was extremely low, just about 15-20% of any given batch. My father had been a chief engineer in a Soviet chip factory in the late 80s and told me there were days when they were unable to get a single working chip from a whole wafer. Because of that Soviet computers were just ridiculously expensive, pricing started from around 4000 rubles which was an ordinary paycheck for 3 years.

[@alexrzr]

Soviets itself was HORRENDOUSLY inefficent. It was a "jail of nations" and now russians wants to renew this regime.

[@Aeimos]

Most ironically, there's a large population of socialist Zoomer software engineers in the US.

[@sztypettto]

and what were the price of computers in US and Western Europe during the same time?

[@Aeimos]

@@sztypettto less than 3 years in wages.

[@jamesrotary7274]

@@sztypettto I'm not a vintage computer expert but a brand new spectrum could be had for less than 200 USD back in 1985. Older 8080 -family based machines (similar to those made by soviets) could be purchased at bargain prices.

[@dmitria6847]

@Asianometry. Actually, besides the reasons described in your video you forgot to mention a very important point: the USSR lost 27-28M of it's population, mostly european, due to the WWII. Most of the european part of the USSR laid in ruins. Up to 60M lost their homes or lived in worse conditions then before the war. Rebuilding lasted till the 80-s at least. And there was nothing like Marshals Plan for the SU, all was done on our own. Then, right after the WWII the West has declared a Cold War driving politics of isolation. But even if there would be no such isolation no country could reshape the industry to be capable of coping both with huge scale peoples needs and whole reconstruction of the ruined country and keeping military fit at the same time, because the losses of tens of millions people, including engineers and scientists and devastation at a scale unseen before, which left deepest wounds and noone wanted to be caught off guard once again, so the army had prio N1. Only soviet people would understand that life and devotion after the war. At the same time the US industry was in the best shape due to the booming production of all goods, including military goods for decades, gathering experience and trimming personal to the highest knowledge standards made available by that booming industries. In my opinion this is one of the most important arguments which is often omitted or seems forgotten, why the SU lagged. But even under such circumstances it delivered sometimes up to 25% of scientific publications and has reached a lot.

[@JuPiTeR_0211]

Yes a great answer please tell me more about all this

[@davidwheeler2990]

I loved this video. Incidentally, the Russians later produced their own computer on a chip. American engineers obtained a sample and discovered that it was a copy of Intel’s 8080 CPU. However, the Russians disconnected circuitry designed for diagnostics, as they didn’t understand what it was for. In the 1970s, my dad licensed magnesium production technology from Russia’s VAMI (Russian National Aluminum and Magnesium Institute). It was much better than our methods. I have also been told that Russia excels at light-metal technology and leads the world in titanium production. Furthermore, they allegedly have controlling interest in American-based companies that produce titanium. Regardless, it would be interesting to learn how they failed in one field while excelling in another.

[@nikolatasev4948]

Yep, USA bought titanium for the SR-71 from USSR (through intermediates, of course). USSR also had very advanced superalloys, allowing them to have, for example oxygen-rich full-flow RP1 engine built in the 60s, the NK-33. Rocket scientists would not believe in its parameters until buying several copies for testing and seeing it for themselves. These same engines flew on the Anthares, and I don't mean the old design, I mean the old hardware itself. Then again, this same phenomenal engine repeatedly blew up the Russian rocket it was supposed to carry, and then likely blew up the Anthares. The Soviet system is great at finding and training talent, then wasting their labor.

[@francoislechanceux5818]

Equating the soviets to russians, Best way to know a russian troll

[@thomasmaughan4798]

@@francoislechanceux5818 "Equating the soviets to russians, Best way to know a russian troll" Or just an American. See the movie "Dr. Strangelove" en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dr._Strangelove It is a serious comedy but portrays the Russians as the enemy; not Soviets; Russians.

[@francoislechanceux5818]

@@thomasmaughan4798 Online, everybody wants to be an American. Looks like it systematically gets you more "likes" doesn't matter how stupid what you say is.

[@francoislechanceux5818]

@@thomasmaughan4798 Fact is during the Soviet era, the greatest scientists in that fortunately dead country were NOT russians. That explains why after the death of that country, russia became a desert of innovations. Today, the GDP of South Korea is superior to the GDP of russia.

[@ishkel]

I would say, Soviet Union was well ahead in developing calculation approaches which can be verified by publications which are fundamental up to this point. It was behind in electronic hardware implemented such calculations. However, upto 80th, one compensated another.

[@JoeKubinec]

I heard it said that they excelled at any aspect of technology or science that only required a pad of paper and a pencil to work on. I assume that this means that the paper and pencil were the only widely distributed "tools" available to their best and brightest, so it makes sense to me that their development of algorithms was world-leading. In a company that I worked for we would get Russian technical papers from the 60's and 70's translated because it gave us the theory for the systems we were developing, and we had the ability to physically realize the systems, which they didn't, so the company I worked for was successful.

[@jackboyce]

Soviet-era physicists were legendary for their ability to solve problems with clever analytical methods, instead of numerical computations. (I am a physicist.) Often these non-computer approaches give better insight into the physics, and nice ways of finding approximate solutions to problems. The series of textbooks by Landau and Lifshitz, written very much in this analytical tradition, were popular in the West for generations (translated of course).

[@ishkel]

@@jackboyce An example from gas dynamics: when both US and Soviet Union first tested their nuclear weapons, scientists from both sides started development of the blast model. US dedicated first computers to this most important at the moment task. Russian scientists Sedov found an analytical solution of the problem. This is an unique example of solving this kind of problems and is using to verify performance of numerical approaches up to this time

[@WhatALoadOfTosca]

@@JoeKubinec Ironically, the US spent millions on developing a pen that would write in space. The Russian's just used a pencil ;) I feel this sums up the US approach to cracking a nut with a boulder.

[@arctic_haze]

The lack of computers actually made the Soviet mathematicians the best in the world. They needed to analytically solve what in the West was usually numerically modeled on computers. But still the computer approach is more efficient.

[@Wunderbolts]

I’m somehow amazed at 10,000 calculations per second while watching this video on a phone with a 5nm soc with 15 billion transistors.

[@sudiptaranjanpatra1876]

we have come a long way...

[@SianaGearz]

Hey my C64 can do maybe about 100 000 to 300 000 calculations per second on around 4000 transistors. Ok mine is CMOS variant actually so it should be like double that on the transistor count but also it could be clocked higher but just isn't because the design is a little older, that's how it keeps video in sync.

[@hwfcup1344]

that thing could do 15+ trillions calculations per second

[@maryhadda8420]

What will we have in another 50 years? (Assuming we're not living in caves and using abaci.)

[@rikkithinn7258]

@@maryhadda8420 nothing, hopefully.

[@fivegiga5523]

Russian can make computers with cast iron box. It will never break but never work.

[@andriypredmyrskyy7791]

Yo, my mother went to school for computer science in the former Soviet Union and I was dumbfounded by her descriptions of her university computer lab. I know the history of computers at that time, they should have been better by then. I then heard about this gap. I'm so excited to learn more.

[@NUCLEARARMAMENT]

@Z80 A lot of people don't realize this.

[@miamijules2149]

@Z80 really good point

[@VeganSemihCyprus33]

They want to keep you as slaves! 👉The Connections (2021) [short documentary] 🔥

[@brokentower3148]

American cooperation and planning beat competition the world over. Then, after the Cold War, into the garbage. The only reason we didn't experience a Novorussian-style collapse in living standards and technical progress after dual-use ended is that Clinton gave it to Gore to keep him occupied and Gore used the implied assumption that he worked under presidential authority in negotiations regarding its end.

[@IsmailofeRegime]

​@Z80 While that's true, I'm sure lots of Soviet personnel involved in computing in the 80s would have envied their Japanese counterparts (and probably their British and West German counterparts as well.) Not all gaps are equivalent.

[@gregorhi2]

I think it's fascinating how there was the idea of cybernetics in the socialist countries (use of computers to predict and plan the production needs of the country) and yet they didn't follow through with the technology. I worked in the early 90s in a factory for electronic parts and the control room just looked like the room at the end of the video. The photo of Erich Honecker was removed but the shadow of the frame was still visible :-).

[@VictorZenloth]

Ironically, Walmart and Amazon, which have their own internal economies larger than most countries, ended up using these cybernetic techniques in their deployment of computers in managing logistics and inventory. Project Cybersyn in Salvador Allende's Chile also instituted a similar program to great success however it was cut short by the fascist pinochet coup.

[@lenas6246]

im not really familiar with theories about technology development but the difference is that the notion of growth as a goal in itself was and is prevalent in capitalist countries but not so much in socialist countries. Frankly, I don't see much societal use of technology development for itself.

[@maryhadda8420]

@@VictorZenloth You mean Pinochet/Nixon.

[@VeganSemihCyprus33]

They want to keep you as slaves! 👉The Connections (2021) [short documentary] 🔥

[@brokentower3148]

Any efficiency gain in logistics, inventory control, or planning was opposed until the 80s, when it was too damn late and planning was on the outs because the thieves realized they could just privatize it all and hand it to themselves.

[@peteb2]

New Subscriber! Damn, extremely interesting & explains why I had to always fill out so many official documents that I would not on sell or place hardware samples of new microprocessor into the hands of specific Eastern Block Countries!

[@marguskivilaan5369]

I live in Estonia, back in '80-s it was a part of USSR. In 1982-1988 studied authomatic processes in Tallinn Polytech University, part of studies was computing. As a hardware, we used Nairi computers, big as a writing desk, less computing power than Altair, never did what expected. Other one was ES-1, but i never saw this thing alive, we just wrote our program pieces to paper and somebody somewhere feeded these in, results were handed back a week later. For languages we were taught, there were PL-1, Fortran, Basic, a bit of low-level language (can't recall it's name, probably something like c++) Hardware was a complete sh**, languages were pretty much copied (stolen) from "rotten west" Edit: Dug deeper in memory; this Nairi didn't have display, only a typewriter type of input-output device low-level language was Assembler later (maybe 1986-87) there was kinda "computer class" with about 15 terminals, cannot recall prog language used there first personal computer ancestors available were "black market" Sinclair's and some it's clones, appeared in 1988-1989

[@philliprobinson7724]

Good work. This is what happens when politicians can over-ride scientists in matters that belong to science. As with Stalin and Kruschev, any thug who thinks he's always right can be a politician, but only a disciplined thinker who critiques his own thinking can be a good scientist. Cheers, P.R.

[@patverum9051]

And that's why Putler is just a politician...

[@VeganSemihCyprus33]

They want to keep you as slaves! 👉The Connections (2021) [short documentary] 🔥

[@AltimaNEO]

Sounds eerily like modern times

[@philliprobinson7724]

@@patverum9051 Hi Pat. Yes, and the tragedy is that he's an intelligent man. His handicap is that living 37 years under Soviet rule taught him that "might is always right". With computers, it isn't. Cheers, P.R.

[@philliprobinson7724]

Hi Vegan. Dairy inclusive vegetarian here. The tragedy is, a communistic society starts out as a bunch of dewy-eyed optimistic idealists whose rose tinted spectacles don't let in enough light for them to see the wolves in their midst. That's not to say that having ideals and thinking the best of others is unwise, but rather that we should never forget that large pots of money and bags of power invariably attract the wrong sort of communist. Lord Acton summed it up" "Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely". Another political experiment gone wrong! Sigh! P.R.

[@kenibnanak5554]

Back in my Cold War days we had opportunity to examine a Soviet illicit clone of the Radio Shack TR(a)S(h) 80. They had problems with integrated circuit boards, so it had lots of jumper wires with twisted soldered connections. Needless to say the exposed wires generated their own static picked up by neighboring wires which induced multiple errors. The box was just full of wires. They eventually sort of solved it as their clone of the C64, although a little larger than a real one used far less wiring. Then there was the plot to allow them to 'steal' flawed various item designs with hidden back doors hard wired into source code, but that's a story in itself. Sufficient to say it worked..

[@SMGJohn]

Far as I know there is no TRS-80 Soviet clone, I know only of the Polish, Yugoslav, South Korean, Brazil and Dutch clones of TRS-80. All of them equally shoddy and almost up to a point of being handmade. USSR had some very well manufactured "personal" computers like MIR and many others mainly used in education and by mathematicians. So what you are saying is extremely suspicious, also TRS-80s Chinese build kits existed, basically TRS-80 you could assemble yourself, cheap and effective, what you may have seen, would been one of those build kits made by someone in USSR on his free time, it was actually common for Soviet people to buy kit based computers and assemble them by their own, USSR even produced some itself, this idea of building the computer yourself persisted into the 90s and early 2000s with the opening of western market in post-Soviet Russia. The aquarium computer for example is a Russian invention, throwing entire computer into aquarium filled with mineral OIL. As for Soviet computer manufacturing quality, one eBay search will give you plenty of examples, and one thing they all have in common is being overbuilt to point of stupidity, some have backup wires to multiple boards in case one fails LOL

[@denisripley8699]

Consumer electronics.. like radios & TVs suffered 'supply chain' problems. Crude PCB and discrete component unavailability resulting in 'bodges' - such as paralleling or series-ing resistors to achieve correct value on the bench.

[@wicked1172]

So Basically most of if not all of their technology was "borrowed" from the West. Then when they are desperate to keep up they are willing to "borrow" anything they can get their hands on. So the West makes available compromised hardware and software which the Soviets eat right up, similar to the SST program. Communism sucks.

[@MrRtkwe]

Also don't underestimate the main reason the US did anything better than most countries post WW2, we weren't a smoldering pile of rubble like most of Continental Europe and Asia.

[@TarlanT]

Japan, China and Taiwan were also smoldering piles of rubble. Taiwan was actually not even industrialized. Just a half empty island.

[@oldrrocr]

don't forget that many of the targeted, shall we say "disenfranchised", people migrated to the USA, and some of these were geniuses.

[@TucsonDude]

This is a very complicated subject. Western minds are the forefront of this technology. While we had significant help from Indians and Asians...much of the technology we enjoy came from those of Western Europe descent.

[@WhatALoadOfTosca]

When you take over most of Europe and the rest of the world under the guise of "peace" then you always have a lot of resources at your fingertips that you never needed to pay for ;)

[@TucsonDude]

@@WhatALoadOfTosca When you refer to "you", I assume you mean deep state governments and major capitalists, eh?

[@ershn8d]

BK-0010 computers were produced from 1985, 78000 for households, 44000 for schools. Or more. In 1988 we had a class with 30 at school. Electronica MC 0202 was produced from 1987, 310000 computers (22000 school classes). Then some others, like Agat (12000 from 1983 to 1988, 7000 im 1989). Plus the big amount of self made ZX Spectrum clones... not everyone are lucky but I had the access to several university computers in Leningrad and Volgograd (Apple II, DVK-2, 286 and sometimes even 386) and 2 school classes (even in 1st grade).

[@polka23dot70]

IBM 1401 did not replace punched card technologies. IBM 1401 was the punched card technology. The IBM 1401 was introduced in 1959. Punched cards were the primary data entry medium until late 1970s.

[@Asianometry]

🤔 late 1970s?

[@alexhajnal107]

@@Asianometry Latest I'm aware of is circa 1979 (at a government facility in the USA). Used magnetic core memory as well. Was replaced by a VAX.

[@polka23dot70]

@@Asianometry certainly!

[@kennmossman8701]

@@Asianometry Yep. Used punched cards at university until the early 1980's. After graduation saw many businesses still using punched cards

[@Obscurai]

@@Asianometry Punch card decks were still used by mainframes in the late 1970s but mini-computers from DEC and HP were filling other computing niches. Often while the mainframes of the late 1970s still used punched cards, they were starting to use 3270 and eventually 5250 terminals. Another popular input medium at the time as punched tape. These data storage and input methods persisted into the 1980s only to replaced by magnetic media such as 8" floppy disks. I still have a box of my last card deck I used for a computer science course in my closet.

[@psikeyhackr6914]

I was a Customer Engineer for IBM in the late 70s and 80s. I saw a 1401 in the flesh in 1980. I just knew it from pictures. It was a riveting experience.

[@willhovell9019]

Don't ignore the Colossus machines built by Tommy Flowers and his team of engineers at the General Post office Research Station at Dollis Hill , London in 1943 and Colossus II in 1944 ( 1,600 and 2,600 valves) for Bletchley Park & the German Lorenz machine. please don't talk about Europe, without mentioning the British computing machines built at Manchester in the late 1940s and LEO ( Lyons Electronic Office) and later companies that merged to form ICL.

[@Merilix2]

Colossus was a very special purpose machine designed to decipher encrypted messages, wasn't it?

[@willhovell9019]

@@Merilix2 not really it used all of the technology later deployed.in Manchester and ENIAC in the later 1940s. It was semi programmable , and could be adapted from military/ intelligence. Like many technologies they are often early adopted by defence organisations and as such highly secret. A bit like relational databases and the US Department of Defense.

[@willhovell9019]

@@Merilix2 kzbin.info/www/bejne/nWPXfpaDhtaGmKM

[@Merilix2]

@@willhovell9019 Well, if I look at the technical details and how this machine was used I barely find anything which allows a classification as "general purpose" or "computer".

[@willhovell9019]

@@Merilix2 American xenophobia.

[@navjotsingh5108]

Keep em' comin' and thanks for all of the help!!