How Microsoft Created a Revolution in Soviet Computing | Hacker News Reader

How Microsoft Created a Revolution in Soviet Computing

atlasobscura.com

50 pointslermontov15 comments

That was devolution, not revolution. The only reason US companies got to that market was political decision in Moscow to halt development of their own original systems and start to copy. That was very wrong decision, led to 99% dependency of later Russia from Wintel. Now Russia struggles to get out of this dependency, but I am afraid its too late.

They lost the war on technology long ago. What happened after was just inevitable.

Dude, we had not even started. I personally recall, that IT serving РБМК1500 nuclear breeder had nothing to do with Wintel and programming was on some sort of cyrillic Assembler. I knew one of the actual programmers in Vysaginas.

Consider that even the mighty Japan, who was ahead of US on electronics lost the game on computers and software. Soviets, where science and technology were fully controlled by state were bound to lose the fight on consumer centric products. And this was not so different for Russian Federation, no time, no human resources, no entrepreneurship.

Man, wtf are you spouting. You imply that MS/Intel are out to get the Russian government or something? The only thing Russia is dependent on when it comes to IT is the English language, lol, and that may be more of an advantage than disadvantage.

Struggles to get out? Well, hey, good luck with that, maybe you'll get out and never be able to visit Reddit, Imgur, Hacker News and other Western shit.

Have a cup of coffee and then try reading the parent comment again. The parent very clearly attributes the blame to the Russian states political decision to "halt development of their own original systems and start to copy".

I have no idea what you're smoking, but I'd like some of that, please. If they had developed their own system, they would be absolutely incompatible with standard systems and have to reinvent everything, while now they can just build on what's already there. The slight specific advantage of doing one or two things differently is massively overshadowed by the advantage of being able to coöperate and exchange data easily with the rest of the world.

This one https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ternary_computer incompatible with everything ahaha

of course you do not have idea of what I am smoking. I smoked a lot of technical documentation in the 90-ies. The USSR had some sort of the Internet over radio for antiaircraft missiles distributed squadrons. Completely original. It had global ultra long wave system for submarines communication. And of course it had original competing computer architectures. That was not competition as you know it. Normally state financed a bunch of perspective tech, but only few best suited for economical situation went to series. Most of educational IT came from Bulgaria and East Germany, and there was colossal own production in Minsk. Minsk still produces a hell of cheap chips for watches by the way. But military applications and industrial IT was in many cases original, especially in nuclear energy production and space.

Love that you assume the "rest of the world" would have gone with the American solution.

I can only speak from the East-German perspective not Soviet/Russian, things might have been very different over there, but the article paints a too simplistic and too 'business-oriented' Western view and I wouldn't call it a 'revolution' at all.

Here's what changed from the 80's to the 90's from my perspective (as an 80's computer kid):

What became better:

- computers got a whole lot cheaper and easier to buy, the domestic 8-bit computers were astronomically priced, and 'grey imports' like a C64 or Amiga cost as much as an expensive car (and those were expensive) and were completely unreachable unless you had relatives in the West

- since it was suddenly possible to easily get a private phone for everyone, information exchange also got a lot easier (and legal!, e.g. in Eastern Germany, access to copying machines was restricted, owning a computer printer was legal though), information exchange between computer enthusiasts mostly happened via snail mail in the 80's

What was lost:

- the 8-bit computers in the East were mostly about education, there was (nearly) no commercial interest to sell 'gaming computers', and of course we wrote our own games because there was nothing to play on those things. Without being saturated with distractions, there was more motivation to explore and learn how those computers actually work

- shift to very few computer architectures that were successful at that time in the West (at least in Eastern Germany (in the 90's) it was either Amiga or PC, with a few Macs in schools in the 90's). But in 80's Eastern Germany alone, 5 different 8-bit architectures were built, with 9 or 10 different models, none of them a direct clone of western computers (with one exception, a late CPC clone in 1989), other Eastern Bloc countries very likely had the same number of domestically developed computers. Sure, the chips were direct clones (only Z80, no 6502, at least in Eastern-Germany), but the computer architecture and operating systems had a few unique and interesting ideas in them

- before the 90's, copyright simply didn't exist in the East, everything was copied and modified as needed without anyone giving a shit who invented or built it originally, I'd argue that this had overall a positive effect on knowledge exchange, similar to what open source is today

Looking back, I think the 90's were the dark age of computing. The boring (compared to Amiga or Atari) PC had won, Silicon Graphics went down. Nearly all useful software was commercial and expensive. It was only since the mid-2000s after Open Source and Linux had won, that things started to get interesting again.

All IMHO of course :)

Same story in Bulgaria, except 6502s instead of Z80s.

An obligatory quote, which, while hyperbolic, touches some peculiarities of the time and place:

http://www.vladware.com/Personal/Programmers.htm

Developers sneaking in pirated copies of software from companies like Borland into the office long preceded and anticipated their entry.

I knew the Amstrad was old, but really...

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