Very interesting article.

I'm quite surprised that they appear to use a customised Linux distribution rather than build their own from scratch properly. If you look at the East Germany in the 1980s, the various "VEB" state industries were even chucking out 8086 and VAX clones with every component built in the Eastern Block and even cloned UNIX operating systems!

Couple of links to show the scale of their industry back then:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VEB_Robotron

http://translate.google.com/translate?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.rob...