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How communist Bulgaria became a leader in technology, robotics and sci-fi (2018)
- severak_cz 7y agoI wonder if Bulgaria really became leader in tech. In Czechoslovakia we also had some sort of computer industry. We also had state security agents buying western tech in disguise and importing it home for cloning. I even know one guy who worked at computer reverse engineering institute back then. Also I have found memoirs of some random guy who worked as IT specialist for Stb (Czech equivalent of Stasi). However, this article is really good introduction to Blugarian sci-fi which I didn't known before (unlike Polish and Soviet).
- bogomipz 7y agoInteresting. Might you have any links or references to the memoirs you could share?
- alexgmcm 7y agoI remember in Red Plenty it describes how the USSR decided to just copy IBM machines rather than build their own at some point. It's a shame as MSU was working on some really interesting stuff including the weird Setun ternary computer.
- qubex 7y agoRed Plenty is a fantastic and unusual book, I highly recommend it to everybody with even a cursory interest in mathematics, economics, logistics, information technology, politics, or history.
- alexgmcm 7y agoI liked it - I felt it didn't really answer the question it seemed to set out with though. That is - there was a time when it looked like the USSR was genuinely going to catch up with and surpass the USA, how did they manage this and where did it go wrong?
- nradov 7y agoThe USSR was never actually catching up. With access to more accurate historical data we now know that much of their reported economic development was based on falsified official statistics.
- lyrr 7y agoGonna need a source for that.
- rayiner 7y agohttps://tnsr.org/2018/02/assessing-soviet-economic-performance-cold-war/ https://tnsr.org/2018/02/assessing-soviet-economic-performan...
- hylaride 7y agoThat's not entirely accurate. Between 1930-1970s (with some hiccups) the USSR was indeed "catching up", but this was because they were industrializing from almost nothing, plus rebuilding after the war. It was the stagnation in the 1970s where the centrally planned economy couldn't adapt to consumer goods, light industry, and technology where they fell further and further behind. Various incentive problems exasperated things. Things would have been much worse in the 70s if high oil prices didn't mask these underlying problems, allowing the USSR to obtain hard currency to import goods. Don't get me wrong, communism was bad. However, there were periods where it appeared to look superior. The quality of life in North Korea was "superior" to the south until the late 70s (much of this was backed by soviet subsidies, etc), but the optics still existed. There was a similar, though much more brief, period where east Germany had a faster growing economy than the west. There is a reason the Berlin wall was built in the 60s and not earlier.
- frandroid 7y agoIn industrial societies, we re-invested about 20% of our GDP into production capital; under Stalin, that percentage was closer to 40%. That diminished after he died, to improve people's quality of life, but at the expense of overall productivity improvement.
- contingencies 7y agoYou seem interesting, please send me an email.
- cambalache 7y agoI didn't like it. I mean, the argument and data were interesting. What bothered me was the narrative, it was trite and disingenuous and clearly written by a clueless white guy.
- ativzzz 7y agoEverything you said makes sense up until > clueless white guy race adds absolutely nothing to your argument, especially considering the USSR was majority white.
- andrepd 7y agoCan you elaborate, and explain why the author's skin tone is relevant? Unless I'm very mistaken, Russian people are mostly very fair-skinned... I'm not saying the rest of the criticism is right or wrong, but that last bit was uncalled for.
- cambalache 7y agoI have learned these kind of discussions are worthless in this site, but since if you seem to have good faith here we go. The episode I remember the most was one when an American delegation went to Moscow (IIRC this was in the sixties, remember, the book is fiction), anyway, in the book the American delegation is comprised by you know, normal people, students and so on. The Soviet delegation is comprised by political-quasi-robots zealots a-la Ivan Drago. One of the members of the American delegation is a black woman, a fact the "Soviet zealots" take as an opportunity to claim that under capitalism racism exists in America. Well, what you do know, the black character proceeds to educate them and tell them they are very well mistaken because black Americans enjoy the same opportunities as white Americans. This seemed to me very very weird, even if this was a work of fiction. No person of color in their right mind would have that opinion, even less in the 1960s. So I was interested to check who the author was and why they wrote such an unbelievable character. He is a white English guy. Surprise, surprise. The fact he minimized or discarded the huge challenges black Americans faced and still face, just to score a cheap political point in a work of fiction was disgusting to me.
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- cafard 7y agoDidn't Dijkstra say that the USSR copying the IBM 360 architecture proved that it had lost the Cold War?
- buzzkillington 7y ago>At its peak, Bulgaria supplied 40% of the computers in COMECON. The electronics industry employed 300,000 workers, and it generated 8 billion rubles a year. [0] That's on top of a population of just under 9 million and a working age population of 6 million [1], so 5% of the workforce was involved in the production of computer hardware alone. It seems there was a very large bet on the computer industry from the communist party. Jumping around wikipedia [2] it also seems that pretty much all the computers were clones of western computers and several years behind the west in terms of technology. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_computer_hardware_in_Bulgaria https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_computer_hardware_i... [1] https://www.populationpyramid.net/bulgaria/1985/ https://www.populationpyramid.net/bulgaria/1985/ [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_computer_hardware_in_Bulgaria https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_computer_hardware_i...
- varjag 7y agoVast majority of the electronic industry were not computer production, so you're off by a magnitude for sure.
- buzzkillington 7y agoComputer hardware included everything from magnetic platters for hard drives to crt displays to the silicon wafers.
- varjag 7y agoIt also included steel, copper and plastics, so by this logic we can throw in everyone involved into production of those. Getting really solid numbers then, like 50% working population! Bulk of the electronics products were things like radios, TVs and rotary telephones.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- p_l 7y agoIIRC, Bulgaria was among the countries that got "assigned" the low-end of ES EVM that were pushed everywhere, and of course, the low-end machines were much more common than medium/high end produced elsewhere.
- nimbius 7y agoAs a former Soviet satellite it was in an excellent position to do so. the USSR was first in space, first to the moon, and first to invent the universally programmable computer, the MESM. in 1958 they even invented the first mobile phones.
- naveen99 7y agoI wonder why the Russians or even the Chinese or Indians haven’t publicly attempted to clone Microsoft Windows (a desktop os). There is a Russian Linux distro. But I would think it would be more productive to have an international software arms race than a military / space arms race.
- macspoofing 7y agoBecause it's hard and especially hard for monolithic systems (i.e. governments) to go up against private enterprises in certain spaces. Governments are really good at funding cutting edge research that does not have an immediate or obvious market (e.g. early internet, space exploration, fundamental physics research, etc.). Governments are not good at actually competing in a space where there is a market and private competition. >But I would think it would be more productive to have an international software arms race than a military / space arms race. There is. It's called 'the market'. We are in the midst of an 'international software arms race', and this arms race spans every category of software. You want project management software? There are a thousand options. In a top-down communist-style system, you would maybe get one option.
- naveen99 7y agoYeah, I guess it’s more profitable for them to just collect taxes from Microsoft instead. But I am not sure it can’t be done. What if the government deployed desktops to all citizens that were centrally administered, and requires them to be used for all government business / taxes, public services. Clearly I am talking about a dystopian society... but I don’t see why some dictator or communist wouldn’t want to implement it. Aren’t large Chinese companies essentially branches of the government? Why doesn’t China want a fully controlled clone of Microsoft ? They clearly wanted their own google: baidu, their own amazon: Ali baba, their own Facebook: wechat... It’s no more inefficient in principal to have government controlled personal computers as it is to have corporate controlled work computers. Work desktops are famously useless with all the required bloatware, encryption, antivirus, restrictive group policies and internet policies... but corporations think it’s worth the loss of efficiency, electricity, employee time to have a stranglehold on their computing. Why wouldn’t the super power hungry governments want the same ?
- walrus01 7y agoIf I recall my history right, a lot of the locally built small computers in the soviet union were 6502 based Apple II clones.
- istinetz 7y agoYou're correct. My mother used to work on exactly this, reverse engineering CPUs. They just gave them a part and told them to figure out how it works, and to replicate it. It is my understanding that by that point, in the late 80s, most people in her institute were working on copying western tech, not on original IP.
- IgorPartola 7y agoMy first computer was a home computer from Bulgaria called Pravetz 8D. It’s amazing that it never occurred to me until now to look it up on the web and sure enough there is a Wikipedia page about them. If not for that thing, I wouldn’t be a software engineer today.
- ReptileMan 7y agoI remember that nightmare ... the software was recorded on tapes.
- phillc73 7y agoJust like a Commodore 64.
- use-net 7y agodude, Wozniak in 1984 talked about how even Apple Inc. did only have audio cassette tapes to copy more tapes to sell their Apple I and Apple // computer software on - before eventually they had enough money to buy a floppy disc drive. Their chief financial officer was kinda elated about his tape based home finance software predating Excel.
- laumars 7y agoThat was the norm for 8bit micro computers of that era. It did have some accidental benefits too because some radio stations would air software for people to record
- malkia 7y agoBulgarian here. My best friend had this one, it was an https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oric https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oric based computer clone, and fun to use :) - all you need is a TV. My father bought me Pravetz 8C (An Apple ][ /e, or was it /c) clone with 128KB RAM! (pr#8 hi-res mode) + floppy. It was more expensive than buying a good russian car back then, and I'm thankful for what he did for me! We had few magazines, books to learn from, and were typing like crazy hex codes to get TETRIS, or someother game on. For a long time, I thought it was the "Merchant" that made Karateka, only later to understand that was one of the earliest cracking groups (some of them later turned into demo groups), and that's how we got most of the software in. Years before communism fell, our biggest hard-drive maker, started making their "own" games - which were complete rip offs of other western games, and "cyrilized" to the bone (like "Karateka" again). Another friend of mine's mom was working in a company, back then durign communism and all they did was byte-code replace english into russian in lots of DOS apps - like PC Tools. Hence the weird abbreviation, as often russian would not fit. Really, it was direct hex-editing! All, in all, I'm somehow thankful to the regime (ahem...) for giving me "free" of a lot, here in the US, is paid. Especially the programming clubs, courses, etc. Obviously that whole scheme did not scale :) but it was good times (while I was kid).
- keiferski 7y agoThe author of the Cyberpunk Manifesto (1997), Christian As. Kirtchev, is also Bulgarian. He has a collection of Eastern European cyberpunk stories on Amazon (no idea how good they are) and is apparently active on Twitter too. - http://project.cyberpunk.ru/idb/cyberpunk_manifesto.html http://project.cyberpunk.ru/idb/cyberpunk_manifesto.html - https://www.amazon.com/Chemical-Illusions-Anthology-Cyberpunk-Eastern/dp/144956402X https://www.amazon.com/Chemical-Illusions-Anthology-Cyberpun... - https://twitter.com/cyberkristiyan https://twitter.com/cyberkristiyan
- gentleman11 7y agoI read neuromancer recently and it was interesting how commonplace the hugely creative ideas within it are today. The books ideas felt commonplace, except that it’s only because it/the genre influenced sci-fi so successfully. I wish I could have read it when it first came out
- Nasrudith 7y agoI certainly wasn't a part of the cultural context but I get the feeling that in many cases the messages werr really about the Soviet Bloc consciously or otherwise. Along with the anxieties attributed to the computers, which sound like an outlet for complaints about the top down system. The bit about the experts seems downright allegorical for the suppression of "bourgeois pseudoscience" like cybernetics itself before they could rationalize it in the prevailing dogma for the party. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cybernetics_in_the_Soviet_Union https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cybernetics_in_the_Soviet_Un...
- npace12 7y agoI grew up there. Every school had classrooms with Pravetz 8D (apple ii clone) running Karateka and those classes were full! I was in kindergarden when my parents signed me up to learn computers and by 1st grade, I was writing chatbots in Basic. Fun times.
- cosmolev 7y agoI heard a story that at the opening ceremony of a semiconductor plant some Bulgarian communist party member made a speech where he said that semiconductors is just a first step and they are going in the direction of full conductors.
- atmin 7y agoNot just some member, but the leader. He did know how to behave in this role (including allowing such stories become widespread), he was the leader for 45 years.
- andrei_says_ 7y agoThis is interesting. Are you implying a leader’s job was to act silly and maintain an image of a not-so-smart but relatable guy while the party was doing its shady deeds? A comic relief mask of sorts?
- pdimitar 7y agoMany dissidents in Bulgaria believed exactly that. "Give the people bread and entertainment", as the Romans said.
- primity 7y agoIt's not unheard of for a leader to tell a joke
- istinetz 7y ago[Citation needed], but it was my impression that communist jokes were occasionally spread on purpose by the security forces, just as a sort of valve to release the tension.
- istinetz 7y agoMy favourite anecdote from that era is this slogan that a small town came up with. "Reagan - enemy number one of the Tutrakan village system!"
- m0zg 7y agoThe first 286 I've worked on (in the USSR) was Bulgarian. It was pretty crappy, but still, 286 DOS software ran on it just fine. CGA display. Arkanoid, Prince of Persia, good times. At the time the USSR did not produce its own PC-compatible computers.
- sehansen 7y agoBulgaria is the origin of the oldest, still-functioning satellite in earth orbit, the Bulgaria 1300. It will turn 40 next year. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulgaria_1300 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulgaria_1300
- istinetz 7y agoHaha, this is absolutely brilliant, thank you for sharing. It's so old, it was not even easy to verify it's still up there. https://www.n2yo.com/satellite/?s=12645 https://www.n2yo.com/satellite/?s=12645
- Barrin92 7y agoConcerning the fiction of Lyuben Dilov mentioned in the article which I had not heard of before, does anyone know if there are translations of his work either in English or German? Googling does not spit out much info.
- gostsamo 7y agoHe was translated mostly in Eastern Europe. Unfortunately, I couldn't find a list of translations, but german is more likely option than english. If you are really interested, I can ask around.
- Barrin92 7y agoif you find something out that'd be amazing. Had little luck scouring the internet.