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>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
by 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.