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IC development was even worse. We (some of my professors) were reverse engineering western CPUs etc. for domestic consumption. This involved gently shaving top
by clarionbell 4y ago
IC development was even worse. We (some of my professors) were reverse engineering western CPUs etc. for domestic consumption. This involved gently shaving top of the package and retracing the circuitry for lithography.
There were moments of genuine excitement however, when the sandpaper caught some of the circuit one had to imagine what should have been there. Thus creating novel design.
- origin_path 4y agoDid you have to do things like that because you were ordered to by the state, or because there was no funding to do any actual original design? Why did the industry never create anything new - presumably the Kremlin didn't actually say "don't be creative" to you and it was an emergent property of the system?
- qikInNdOutReply 4y agoIn socialists systems all incentives are aligned to gamble the system. You do gamble the system by fullfilling the bare minimum demanded from you and squeezing the most out of the rest of whats handed to you, because your material requirements are huge. Most likely, most of the resources for computer sciences were traded away for others amenities before they ever reached a computation lab. The mentality ist still there in the old citizens of the eastern block. All that remained was the bare minima to do the chop required by quota: "Copy that chip"
- origin_path 4y agoThanks! By the way, the term you're looking for is "game" not "gamble" i.e. people were gaming the system.
- qikInNdOutReply 4y agoAh, years of using it wrong come back to haunt me.. thanks
- clarionbell 4y agoAll three. The order came from above, that's how command economy (what socialist regimes generally implement) works. However, that order was result of insufficient funding, which left nothing to set up independent research pipeline in the area. At the same time, Kremlin did often stifle development on purpose, under guise of "common good". Especially in dependent states across Europe and smaller Soviet Republics. In theory, this was meant to prevent internal competition and waste of resources. In practice it was a way to sell inferior goods and create dependency on the central authority. This happened with everything, computers, trains, cars.
- actionfromafar 4y agoSo, a very imperialist Kremlin.
- severino 4y agoI'd say that reverse engineering an 80's CPU was everything but boring.
- kps 4y agoDEC's first VAX microprocessor was cloned¹. On the successor CVAX² die, DEC included Russian text³ saying (supposedly) “When you care enough to steal the best”. ¹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MicroVAX_78032#Other_vendors https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MicroVAX_78032#Other_vendors ² https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CVAX https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CVAX ³ https://i.stack.imgur.com/xmYaT.jpg https://i.stack.imgur.com/xmYaT.jpg
- tetromino_ 4y agoFYI, that text is completely incomprehensible in Russian. It looks like the chip designer translated an English phrase word-for-word using a dictionary, didn't conjugate verbs or decline adjectives, added some gratuitous misspellings, and ended up with Engrish type nonsense.