7 ms·

Socialist Romania Computer Chips

173 points by picture 4y ago

docmechanic 4y ago
Thank you for sharing this. I'm reminded of my surprise when my Russian language teacher at university told me that Russians celebrated Xmas, and with trees no less. This didn't compute with the typical nationalistic propaganda that passes for 'news'. "The socialist bloc of countries that arose after World War II was not a monolithic entity, it had significant country and cultural differences." "Unlike the Soviet integrated circuit designation or the East German semiconductor designation, the Romanian government did not set standards for the labeling of semiconductors."
- flohofwoe 4y ago
  > This didn't compute with the typical nationalistic propaganda that passes for 'news'. "Nationalistic propaganda" told you that Eastern Bloc countries didn't celebrate Christmas, wat? The whole religious aspect of Christmas was extremely toned down of course, but even the communists didn't have the power to dismantle the Church (surveil and suppress they did though).
  - docmechanic 4y ago
    Do you have a specific question, or are you just triggered to read 'nationalistic propaganda' in this context?
    - flohofwoe 4y ago
      I'd be interested what country's propaganda claimed that Christmas (or the equivalent in the Orthodox church) wasn't celebrated in Eastern Bloc countries, because despite a number of exagerations in Western media of the Cold War era this seems a bit far fetched (having been exposed both to Eastern and Western propaganda in East Germany in my childhood). Christmas in the Eastern Bloc didn't have a 'religious undertone' anymore, but that's also been true for a long time in most civilized Western countries.
  - thriftwy 4y ago
    Not sure about the rest of Eastern Bloc, in USSR the new year took on the big celebration with tree and feast. Which made the following (Julian) Christmas a small, quiet family holiday for people still exhausted by the large one.
    - filoleg 4y ago
      You are 100% correct. NYE is the largest celebration of the year that ended up stretching for days somehow, with the tree and drinking and gifts and all. Only pretty religious people observed Christmas, and it wasn't something that was really even considered as a celebration, more like a minor religious holiday.
      - Maursault 4y ago
        What makes it strange is that Jesus was a Pisces. Christmas, Christmas trees, mistletoe, carolling, wreaths, and even gift-giving became part of the Roman cover-up of a pagan ritual occurring on winter solstice.
- grishka 4y ago
  > Russians celebrated Xmas Huh? I'm Russian and I don't remember when Christmas even is. We celebrate the new year, and yes, there are trees. Christmas is very much a religious holiday for religious people.
  - filoleg 4y ago
    Yeah, fully agreed with your take. I dont remember celebrating it even once, aside from a few times when I was keeping company to my grandma who was observing it. And even then, it could hardly be called a celebration. Also, Christmas in Russia isn't celebrated on the same date as in the US either (Dec 25th), it is around Jan 7th or so due some old-time disagreements about calendar system transitions.
  - kgeist 4y ago
    Is Russian "New Year" really different from American "Christmas"? Both are about a certain old man giving gifts to children, both are about a certain kind of tree, etc. From what I gathered, it's not really a religious holiday in USA either - there's little about Jesus. The names are different, the dates and customs are different, but the essence is same.
    - docmechanic 4y ago
      +1
    - grishka 4y ago
      Yes, it's mostly the same thing. The old man is called "дед мороз", literally "grandfather frost". As a child you'll find your gift from him under the tree in the morning of January 1st. I believe North Americans' Santa Claus puts gifts into socks on Christmas night instead? By the way, all of this applies to other ex-USSR countries too, including at least Ukraine, Belarus, and Kazakhstan.
      - docmechanic 4y ago
        +1
- baybal2 4y ago
  [dead]
mariusmg 4y ago
CIP03 forever baby !!:)
9front 4y ago
Socialist Romania did not pay to license Western chip technologies. All production was based on stolen IP. Ceausescu had a vast spy network stealing everything they could from abroad. The spy network was dismantled when Pacepa, the mastermind behind it, defected to US in 1978.
- flohofwoe 4y ago
  Same for East German chips (mainly Z80 and family), but with the Western CoCom embargo in place for anything that was more advanced than a toaster [1] there wasn't really a legal way to obtain a license anyway. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coordinating_Committee_for_Multilateral_Export_Controls https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coordinating_Committee_for_Mul...
  - masswerk 4y ago
    It is to be mentioned, though, that some of the Eastern Bloc chips were only on the outside identical to the Western originals, but featured their own internal designs, some of them even robuster and/or more feature rich than the originals. It wasn't always just copy and paste.
    - flohofwoe 4y ago
      True, at least the East German Z80 clone U880 was most likely "properly" reverse-engineered from a real chip's die photos (similar to how the visual6502 netlist was reverse engineered), with bug fixes applied in the process - because the U880 has a slightly different undocumented behaviour than an original Z80. There are still conflicting stories to this day though (e.g. some licensed clones from other Western manufactures also differed in behaviour in those areas - so the U880 design could have been stolen from those), the only thing that's for sure is that the U880 isn't a "transistor-perfect" clone of an original Z80.
      - masswerk 4y ago
        Based on what I've read, this seems to be also true for the soviet PDP-11 single-chip designs.
credit_guy 4y ago
> 1984 – Ignoring the Soviet boycott and the participation of Romanian athletes in the Los Angeles Olympics. That resulted in a stunning result for Romania. It ranked number 2 in gold medals, right after the US (the host country). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1984_Summer_Olympics_medal_table https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1984_Summer_Olympics_medal_tab...
_ohe6 4y ago
Hello, I'm from Romania, and I never knew we had such facilities. History is always fascinating and is sad to see parts like this of the industry get destroyed. In every major city, where major industry was (they built quite a lot of things like tractors, cars), now we have Apartment Buildings. In the 90s, after the fall of communism, everything from the industry was bought by members of "Romanian Mafia"(people who had connections and knew how to buy them) and got sold as scrap.
- shrimpx 4y ago
  My understanding is that there are healthy startup scenes in Bucharest and other cities, producing companies like https://uipath.com https://uipath.com, so even though that old generation got scrapped, the future seems hopeful. And hopefully corruption is rooted out over time.
  - yrgulation 4y ago
    There is, but a lot of romanians like to trash their country. Ops comment for instance is a common point of view around the so called psd electorate (founded by former communist party members). They claim that factories have been converted to shopping malls and apartment complexes to the detriment of industry. A false notion as the old industry was dead anyway. Plenty of new factories replaced the old. And indeed the software startup scene is developing as are the tech industry. Corruption is lower and romania has become a high income economy. Sadly many have been conditioned to repeat statements that demean their own country. A sad example of the Stockholm syndrome at national scale.
  - tsimionescu 4y ago
    IT is booming to a great extent in Romania, thanks in large part to a tax cut for IT employment started around 20 years ago. There are still relatively few major success stories, in the sense that the vast amount of programmers are working at international corporations dev offices established in Romania, or in some large outsourcing houses; relatively few are working in startups or in Romanian-owned businesses that are creating their own products. UIPath is more of an exception, but the general situation does seem to be improving. On the other hand, non-IT Romanian industry is very much struggling on almost all fronts, and most of it is nowhere near where it was in terms of competitiveness or just basic output compared to the communist area, thanks in large parts to what the GP was mentioning (a systematic dismantling for parts by opportunistic apparatchiks after the revolution, but also before the revolution itself, as money dried up and the demented regime became more enamored with grandiose projects rather than any practical economy).
theaeolist 4y ago
"The consumption of electricity in everyday life was limited (it was forbidden to use a refrigerator during the winter, and the use of a vacuum cleaner was banned all year round), hot water was supplied to apartments twice a week," This is all false. Source: I was there.
- culi 4y ago
  I wasn't there but my parents were and I also haven't heard of any of this. With most "life under communism" stories I'm sure it's a broad generalization that might've applied in a few localities but varied widely
- tsimionescu 4y ago
  There were periods when electricity was rationed, usually with rolling blackouts. I've also never heard of a ban on refrigerators at any particular time of year, nor a ban on vacuum cleaners. Problems with hot water were common, but I've also not heard of any particular schedule. Food scarcity was a much bigger problem for that period though, especially in major cities (people would queue for hours for a chance at meat or eggs, for example).
  - saiya-jin 4y ago
    This was same in Czechoslovakia, I recall my parents standing queue in freezing cold during winter for 2-3 hours so that their sick son could have some mandarines or lemon juice in the tea. The beauty of communist central planning, nothing really worked unless you were in communist party.
  - gls2ro 4y ago
    Well, there is no need to put a ban on refrigerators or vacuum cleaners if you could not safely assume that there will be electricity in general. Also for other people reading this, please note that all stores in most of the country (with exception of capital city and a couple others) were controlled by the state. Leaving the country was forbidden in general. So if they wanted people not to use refrigerators on large scale or vacuum cleaners they could just decide to not sell them. It was that simple to restrict something like electronics. Just add more: again in most of the country there were very few cars running as there was a limited supply of petrol/gas for cars. You could have a fixed amount of gas. They even decided at one point that on Sunday to restrict circulation of cars the following way: one Sunday cars that have an odd number are allowed, the other Sunday cars that have an even number were allowed.
adiian 4y ago
https://hackaday.com/2017/11/07/romanias-1980s-illicit-diy-computer-movement/ https://hackaday.com/2017/11/07/romanias-1980s-illicit-diy-c... Look inside an old Apple II and you’ll see a sea of chips accomplishing what can be done with only a few today. The Cobra clones looked much the same, but with even more chips. Using whatever they could get their hands on, the students would make 30 chips do the job of an elusive $10 chip. No two computers were necessarily alike. Even the keyboards were hacked together, sometimes using keys designed for mainframe computers but with faults from the molding process. These were cleaned up and new letters put on.
olao99 4y ago
Meh just a bunch of clones
- Koshkin 4y ago
  Still, it is amazing what they could do back then.

173 points by picture 4y ago

Thank you for sharing this. I'm reminded of my surprise when my Russian language teacher at university told me that Russians celebrated Xmas, and with trees no less. This didn't compute with the typical nationalistic propaganda that passes for 'news'. "The socialist bloc of countries that arose after World War II was not a monolithic entity, it had significant country and cultural differences." "Unlike the Soviet integrated circuit designation or the East German semiconductor designation, the Romanian government did not set standards for the labeling of semiconductors."

flohofwoe 4y ago
> This didn't compute with the typical nationalistic propaganda that passes for 'news'. "Nationalistic propaganda" told you that Eastern Bloc countries didn't celebrate Christmas, wat? The whole religious aspect of Christmas was extremely toned down of course, but even the communists didn't have the power to dismantle the Church (surveil and suppress they did though).
- docmechanic 4y ago
  Do you have a specific question, or are you just triggered to read 'nationalistic propaganda' in this context?
  - flohofwoe 4y ago
    I'd be interested what country's propaganda claimed that Christmas (or the equivalent in the Orthodox church) wasn't celebrated in Eastern Bloc countries, because despite a number of exagerations in Western media of the Cold War era this seems a bit far fetched (having been exposed both to Eastern and Western propaganda in East Germany in my childhood). Christmas in the Eastern Bloc didn't have a 'religious undertone' anymore, but that's also been true for a long time in most civilized Western countries.
- thriftwy 4y ago
  Not sure about the rest of Eastern Bloc, in USSR the new year took on the big celebration with tree and feast. Which made the following (Julian) Christmas a small, quiet family holiday for people still exhausted by the large one.
  - filoleg 4y ago
    You are 100% correct. NYE is the largest celebration of the year that ended up stretching for days somehow, with the tree and drinking and gifts and all. Only pretty religious people observed Christmas, and it wasn't something that was really even considered as a celebration, more like a minor religious holiday.
    - Maursault 4y ago
      What makes it strange is that Jesus was a Pisces. Christmas, Christmas trees, mistletoe, carolling, wreaths, and even gift-giving became part of the Roman cover-up of a pagan ritual occurring on winter solstice.
grishka 4y ago
> Russians celebrated Xmas Huh? I'm Russian and I don't remember when Christmas even is. We celebrate the new year, and yes, there are trees. Christmas is very much a religious holiday for religious people.
- filoleg 4y ago
  Yeah, fully agreed with your take. I dont remember celebrating it even once, aside from a few times when I was keeping company to my grandma who was observing it. And even then, it could hardly be called a celebration. Also, Christmas in Russia isn't celebrated on the same date as in the US either (Dec 25th), it is around Jan 7th or so due some old-time disagreements about calendar system transitions.
- kgeist 4y ago
  Is Russian "New Year" really different from American "Christmas"? Both are about a certain old man giving gifts to children, both are about a certain kind of tree, etc. From what I gathered, it's not really a religious holiday in USA either - there's little about Jesus. The names are different, the dates and customs are different, but the essence is same.
  - docmechanic 4y ago
    +1
  - grishka 4y ago
    Yes, it's mostly the same thing. The old man is called "дед мороз", literally "grandfather frost". As a child you'll find your gift from him under the tree in the morning of January 1st. I believe North Americans' Santa Claus puts gifts into socks on Christmas night instead? By the way, all of this applies to other ex-USSR countries too, including at least Ukraine, Belarus, and Kazakhstan.
    - docmechanic 4y ago
      +1
baybal2 4y ago
[dead]

mariusmg 4y ago

CIP03 forever baby !!:)

9front 4y ago

Socialist Romania did not pay to license Western chip technologies. All production was based on stolen IP. Ceausescu had a vast spy network stealing everything they could from abroad. The spy network was dismantled when Pacepa, the mastermind behind it, defected to US in 1978.

flohofwoe 4y ago
Same for East German chips (mainly Z80 and family), but with the Western CoCom embargo in place for anything that was more advanced than a toaster [1] there wasn't really a legal way to obtain a license anyway. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coordinating_Committee_for_Multilateral_Export_Controls https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coordinating_Committee_for_Mul...
- masswerk 4y ago
  It is to be mentioned, though, that some of the Eastern Bloc chips were only on the outside identical to the Western originals, but featured their own internal designs, some of them even robuster and/or more feature rich than the originals. It wasn't always just copy and paste.
  - flohofwoe 4y ago
    True, at least the East German Z80 clone U880 was most likely "properly" reverse-engineered from a real chip's die photos (similar to how the visual6502 netlist was reverse engineered), with bug fixes applied in the process - because the U880 has a slightly different undocumented behaviour than an original Z80. There are still conflicting stories to this day though (e.g. some licensed clones from other Western manufactures also differed in behaviour in those areas - so the U880 design could have been stolen from those), the only thing that's for sure is that the U880 isn't a "transistor-perfect" clone of an original Z80.
    - masswerk 4y ago
      Based on what I've read, this seems to be also true for the soviet PDP-11 single-chip designs.

credit_guy 4y ago

> 1984 – Ignoring the Soviet boycott and the participation of Romanian athletes in the Los Angeles Olympics. That resulted in a stunning result for Romania. It ranked number 2 in gold medals, right after the US (the host country). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1984_Summer_Olympics_medal_table https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1984_Summer_Olympics_medal_tab...

_ohe6 4y ago

Hello, I'm from Romania, and I never knew we had such facilities. History is always fascinating and is sad to see parts like this of the industry get destroyed. In every major city, where major industry was (they built quite a lot of things like tractors, cars), now we have Apartment Buildings. In the 90s, after the fall of communism, everything from the industry was bought by members of "Romanian Mafia"(people who had connections and knew how to buy them) and got sold as scrap.

shrimpx 4y ago
My understanding is that there are healthy startup scenes in Bucharest and other cities, producing companies like https://uipath.com https://uipath.com, so even though that old generation got scrapped, the future seems hopeful. And hopefully corruption is rooted out over time.
- yrgulation 4y ago
  There is, but a lot of romanians like to trash their country. Ops comment for instance is a common point of view around the so called psd electorate (founded by former communist party members). They claim that factories have been converted to shopping malls and apartment complexes to the detriment of industry. A false notion as the old industry was dead anyway. Plenty of new factories replaced the old. And indeed the software startup scene is developing as are the tech industry. Corruption is lower and romania has become a high income economy. Sadly many have been conditioned to repeat statements that demean their own country. A sad example of the Stockholm syndrome at national scale.
- tsimionescu 4y ago
  IT is booming to a great extent in Romania, thanks in large part to a tax cut for IT employment started around 20 years ago. There are still relatively few major success stories, in the sense that the vast amount of programmers are working at international corporations dev offices established in Romania, or in some large outsourcing houses; relatively few are working in startups or in Romanian-owned businesses that are creating their own products. UIPath is more of an exception, but the general situation does seem to be improving. On the other hand, non-IT Romanian industry is very much struggling on almost all fronts, and most of it is nowhere near where it was in terms of competitiveness or just basic output compared to the communist area, thanks in large parts to what the GP was mentioning (a systematic dismantling for parts by opportunistic apparatchiks after the revolution, but also before the revolution itself, as money dried up and the demented regime became more enamored with grandiose projects rather than any practical economy).

theaeolist 4y ago

"The consumption of electricity in everyday life was limited (it was forbidden to use a refrigerator during the winter, and the use of a vacuum cleaner was banned all year round), hot water was supplied to apartments twice a week," This is all false. Source: I was there.

culi 4y ago
I wasn't there but my parents were and I also haven't heard of any of this. With most "life under communism" stories I'm sure it's a broad generalization that might've applied in a few localities but varied widely
tsimionescu 4y ago
There were periods when electricity was rationed, usually with rolling blackouts. I've also never heard of a ban on refrigerators at any particular time of year, nor a ban on vacuum cleaners. Problems with hot water were common, but I've also not heard of any particular schedule. Food scarcity was a much bigger problem for that period though, especially in major cities (people would queue for hours for a chance at meat or eggs, for example).
- saiya-jin 4y ago
  This was same in Czechoslovakia, I recall my parents standing queue in freezing cold during winter for 2-3 hours so that their sick son could have some mandarines or lemon juice in the tea. The beauty of communist central planning, nothing really worked unless you were in communist party.
- gls2ro 4y ago
  Well, there is no need to put a ban on refrigerators or vacuum cleaners if you could not safely assume that there will be electricity in general. Also for other people reading this, please note that all stores in most of the country (with exception of capital city and a couple others) were controlled by the state. Leaving the country was forbidden in general. So if they wanted people not to use refrigerators on large scale or vacuum cleaners they could just decide to not sell them. It was that simple to restrict something like electronics. Just add more: again in most of the country there were very few cars running as there was a limited supply of petrol/gas for cars. You could have a fixed amount of gas. They even decided at one point that on Sunday to restrict circulation of cars the following way: one Sunday cars that have an odd number are allowed, the other Sunday cars that have an even number were allowed.

adiian 4y ago

https://hackaday.com/2017/11/07/romanias-1980s-illicit-diy-computer-movement/ https://hackaday.com/2017/11/07/romanias-1980s-illicit-diy-c... Look inside an old Apple II and you’ll see a sea of chips accomplishing what can be done with only a few today. The Cobra clones looked much the same, but with even more chips. Using whatever they could get their hands on, the students would make 30 chips do the job of an elusive $10 chip. No two computers were necessarily alike. Even the keyboards were hacked together, sometimes using keys designed for mainframe computers but with faults from the molding process. These were cleaned up and new letters put on.

olao99 4y ago

Meh just a bunch of clones

Koshkin 4y ago
Still, it is amazing what they could do back then.