7 ms·

Polish communist era 8 bit computer used in banks, MK-45 (2021) [video]

84 points by InterNautic 4y ago

InterNautic 4y ago
It was running CP/M and was an effect of sanctions and components shortages.With comical results like power outlet made out of regular wall mounted outlet. Video about that wonder of communism, it has Polish subs so you can use autotranslate https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CMRAMxtS21A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CMRAMxtS21A
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
mgl 4y ago
I still remember playing with green-screen Elwro computer at my friend’s house when I was 12. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elwro https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elwro
Koshkin 4y ago
So, back in the day Poland must have had quite a few people working in hi-tech. Which leaves me wondering, has the country been able to retain its corps of specialists, and what is Poland’s most hi-tech product today?
- skissane 4y ago
  A couple of my computer science professors at university were Polish. They’d both done their PhDs in Poland in the 70s/80s. Like many other bright Poles, when communism ended, they took the opportunity to depart for greener pastures (and being Australia, sunnier too).
- InterNautic 4y ago
  Communist Poland was a producer of acceptable quality peripheral computer hardware, but meh central processing unit parts due to outdated semiconductor production lines and shortages of needed materials and money needed for research and production (central planing sucks at delivering that) and complicated procedures of obtaining governmental permission to import semiconductors from the West (as you needed to use US dollars to pay for them and only government was allowed to perform international transactions using foreign currencies). And even when you get the permit you could have been denied access by western producers if parts you were looking at were covered by western sanctions. As for designers of hardware – K-202 and later MERA-404 were the most advanced TTL architectures that originated under communist regime in Poland. As for CMOS single chip CPUs whole eastern bloc only managed to copy 8 bit western designs, most notably by teams from Ukraine and Bulgaria (that was also a main Floppy Discs producer in the bloc BTW, other than that cassette tapes and reel to reel tapes were the most common storage media). As for retaining specialists specialized in deign - they weren't too numerous to begin with. In later years of communist era regimes designed mostly to switch from attempts of developing of own designs to reverse engineering and copying western designs which involved a lot of industrial espionage and smuggling of components and software which even further limited size of group of people who were designing own solutions. Tho Poland continued to produce own designs based on own components as well as parts from the West and Soviet Union well into the 1980s. By the time communist ended a lot of them were well into their 40s and 50s with the biggest group that was about to turn 60. Poland by that time had no manufacturing capabilities to produce modern components in high quantities essential for survival of such businesses. Younger generation was more interested in developing software for western minicomputers like PC, Commodore and Atari products. So there was quite a gap in generations and their main focus. As for today there is some research on quantum computing and photonics being done in academia. As for manufacturing of more innovative hardware and software most specialists emigrate to Germany, Scandinavia, the UK and the US. Poland is not too friendly for such business (lower level of economic freedom, overcomplicated taxation system etc) compared to these countries especially as risky ones as innovative high tech.
- askvictor 4y ago
  Not first hand info, but I hear there's a good high level of tech competence there now. Also, apparently a decent manufacturing capability, with good quality control and low wages (compared to much of Europe). Which apparently is setting them up as an EU-local competitor to China.
- durnygbur 4y ago
  Not a trace of it remaining, now we're doing brain dead software outsourcing. Last artifact remaining - Elwro - was subject of hostile takeover by Siemens during the awful filthy corrupted 90s.
  - ajuc 4y ago
    Goodram (Wilk Electronics) is pretty big and it was created in 90s.
- progre 4y ago
  I work with Poles all the time. There definetly is a huge market for IT type work in Poland. Lots of contracting in the rest of Europe since Poles are still quite cheap but in the EU.
- Hackbraten 4y ago
  > what is Poland’s most hi-tech product today? For me, it’s the Polyend Tracker [0]. [0]: https://polyend.com/tracker/ https://polyend.com/tracker/
  - multjoy 4y ago
    That's a good looking unit!
- Tade0 4y ago
  Ahem, games. The local gaming industry attracts talent from the region and has a few globally successful products - even if companies themselves are incorporated in Cyprus. But that only gained momentum relatively recently - there was no carryover from the communist era. There are also payment systems - there's a lot of experimentation going on in that field. All the more interesting because the population is particularly price-conscious and intolerant to friction in payment processing. The rest is largely outsourcing. We have a few large domestic IT companies doing projects for the government. Lastly Poland is where around 3% of the world's li-ion batteries are manufactured. Not a lot in absolute terms, but it's, weirdly enough, half the manufacturing capacity of the US and in the EU second only to Hungary. That's about it. Academia mostly gave up and resorted to pumping out masters' degrees. There is still a significant amount of brain-drain in IT, but it's countered with generous tax incentives.
- ajuc 4y ago
  In Warsaw Pact countries were assigned specialized roles by USSR. Poland was supposed to make tanks, radars, radio, agricultural machines (including planes), etc. And we had pretty good industry in these domains. But in each case - for example tanks - there were always some parts you couldn't make in one country to prevent uprisings. So for example for tanks we took some crucial parts from Czechoslovakia. USSR was able to do whatever it wanted of course. So, to this day we make good military RF-related tech (see WB-Electronics and Radwar for example). But when we tried a space program in 60s ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meteor_(rocket) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meteor_(rocket) ) - USSR made us stop pretty quickly. Back to the subject - East Germany and USSR was supposed to do integrated circuits, so our industry wasn't very good in that regard. We made some, but nothing modern. Polish-made computers were mostly using foreign ICs with the exception of a Polish-made clone of 8080 used in a series of computers by Elwro. Nowadays we have one pretty big IC factory in Poland ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilk_Elektronik https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilk_Elektronik ), and a few specialized IC factories for military and industrial automation. On the other hand Poland is pretty big in software, especially gamedev.
- tester756 4y ago
  The most "hi tech" stuff from Poland that I know is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asymmetric_numeral_systems https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asymmetric_numeral_systems
cactusplant7374 4y ago
There aren’t English subtitles?
- InterNautic 4y ago
  They are if you bother to click auto-translate option.
  - ericpauley 4y ago
    Can’t make this show on iOS.
    - InterNautic 4y ago
      [flagged]
      - cactusplant7374 4y ago
        [flagged]
        dang 4y ago
        Please don't respond to a bad comment by breaking the site guidelines yourself. That only makes everything worse. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
        cactusplant7374 4y ago
        [flagged]
      - dang 4y ago
        Please don't be a jerk in HN comments. We ban accounts that do that. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
ggm 4y ago
Motorola had some investment in the region. 6800 class CPU fab. Maybe made under licence. I remember my dad touring Poland, Hungary discussing vlsi conference stuff with people there in the 80s. The UK maths/compsci circuit had good links with Poland's because of Marian Rejewski and cryptography history. Well.. good and not good, he didn't always get recognition for what he'd done.
- InterNautic 4y ago
  UK was involved in (in)famous story of production of K-202. The story that to these days is a highly controversial topic due to various groups blaming different people (from Jacek Karpiński to communist government) for it's failure tho it was pretty impressive and innovative architecture at the moment it was presented to the world, tho prolonged problems with production deleyed it's arrival so much it was no longer able to keep up with western rivals especially integrated CPUs as K-202 was a TTL based architecture.
somat 4y ago
As someone who missed that era, a question about cp/m. Most machines had some sort of basic rom, why was that not the preferred command processor, basic is not that great, but it provides for a much richer command environment than cp/m or dos. What was the advantage of cp/m? I am approaching from the context of the unix shell, an operating environment rich enough to program in. I don't know what scripting was available on cp/m but dos scripting with batch files was a miserly unpleasant thing in comparison. But then I think about how all those early home computers had a BASIC rom, why did that not evolve into a BASIC shell? it would have been a much nicer environment than cp/m.
- retrac 4y ago
  CP/M software was (somewhat) portable. That was its killer feature. A program coded in 8080 assembly that closely adhered to the CP/M API, would run on any 8080 machine that could run CP/M. Anyone with the hardware skill could build a CP/M compatible computer, no coding required beyond a bootloader and tweaking the CP/M BIOS (low level driver code). There were dozens of manufacturers of CP/M machines. On the other hand, there was no standard BASIC common across all those machines, besides MS BASIC, sort of. On proprietary systems, BASIC shells were a thing. Both DOS and ProDOS on the Apple II hooked into the ROM BASIC interpreter.
  - donatj 4y ago
    Just to add a little detail, MS BASIC’s capabilities varied pretty widely across versions and machines, and it wasn’t helped that Commodore had gotten a sweet heart deal on MS BASIC in 1977 that included no royalties and as such they never upgraded the version of MS BASIC - as that would involve giving the now much bigger and more apt Microsoft another whack at the terms.
  - InterNautic 4y ago
    Yes, this is why "it can run CP/M" is popular "form of bragging" among modern homebrew computers builders.
- karmakaze 4y ago
  The CP/M machines I've used (z80) weren't so personal. They typically ran off the shelf software. I recall using dBase II on a Xerox machine. The machines that came with BASIC could be personal (Atari) or business focused (TRS-80) and did make for a good default prompt. Often the storage subsystem needed a DOS-like part not included with Basic which may only have supported cassette data storage out of the box.
ck45 4y ago
Coincidentally I saw this video on youtube yesterday about how the attempt to keep up with the west regarding semiconductors ruined the economy of East Germany. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cxrkC-pMH_s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cxrkC-pMH_s Edit: Added link to youtube instead of HN
- flohofwoe 4y ago
  I can't see anything under your link, but I'm very interested in the video :) I would be surprised though if this would have been the singular event that ruined the East German economy (if there was one main reason then it was the central planning and micromanagement of the entire ecomony which was mostly based on made up numbers and wishful thinking instead of reality), if anything, the focus on microelectronics was an unintended long term investment into the post-GDR future ;) (Dresden and Jena are still high-tech hotspots, and without having access to computers and then catching the "computer virus" as East German teenager I wouldn't have become a programmer later)
  - argulane 4y ago
    The video is probably this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cxrkC-pMH_s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cxrkC-pMH_s
    - flohofwoe 4y ago
      Thanks! Watching it now :) PS: it's a good video, but focuses a bit too much on the political background ... which may of course be interesting as introduction for people without 'first hand' East German experience ;). The video doesn't mention the most interesting unsolved mystery: how the Z80 was actually cloned. There are a couple of contradicting stories around (with the two extreme ends being (1) the Stasi stole the masks directly from Zilog or another Z80 vendor - which makes a good James Bond story, and (2) somebody just literally walked into a West German electronics store, bought a handful of Z80s, smuggled them back over the border, and the rest was reverse engineered via traditional decapping - which is a much more boring story, but also much more likely. The only fact that helps to clear up some of the myths is that the East German Z80 is not a 1:1 clone of an original Zilog Z80 because it differs slightly in undocumented behaviour, but it could probably be 1:1 clone of a non-Zilog Z80 clone (such as Hitachi's).
forinti 4y ago
Brazil had a restricted market for computers in the 80s. They too had to work with obsolete machines, but I don't think that was the main mistake. The mistake was to not popularise computers and educate people about them (as the British did). They were too expensive and weren't as used as they could have been.

84 points by InterNautic 4y ago

It was running CP/M and was an effect of sanctions and components shortages.With comical results like power outlet made out of regular wall mounted outlet. Video about that wonder of communism, it has Polish subs so you can use autotranslate https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CMRAMxtS21A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CMRAMxtS21A

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

mgl 4y ago

I still remember playing with green-screen Elwro computer at my friend’s house when I was 12. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elwro https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elwro

Koshkin 4y ago

So, back in the day Poland must have had quite a few people working in hi-tech. Which leaves me wondering, has the country been able to retain its corps of specialists, and what is Poland’s most hi-tech product today?

skissane 4y ago
A couple of my computer science professors at university were Polish. They’d both done their PhDs in Poland in the 70s/80s. Like many other bright Poles, when communism ended, they took the opportunity to depart for greener pastures (and being Australia, sunnier too).
InterNautic 4y ago
Communist Poland was a producer of acceptable quality peripheral computer hardware, but meh central processing unit parts due to outdated semiconductor production lines and shortages of needed materials and money needed for research and production (central planing sucks at delivering that) and complicated procedures of obtaining governmental permission to import semiconductors from the West (as you needed to use US dollars to pay for them and only government was allowed to perform international transactions using foreign currencies). And even when you get the permit you could have been denied access by western producers if parts you were looking at were covered by western sanctions. As for designers of hardware – K-202 and later MERA-404 were the most advanced TTL architectures that originated under communist regime in Poland. As for CMOS single chip CPUs whole eastern bloc only managed to copy 8 bit western designs, most notably by teams from Ukraine and Bulgaria (that was also a main Floppy Discs producer in the bloc BTW, other than that cassette tapes and reel to reel tapes were the most common storage media). As for retaining specialists specialized in deign - they weren't too numerous to begin with. In later years of communist era regimes designed mostly to switch from attempts of developing of own designs to reverse engineering and copying western designs which involved a lot of industrial espionage and smuggling of components and software which even further limited size of group of people who were designing own solutions. Tho Poland continued to produce own designs based on own components as well as parts from the West and Soviet Union well into the 1980s. By the time communist ended a lot of them were well into their 40s and 50s with the biggest group that was about to turn 60. Poland by that time had no manufacturing capabilities to produce modern components in high quantities essential for survival of such businesses. Younger generation was more interested in developing software for western minicomputers like PC, Commodore and Atari products. So there was quite a gap in generations and their main focus. As for today there is some research on quantum computing and photonics being done in academia. As for manufacturing of more innovative hardware and software most specialists emigrate to Germany, Scandinavia, the UK and the US. Poland is not too friendly for such business (lower level of economic freedom, overcomplicated taxation system etc) compared to these countries especially as risky ones as innovative high tech.
askvictor 4y ago
Not first hand info, but I hear there's a good high level of tech competence there now. Also, apparently a decent manufacturing capability, with good quality control and low wages (compared to much of Europe). Which apparently is setting them up as an EU-local competitor to China.
durnygbur 4y ago
Not a trace of it remaining, now we're doing brain dead software outsourcing. Last artifact remaining - Elwro - was subject of hostile takeover by Siemens during the awful filthy corrupted 90s.
- ajuc 4y ago
  Goodram (Wilk Electronics) is pretty big and it was created in 90s.
progre 4y ago
I work with Poles all the time. There definetly is a huge market for IT type work in Poland. Lots of contracting in the rest of Europe since Poles are still quite cheap but in the EU.
Hackbraten 4y ago
> what is Poland’s most hi-tech product today? For me, it’s the Polyend Tracker [0]. [0]: https://polyend.com/tracker/ https://polyend.com/tracker/
- multjoy 4y ago
  That's a good looking unit!
Tade0 4y ago
Ahem, games. The local gaming industry attracts talent from the region and has a few globally successful products - even if companies themselves are incorporated in Cyprus. But that only gained momentum relatively recently - there was no carryover from the communist era. There are also payment systems - there's a lot of experimentation going on in that field. All the more interesting because the population is particularly price-conscious and intolerant to friction in payment processing. The rest is largely outsourcing. We have a few large domestic IT companies doing projects for the government. Lastly Poland is where around 3% of the world's li-ion batteries are manufactured. Not a lot in absolute terms, but it's, weirdly enough, half the manufacturing capacity of the US and in the EU second only to Hungary. That's about it. Academia mostly gave up and resorted to pumping out masters' degrees. There is still a significant amount of brain-drain in IT, but it's countered with generous tax incentives.
ajuc 4y ago
In Warsaw Pact countries were assigned specialized roles by USSR. Poland was supposed to make tanks, radars, radio, agricultural machines (including planes), etc. And we had pretty good industry in these domains. But in each case - for example tanks - there were always some parts you couldn't make in one country to prevent uprisings. So for example for tanks we took some crucial parts from Czechoslovakia. USSR was able to do whatever it wanted of course. So, to this day we make good military RF-related tech (see WB-Electronics and Radwar for example). But when we tried a space program in 60s ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meteor_(rocket) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meteor_(rocket) ) - USSR made us stop pretty quickly. Back to the subject - East Germany and USSR was supposed to do integrated circuits, so our industry wasn't very good in that regard. We made some, but nothing modern. Polish-made computers were mostly using foreign ICs with the exception of a Polish-made clone of 8080 used in a series of computers by Elwro. Nowadays we have one pretty big IC factory in Poland ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilk_Elektronik https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilk_Elektronik ), and a few specialized IC factories for military and industrial automation. On the other hand Poland is pretty big in software, especially gamedev.
tester756 4y ago
The most "hi tech" stuff from Poland that I know is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asymmetric_numeral_systems https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asymmetric_numeral_systems

cactusplant7374 4y ago

There aren’t English subtitles?

InterNautic 4y ago
They are if you bother to click auto-translate option.
- ericpauley 4y ago
  Can’t make this show on iOS.
  - InterNautic 4y ago
    [flagged]
    - cactusplant7374 4y ago
      [flagged]
      - dang 4y ago
        Please don't respond to a bad comment by breaking the site guidelines yourself. That only makes everything worse. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
        cactusplant7374 4y ago
        [flagged]
    - dang 4y ago
      Please don't be a jerk in HN comments. We ban accounts that do that. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

ggm 4y ago

Motorola had some investment in the region. 6800 class CPU fab. Maybe made under licence. I remember my dad touring Poland, Hungary discussing vlsi conference stuff with people there in the 80s. The UK maths/compsci circuit had good links with Poland's because of Marian Rejewski and cryptography history. Well.. good and not good, he didn't always get recognition for what he'd done.

InterNautic 4y ago
UK was involved in (in)famous story of production of K-202. The story that to these days is a highly controversial topic due to various groups blaming different people (from Jacek Karpiński to communist government) for it's failure tho it was pretty impressive and innovative architecture at the moment it was presented to the world, tho prolonged problems with production deleyed it's arrival so much it was no longer able to keep up with western rivals especially integrated CPUs as K-202 was a TTL based architecture.

somat 4y ago

As someone who missed that era, a question about cp/m. Most machines had some sort of basic rom, why was that not the preferred command processor, basic is not that great, but it provides for a much richer command environment than cp/m or dos. What was the advantage of cp/m? I am approaching from the context of the unix shell, an operating environment rich enough to program in. I don't know what scripting was available on cp/m but dos scripting with batch files was a miserly unpleasant thing in comparison. But then I think about how all those early home computers had a BASIC rom, why did that not evolve into a BASIC shell? it would have been a much nicer environment than cp/m.

retrac 4y ago
CP/M software was (somewhat) portable. That was its killer feature. A program coded in 8080 assembly that closely adhered to the CP/M API, would run on any 8080 machine that could run CP/M. Anyone with the hardware skill could build a CP/M compatible computer, no coding required beyond a bootloader and tweaking the CP/M BIOS (low level driver code). There were dozens of manufacturers of CP/M machines. On the other hand, there was no standard BASIC common across all those machines, besides MS BASIC, sort of. On proprietary systems, BASIC shells were a thing. Both DOS and ProDOS on the Apple II hooked into the ROM BASIC interpreter.
- donatj 4y ago
  Just to add a little detail, MS BASIC’s capabilities varied pretty widely across versions and machines, and it wasn’t helped that Commodore had gotten a sweet heart deal on MS BASIC in 1977 that included no royalties and as such they never upgraded the version of MS BASIC - as that would involve giving the now much bigger and more apt Microsoft another whack at the terms.
- InterNautic 4y ago
  Yes, this is why "it can run CP/M" is popular "form of bragging" among modern homebrew computers builders.
karmakaze 4y ago
The CP/M machines I've used (z80) weren't so personal. They typically ran off the shelf software. I recall using dBase II on a Xerox machine. The machines that came with BASIC could be personal (Atari) or business focused (TRS-80) and did make for a good default prompt. Often the storage subsystem needed a DOS-like part not included with Basic which may only have supported cassette data storage out of the box.

ck45 4y ago

Coincidentally I saw this video on youtube yesterday about how the attempt to keep up with the west regarding semiconductors ruined the economy of East Germany. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cxrkC-pMH_s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cxrkC-pMH_s Edit: Added link to youtube instead of HN

flohofwoe 4y ago
I can't see anything under your link, but I'm very interested in the video :) I would be surprised though if this would have been the singular event that ruined the East German economy (if there was one main reason then it was the central planning and micromanagement of the entire ecomony which was mostly based on made up numbers and wishful thinking instead of reality), if anything, the focus on microelectronics was an unintended long term investment into the post-GDR future ;) (Dresden and Jena are still high-tech hotspots, and without having access to computers and then catching the "computer virus" as East German teenager I wouldn't have become a programmer later)
- argulane 4y ago
  The video is probably this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cxrkC-pMH_s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cxrkC-pMH_s
  - flohofwoe 4y ago
    Thanks! Watching it now :) PS: it's a good video, but focuses a bit too much on the political background ... which may of course be interesting as introduction for people without 'first hand' East German experience ;). The video doesn't mention the most interesting unsolved mystery: how the Z80 was actually cloned. There are a couple of contradicting stories around (with the two extreme ends being (1) the Stasi stole the masks directly from Zilog or another Z80 vendor - which makes a good James Bond story, and (2) somebody just literally walked into a West German electronics store, bought a handful of Z80s, smuggled them back over the border, and the rest was reverse engineered via traditional decapping - which is a much more boring story, but also much more likely. The only fact that helps to clear up some of the myths is that the East German Z80 is not a 1:1 clone of an original Zilog Z80 because it differs slightly in undocumented behaviour, but it could probably be 1:1 clone of a non-Zilog Z80 clone (such as Hitachi's).

forinti 4y ago

Brazil had a restricted market for computers in the 80s. They too had to work with obsolete machines, but I don't think that was the main mistake. The mistake was to not popularise computers and educate people about them (as the British did). They were too expensive and weren't as used as they could have been.