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There's a somewhat famous (possibly apocryphal?) story about the USSR's campaign to get its hand on American minicomputers to reverse engineer. The CIA would in

There's a somewhat famous (possibly apocryphal?) story about the USSR's campaign to get its hand on American minicomputers to reverse engineer. The CIA would intercept shipments they suspected were being sold to the Soviets and fill the boxes with rocks before sending them along to be picked up by KGB agents in South America. Ultimately the Soviets did end up procuring a few western machines and reverse-engineering them. This is a look at one such machine - essentially a desktop PDP-11 used by the Soviet nuclear power industry: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r1EWsWxObjA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r1EWsWxObjA

dboreham 3y ago
There were pdp-11s everywhere in the 1970s, and the designs were published (I have the schematics in my desk drawer here on microfiche). They were built from off the shelf TTL chips that again could be bought everywhere (things like UARTs often did use an LSI chip, bit harder to get hold of but still readily available) So it's inconceivable that a state level actor couldn't easily produce clones, even without ever having seen one! All the stories about "campaign to get its hand on American minicomputers" etc is theater.
- tivert 3y ago
  There were pdp-11s everywhere in the 1970s, and the designs were published (I have the schematics in my desk drawer here on microfiche). They were built from off the shelf TTL chips... > All the stories about "campaign to get its hand on American minicomputers" etc is theater. The stories might be true, but not so much about acquiring the designs as quality implementations. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_computing_in_the_Soviet_Union https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_computing_in_the_So...: > Soviet industry was unable to mass-produce computers to acceptable quality standards[6] and locally manufactured copies of Western hardware were unreliable.[7] As personal computers spread to industries and offices in the West, the Soviet Union's technological lag increased.[8] > ... > Since computers were considered strategic goods by the United States, their sale by Western countries was generally not allowed without special permission.[39] As a result of the CoCom embargo, companies from Western Bloc countries could not export computers to the Soviet Union (or service them) without a special license.[84]

dboreham 3y ago

There were pdp-11s everywhere in the 1970s, and the designs were published (I have the schematics in my desk drawer here on microfiche). They were built from off the shelf TTL chips that again could be bought everywhere (things like UARTs often did use an LSI chip, bit harder to get hold of but still readily available) So it's inconceivable that a state level actor couldn't easily produce clones, even without ever having seen one! All the stories about "campaign to get its hand on American minicomputers" etc is theater.

tivert 3y ago
There were pdp-11s everywhere in the 1970s, and the designs were published (I have the schematics in my desk drawer here on microfiche). They were built from off the shelf TTL chips... > All the stories about "campaign to get its hand on American minicomputers" etc is theater. The stories might be true, but not so much about acquiring the designs as quality implementations. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_computing_in_the_Soviet_Union https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_computing_in_the_So...: > Soviet industry was unable to mass-produce computers to acceptable quality standards[6] and locally manufactured copies of Western hardware were unreliable.[7] As personal computers spread to industries and offices in the West, the Soviet Union's technological lag increased.[8] > ... > Since computers were considered strategic goods by the United States, their sale by Western countries was generally not allowed without special permission.[39] As a result of the CoCom embargo, companies from Western Bloc countries could not export computers to the Soviet Union (or service them) without a special license.[84]