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As somebody who grew up as a person and as a programmer in 80s, the problem wasn't purity of the math or the chemicals. The problem was an extremely crappy leve
by smsm42 3y ago
As somebody who grew up as a person and as a programmer in 80s, the problem wasn't purity of the math or the chemicals. The problem was an extremely crappy level of manufacturing quality in everything and lacking facilities in quantity of available technology. I was lucky to grow up in a big city, have educated parents and study in one of the best schools in the country. So I had access to a variety of hardware and software and technology (domestic and imported). Most people however barely had access to programmable calculators, and the only way to actually get access to a PC-level computer would be either work in one of the places where it deemed necessary or build one by yourself (not that the parts would be easily accessible too, you may have to go to a special marketplace, etc.).
Same thing was with information materials - Soviet ones were badly made, severely outdated and rarely available without some kind of special access (you had to know people). I had to translate things from foreign materials (yes, I was lucky to know the right people to gain access to some foreign computer journals), bring books from other neighboring countries (e.g. Bulgaria), etc. As I said, I was lucky - most of my age peers were at best told what the computer is and how one would program it on a whiteboard, if at all.
So yes, by the 80s the Lysenkoist wars were in the past, and actually computers were thought as a way to solve the inadequacies of socialist planning (by then amply evident to all smart people, who were furiously searching for ways to prop up the collapsing system). But general weaknesses of economy, scientific culture, engineering culture, consumer goods manufacturing and in general overall decay of nearly everything (that very soon led to the collapse of the system) ensured that Soviet computer industry was constantly way behind and reduced to badly copying old Western samples, both in the high and consumer ends. It wasn't some one "panic" event that set the Soviets back - it was the inevitable consequence of the overall societal model, and could not have been avoided.
That said, once the USSR collapsed and people could access the world's technology and information freely, people from ex-Soviet countries caught up pretty quickly on the software, indeed - there are a lot of excellent programmers there, though many of them are "from there" already.
- leshow 3y agoI really liked this book on the topic: https://www.goodreads.com/da/book/show/57615568-collapse https://www.goodreads.com/da/book/show/57615568-collapse The inevitability of the USSR collapse was certainly framed that way by pro-western ideologues, but my understanding is that it was the result of conscious reforms and more often than not, blunders, taken on Gorbachev and his cadre of supporters.
- panick21_ 3y agoI heard a story of Sun Microsystems clones but because of manufacturing issues they basically had kernal patches for each individual silicone chip.
- Yeul 3y agoI once read an interesting idea that communism could have worked if implemented with modern information technology. Or at least the supermarkets wouldn't have been empty.
- smsm42 3y agoThat's what they tried to do in the 70s, essentially. Even with the modern computing power, it wouldn't work for multiple reasons, but they certainly gave it a good try, and given the caliber of the people involved (Glushkov, Kolmogorov, etc.) the lack of talent wasn't the problem. The impossibility of the solution likely was.
- orbital-decay 3y agoYes thanks, I was a kid in the 80s and almost forgot how bad it was. Having a technology prototyped in some research institute indeed means nothing if you can't produce it without the product immediately falling apart in consumers' hands (in the best case). Still, by the second half of 80s home computers were more or less available. IIRC a BK-0010 or Mikrosha were around 500-600 rubles, about three monthly salaries of a senior engineer, a lot of people had them, including my family and my uncles/grandparents. And there was a substantial "ecosystem" of a sort around them. Regarding the PCs and workstations, my grandfather, a mechanical engineer (not related to computers in any way), looked for the 1840 in particular (he had some ideas that never worked out) and was able to get it at home by finding the right people, for 1/3 the official price. Which was a lot. I'd still argue that Lysenkoism can't be compared to the cybernetics panic. The former was an actual attempt to bend the science, the latter was more or less a nothingburger caused by some party cogs freaking out at the suggestion that a PID loop can explain (or Engels forbid, control) the politics. Although they seem to think otherwise in Czechia: apparently that moral panic rippled through the entire Eastern Bloc, and for example forced Antonin Svoboda [1] to leave the country. >you had to know people It was a motto of living in USSR, it applied to... everything, basically. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anton%C3%ADn_Svoboda_(computer_scientist) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anton%C3%ADn_Svoboda_(computer...