Yes 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

Yes 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...