10 ms·

The Bulgarian Computer's Global Reach: On Victor Petrov's "Balkan Cyberia"

92 points by martinlaz 2y ago

mrkramer 2y ago
Interesting fact about Bulgaria and Amazon, first order on Amazon.com was from Bulgaria.
- pavel_pt 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - mrkramer 2y ago
    You think Jeff would ship a product that was paid with a stolen card....
    - npace12 2y ago
      they (cdnow) used to ship products ordered with any "generated" credit card that passed their basic regex validation even if that number wasn't an actual bank account.
  - handzhiev 2y ago
    It was cash sent by snail mail. Quite a famous story https://www.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/5hd561/jeff_bezoss_story_about_amazons_first_order_from/ https://www.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/5hd561/jeff_bezoss_...
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
mrtksn 2y ago
Asionometry has a brilliant piece on the topic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t-UVPw1c_So https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t-UVPw1c_So
malkia 2y ago
Anyone remembers The Dark Avenger :) - lol, another fellow bulgarian! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Avenger https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Avenger
- unsigner 2y ago
  I suspect this thread is a honeypot to gather all Bulgarians on HN
  - malkia 2y ago
    indeed :) - Another honeypot would be an article about Heroes of Might and Magic III
boulos 2y ago
This is also directly available from MIT Press as Open Access: https://direct.mit.edu/books/oa-monograph/5598/Balkan-CyberiaCold-War-Computing-Bulgarian https://direct.mit.edu/books/oa-monograph/5598/Balkan-Cyberi...
thriftwy 2y ago
One of the first Sovirt Union's general purpose computers, the MESM[1], was built in some pre-revolutionary mansion outside Kiev. Romania also had significant semiconductor industry and DDR too, such as Kombinat Mikroelektronik "Karl Marx" Erfurt. I'm disappointed the article is so eager to tag late communist Bulgaria "repressive". The same myopic vision where Bulgaria can be of no significance, but also where socialist regime can manifest with nothing but repression. 1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MESM https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MESM
- pvg 2y ago
  "Repressive" seems pretty accurate. That it had non-repressive attributes (what repressive regime doesn't?) doesn't mean it wasn't repressive.
  - thriftwy 2y ago
    With "non-repressive attributes" you're continuing to dig the same hole I was talking about. I mean, come on.
    - pvg 2y ago
      What is the hole in question? You're complaining the article calls a repressive regime repressive. What's the actual objection? That it wasn't repressive? It was really repressive!
      - thriftwy 2y ago
        That now sounds like that Anarcho-Syndicalist dialogue from Monty Python's Holy Grail, where Arthur represses peasants by existing. And I'm absolutely no fan of communism. The hole in question that absolute majority of Bulgarians' experience was shaped by what the economy can let them do and what it can't - talking about both pre-1990 and post-1990. Late communism was more like an asylum which is run by inmates. It was as repressive as they personally were.
gremlinunderway 2y ago
Really cool to see other attempts at historically understanding Warsaw Pact and fUSSR tech industries. Every other treatment I've ever seen for describing the Soviet computing and internet development has always just been a lazy "well it wasn't innovative like silicon valley" which, while not necessarily wrong, sounds more like awkward and insecure attempt at justifying our own processes, and also isn't all that descriptive or useful. This isn't surprising because we still have a very heavy Cold War stink on history to do with the USSR and just continue to discover we were wrong about certain aspects of that experiment or didnt quite fully understand it without heavy ideological bias.
- pvg 2y ago
  we were wrong about certain aspects I think the wrongness of popular perception tends to go in the other direction. People often misunderstand just how badly the Soviet bloc lagged in high technology, precision manufacturing at scale, etc. This makes sense because they remember and have read about the military parity, the brief period of (very roughly) comparable middle class standard of living, etc. But Moore's law (among other things) dramatically exacerbated the technology gap - you can have, say, a steel or oil industry that's a couple of decades behind the state of the art. An IC industry that far behind is barely a meaningful IC industry at all.
- rdtsc 2y ago
  > Every other treatment I've ever seen for describing the Soviet computing and internet development has always just been a lazy "well it wasn't innovative like silicon valley" It depends on the decade and if we're are talking about the Soviet Union, keeping in mind that Warsaw Pact countries also had their own trajectories and specifics, like the article mentions. By the 1970s the Soviets themselves realized they were lagging behind, and decided to mostly "borrow" Western designs. So it isn't just us judging them from an orange forum years later, it was a judgement they came to on their own at that time. In the end they were cloning the computer systems of the West, not vice-versa. And, if we know anything about the Soviets, is they did not like to lose face. Everything from space to sports was always them showing off their superiority, so the decision to concede and start copying computer systems designed by the "evil capitalists" likely wasn't done lightly.
svilen_dobrev 2y ago
things worked when there was the state behind it.. Regardless of efficiency. cm601 CPU was exact copy of motorola-6800 (with ~10% yield - doesn't matter). Pravetz-82 was Apple-][, with M6502 imported. There was even some DEC micro-VAX being copied, EC-1055 AFAIR. Then came the PC... and things went more software-ish. There was "mikro monitor 1.0" which was.. MS windows 2.0 but all in cyrillics and encodings (none in original). Xerox Ventura 2 was also copied and rev.engineered. "docs 1.0/2.x" was (pre-MS and MS) Word. Lots of other stuff. Rev.engineered and fixed/enhanced to support cyrillics or else. Then one day it wasn't anymore. Actually all that, let's call it borrowing, laid a perfect ground for all future versions of those products/companies - with plenty of educated and demanding users thereof. (btw rev.engineering was good fun.. but that's a forgotten land now)
- mobilio 2y ago
  Well... it's complicated
- nekitamo 2y ago
  Reverse engineering was and is a lot of fun! If anything its grown in demand, you just have to make sure you’re doing reverse engineering for where the demand is. Same skills, different targets :)
stanislavb 2y ago
Are there people who studied in UKTC here? Maybe we could connect.
loopdoend 2y ago
In case anyone doesn't know - Bulgaria is the most beautiful country in Europe and is rich with cultural history. Ruins and artefacts everywhere. Please come and check it out - Sofia is amazing this time of year.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- npace12 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
- arcticfox 2y ago
  I didn't know anything about Bulgaria until a week ago when GPT-4 suggested it as a potential home for my family. Beautiful, affordable, nice weather, access to Europe... I have loved everything I've learned about it since, even thinking of learning Bulgarian! What a cool place, your country. This post for me is an instance of that weird effect when once you start looking into something you see it everywhere..
pvg 2y ago
A thread from a couple of years ago on a related topic https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26107924 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26107924 And a small historical bit of snark that's probably in the book (which I haven't had a chance to read yet): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26108958 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26108958
ordu 2y ago
> On the ruins of Bulgaria’s communist utopian cyber-economy, the most prolific and feared virus writer of all, named the Dark Avenger, emerged to wreak havoc on the world’s computers at the moment Francis Fukuyama had proclaimed the end of history. Was it really? Oh, yes, kind of: > “The [US] capitalists behaved like socialists while the [Soviet] socialists behaved like capitalists.” In other words, the United States’ internet precursor ARPANET was achieved through strong government support and subsidies, whereas the Soviet attempts were torpedoed by the “self-interest” of its bureaucrats and experts. The Bulgarian case is different because it did succeed—partly due to the fact that Petrov’s protagonists were able to outplay the capitalists at their own game. They copied the code and then rewrote it. It is the end of history predicted by Karl Marx, but it had played in a different way that he thought. It played in a way Fukuyama described in retrospect. Capitalism is no longer "pure" capitalism, and communism is no longer "pure" communism. The thesis and the antithesis mated and gave rise to something in between. Or rather they morphed both, but the transformation of capitalism was more successful. Though China probably wouldn't agree with this last statement. But looking at USA it use a lot of government funds spent on different projects with a goal to spur up progress. ARPANET is just one example, the other one is Apollo project or commercialization of space which is going on right now. And we can see in China a free market or at least market that is much more free than in USSR. It seems it is not the end of history, it is more like an end of history. But I agree with Erik Hoel[1] it is no good in trying to apply Hegel to history, but his models are good to talk about politics. [1] https://www.theintrinsicperspective.com/p/the-end-of-online-history https://www.theintrinsicperspective.com/p/the-end-of-online-...
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
farmdve 2y ago
Before the 90s, Bulgaria was manufacturing almost everything, it had its problems, but it functioned from what we've been told. Afterwards every single factory was shuttered, sold to individuals for the equivalent of a dollar. After the borders were opened up, we experienced a huge outflow and all the smart people left. We are now a fast shrinking country, poor and even today the political scene is a joke.
- neals 2y ago
  Love the wine though. Had an amazing trip through the amazing wine country last summer. Such beautiful scenery.
- mrtksn 2y ago
  If everything was great why people brought down the system? Is it maybe because everything worked thanks to having customer(the USSR) for ideological reasons and not because it was actually competitive or good? Maybe this was the reason why the factories and everything shut down when USSR was gone? IMHO the ideological markets are very dangerous, gives you the wrong feedback on your output and makes you completely reliant. USSR pumps oil, digs minerals and uses the income from that to purchase stuff from Bulgaria not because Bulgaria is the best(it might have been the best or very good at one point) but because politics. Then Bulgaria doesn't have proper feedback and instead of investing to advance its computer business keeps doing the same when the west with their real markets leaps ahead. Then one day the only customer who bought Bulgarian stuff for ideological reasons is gone and Bulgaria finds out that they don't have any customers anymore because they didn't invest in advancing their tech because they didn't need to. Unfortunately, the west today has a similar problem of ideology based markets but its nowhere nearly as bad as the situation in Communist Bulgaria. One argument might be, if the system worked why wouldn't keep doing it? Because its again very dangerous. If the USSR survived and Bulgaria was kept being the tech powerhouse of USSR with a few nodes behind the state of the art, Bulgaria might have been compelled to send the troops for the invasions USSR might have started because that's how empires work(Bulgarian economy collapsing the moment Russia decides not buying from Bulgaria since it disobeys). Notice that the Russian soldiers in Ukraine come from far eastern regions of the Russian federation, that would have been the fate of Bulgaria today.
alexandargyurov 2y ago
For anyone who's in Sofia, there is a meetup with Victor Petrov this Saturday: https://axle.events/events/prezentaciya-na-balkan-cyberia-c71c9 https://axle.events/events/prezentaciya-na-balkan-cyberia-c7...
paul_h 2y ago
"winners don’t like remembering losers" AKA survivorship bias.

92 points by martinlaz 2y ago

mrkramer 2y ago

Interesting fact about Bulgaria and Amazon, first order on Amazon.com was from Bulgaria.

pavel_pt 2y ago
[flagged]
- mrkramer 2y ago
  You think Jeff would ship a product that was paid with a stolen card....
  - npace12 2y ago
    they (cdnow) used to ship products ordered with any "generated" credit card that passed their basic regex validation even if that number wasn't an actual bank account.
- handzhiev 2y ago
  It was cash sent by snail mail. Quite a famous story https://www.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/5hd561/jeff_bezoss_story_about_amazons_first_order_from/ https://www.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/5hd561/jeff_bezoss_...
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

mrtksn 2y ago

Asionometry has a brilliant piece on the topic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t-UVPw1c_So https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t-UVPw1c_So

malkia 2y ago

Anyone remembers The Dark Avenger :) - lol, another fellow bulgarian! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Avenger https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Avenger

unsigner 2y ago
I suspect this thread is a honeypot to gather all Bulgarians on HN
- malkia 2y ago
  indeed :) - Another honeypot would be an article about Heroes of Might and Magic III

boulos 2y ago

This is also directly available from MIT Press as Open Access: https://direct.mit.edu/books/oa-monograph/5598/Balkan-CyberiaCold-War-Computing-Bulgarian https://direct.mit.edu/books/oa-monograph/5598/Balkan-Cyberi...

thriftwy 2y ago

One of the first Sovirt Union's general purpose computers, the MESM[1], was built in some pre-revolutionary mansion outside Kiev. Romania also had significant semiconductor industry and DDR too, such as Kombinat Mikroelektronik "Karl Marx" Erfurt. I'm disappointed the article is so eager to tag late communist Bulgaria "repressive". The same myopic vision where Bulgaria can be of no significance, but also where socialist regime can manifest with nothing but repression. 1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MESM https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MESM

pvg 2y ago
"Repressive" seems pretty accurate. That it had non-repressive attributes (what repressive regime doesn't?) doesn't mean it wasn't repressive.
- thriftwy 2y ago
  With "non-repressive attributes" you're continuing to dig the same hole I was talking about. I mean, come on.
  - pvg 2y ago
    What is the hole in question? You're complaining the article calls a repressive regime repressive. What's the actual objection? That it wasn't repressive? It was really repressive!
    - thriftwy 2y ago
      That now sounds like that Anarcho-Syndicalist dialogue from Monty Python's Holy Grail, where Arthur represses peasants by existing. And I'm absolutely no fan of communism. The hole in question that absolute majority of Bulgarians' experience was shaped by what the economy can let them do and what it can't - talking about both pre-1990 and post-1990. Late communism was more like an asylum which is run by inmates. It was as repressive as they personally were.

gremlinunderway 2y ago

Really cool to see other attempts at historically understanding Warsaw Pact and fUSSR tech industries. Every other treatment I've ever seen for describing the Soviet computing and internet development has always just been a lazy "well it wasn't innovative like silicon valley" which, while not necessarily wrong, sounds more like awkward and insecure attempt at justifying our own processes, and also isn't all that descriptive or useful. This isn't surprising because we still have a very heavy Cold War stink on history to do with the USSR and just continue to discover we were wrong about certain aspects of that experiment or didnt quite fully understand it without heavy ideological bias.

pvg 2y ago
we were wrong about certain aspects I think the wrongness of popular perception tends to go in the other direction. People often misunderstand just how badly the Soviet bloc lagged in high technology, precision manufacturing at scale, etc. This makes sense because they remember and have read about the military parity, the brief period of (very roughly) comparable middle class standard of living, etc. But Moore's law (among other things) dramatically exacerbated the technology gap - you can have, say, a steel or oil industry that's a couple of decades behind the state of the art. An IC industry that far behind is barely a meaningful IC industry at all.
rdtsc 2y ago
> Every other treatment I've ever seen for describing the Soviet computing and internet development has always just been a lazy "well it wasn't innovative like silicon valley" It depends on the decade and if we're are talking about the Soviet Union, keeping in mind that Warsaw Pact countries also had their own trajectories and specifics, like the article mentions. By the 1970s the Soviets themselves realized they were lagging behind, and decided to mostly "borrow" Western designs. So it isn't just us judging them from an orange forum years later, it was a judgement they came to on their own at that time. In the end they were cloning the computer systems of the West, not vice-versa. And, if we know anything about the Soviets, is they did not like to lose face. Everything from space to sports was always them showing off their superiority, so the decision to concede and start copying computer systems designed by the "evil capitalists" likely wasn't done lightly.

svilen_dobrev 2y ago

things worked when there was the state behind it.. Regardless of efficiency. cm601 CPU was exact copy of motorola-6800 (with ~10% yield - doesn't matter). Pravetz-82 was Apple-][, with M6502 imported. There was even some DEC micro-VAX being copied, EC-1055 AFAIR. Then came the PC... and things went more software-ish. There was "mikro monitor 1.0" which was.. MS windows 2.0 but all in cyrillics and encodings (none in original). Xerox Ventura 2 was also copied and rev.engineered. "docs 1.0/2.x" was (pre-MS and MS) Word. Lots of other stuff. Rev.engineered and fixed/enhanced to support cyrillics or else. Then one day it wasn't anymore. Actually all that, let's call it borrowing, laid a perfect ground for all future versions of those products/companies - with plenty of educated and demanding users thereof. (btw rev.engineering was good fun.. but that's a forgotten land now)

mobilio 2y ago
Well... it's complicated
nekitamo 2y ago
Reverse engineering was and is a lot of fun! If anything its grown in demand, you just have to make sure you’re doing reverse engineering for where the demand is. Same skills, different targets :)

stanislavb 2y ago

Are there people who studied in UKTC here? Maybe we could connect.

loopdoend 2y ago

In case anyone doesn't know - Bulgaria is the most beautiful country in Europe and is rich with cultural history. Ruins and artefacts everywhere. Please come and check it out - Sofia is amazing this time of year.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
npace12 2y ago
[flagged]
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
arcticfox 2y ago
I didn't know anything about Bulgaria until a week ago when GPT-4 suggested it as a potential home for my family. Beautiful, affordable, nice weather, access to Europe... I have loved everything I've learned about it since, even thinking of learning Bulgarian! What a cool place, your country. This post for me is an instance of that weird effect when once you start looking into something you see it everywhere..

pvg 2y ago

A thread from a couple of years ago on a related topic https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26107924 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26107924 And a small historical bit of snark that's probably in the book (which I haven't had a chance to read yet): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26108958 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26108958

ordu 2y ago

> On the ruins of Bulgaria’s communist utopian cyber-economy, the most prolific and feared virus writer of all, named the Dark Avenger, emerged to wreak havoc on the world’s computers at the moment Francis Fukuyama had proclaimed the end of history. Was it really? Oh, yes, kind of: > “The [US] capitalists behaved like socialists while the [Soviet] socialists behaved like capitalists.” In other words, the United States’ internet precursor ARPANET was achieved through strong government support and subsidies, whereas the Soviet attempts were torpedoed by the “self-interest” of its bureaucrats and experts. The Bulgarian case is different because it did succeed—partly due to the fact that Petrov’s protagonists were able to outplay the capitalists at their own game. They copied the code and then rewrote it. It is the end of history predicted by Karl Marx, but it had played in a different way that he thought. It played in a way Fukuyama described in retrospect. Capitalism is no longer "pure" capitalism, and communism is no longer "pure" communism. The thesis and the antithesis mated and gave rise to something in between. Or rather they morphed both, but the transformation of capitalism was more successful. Though China probably wouldn't agree with this last statement. But looking at USA it use a lot of government funds spent on different projects with a goal to spur up progress. ARPANET is just one example, the other one is Apollo project or commercialization of space which is going on right now. And we can see in China a free market or at least market that is much more free than in USSR. It seems it is not the end of history, it is more like an end of history. But I agree with Erik Hoel[1] it is no good in trying to apply Hegel to history, but his models are good to talk about politics. [1] https://www.theintrinsicperspective.com/p/the-end-of-online-history https://www.theintrinsicperspective.com/p/the-end-of-online-...

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

farmdve 2y ago

Before the 90s, Bulgaria was manufacturing almost everything, it had its problems, but it functioned from what we've been told. Afterwards every single factory was shuttered, sold to individuals for the equivalent of a dollar. After the borders were opened up, we experienced a huge outflow and all the smart people left. We are now a fast shrinking country, poor and even today the political scene is a joke.

neals 2y ago
Love the wine though. Had an amazing trip through the amazing wine country last summer. Such beautiful scenery.
mrtksn 2y ago
If everything was great why people brought down the system? Is it maybe because everything worked thanks to having customer(the USSR) for ideological reasons and not because it was actually competitive or good? Maybe this was the reason why the factories and everything shut down when USSR was gone? IMHO the ideological markets are very dangerous, gives you the wrong feedback on your output and makes you completely reliant. USSR pumps oil, digs minerals and uses the income from that to purchase stuff from Bulgaria not because Bulgaria is the best(it might have been the best or very good at one point) but because politics. Then Bulgaria doesn't have proper feedback and instead of investing to advance its computer business keeps doing the same when the west with their real markets leaps ahead. Then one day the only customer who bought Bulgarian stuff for ideological reasons is gone and Bulgaria finds out that they don't have any customers anymore because they didn't invest in advancing their tech because they didn't need to. Unfortunately, the west today has a similar problem of ideology based markets but its nowhere nearly as bad as the situation in Communist Bulgaria. One argument might be, if the system worked why wouldn't keep doing it? Because its again very dangerous. If the USSR survived and Bulgaria was kept being the tech powerhouse of USSR with a few nodes behind the state of the art, Bulgaria might have been compelled to send the troops for the invasions USSR might have started because that's how empires work(Bulgarian economy collapsing the moment Russia decides not buying from Bulgaria since it disobeys). Notice that the Russian soldiers in Ukraine come from far eastern regions of the Russian federation, that would have been the fate of Bulgaria today.

alexandargyurov 2y ago

For anyone who's in Sofia, there is a meetup with Victor Petrov this Saturday: https://axle.events/events/prezentaciya-na-balkan-cyberia-c71c9 https://axle.events/events/prezentaciya-na-balkan-cyberia-c7...

paul_h 2y ago

"winners don’t like remembering losers" AKA survivorship bias.