6 ms·

This was a fascinating article, because I've seen so many results of the Eastern Bloc reverse-engineering efforts basically founder into obscurity. Many of thes

This was a fascinating article, because I've seen so many results of the Eastern Bloc reverse-engineering efforts basically founder into obscurity. Many of these re-created (sometimes with minor variations, or quite novel and ingenious implementation choices) computers were made in small series, but could not compete against illegal imports, and in any case would only be briefly popular in their local university town. So it's cool to see that Bulgaria managed to muster enough government interest to force a cohesive strategy for the whole country. It sounds like it paid off. Also, after googling for Правец, I have found out that I can in fact read Bulgarian, which was quite surprising to me.

gostsamo 6mo ago
Bulgarian is phonetic to a large degree so if you know the sound associated to a letter, you can understandably pronounce it as well. Regarding communism and computing, deterministic systems where the entire state is knowable and predictible have certain appeal for the communist mind. If you search in the HN archives, you might find even more stories about the bulgarian computer industry with a MIT publication in the mix. There could've been even more, but a combination of distrust towards the new capitalist science and later unwillingness for those pesky machines to show the real state of the USSR economy meant that this was not developed with the full backing of the eastern block.
- summa_tech 6mo ago
  You know, I never thought about it that way. But you're making a lot of sense here. And in older sci-fi literature, after a very early period of distrust of the concept, cybernetics as a component / enabler of perfect collectivist society did show up, before - as you said - the West advanced too far away from the local state of the art. Also, as a broader view of your point, perhaps technocratic communism degenerates by giving way to bureaucratic communism.
  - gostsamo 6mo ago
    One thing to understand about communism is that lots of people believed in it, but for the most part the communist elites considered it a feudal system where one's access to resources made them valuable and gave them power. Anything that would provide the higher ups transparency and accountability would be ruinous for the balance of power and therefore met significant pushback. There was never a technocratic communism because idealists would be either defanged to act as specialist executor clas or outright removed as unreliable players. Regarding computer usage, it was increasing to the very end, but the desolution of the USSR stopped it and the industry was destroyed in the following crises. The elites tried to modernize the economies, but it was too little too late.
- unmole 6mo ago
  > Regarding communism and computing, deterministic systems where the entire state is knowable and predictible have certain appeal for the communist mind. Francis Spufford explores this idea in Red Plenty, which I highly recommend. More broadly, I think the book would appeal to many HN readers.
  - NitpickLawyer 6mo ago
    Some explorations with an AI overlord also in LeGuin's "The Dispossessed"
    - WaxProlix 6mo ago
      Hard to talk about favorites in books, but there was a solid decade of my life where I'd have probably said this was my favorite sci fi book. Highly recommend to anyone reading this.
  - keybored 6mo ago
    The incredible things I read on this site. The communist mind? Oh right, there’s a book for that, and it’s probably agreeable to people on this site. What the heck is this psycho-mysticism.
    - vidarh 6mo ago
      It's a fascinating exercise in antrhopology to see otherwise smart people confidently discuss the mind of people most of them have had no exposure to in person. Having spoken to a variety of people across the very broad spectrum of left-wing thought, ranging from libertarian marxists opposing the very existence of a state, to hardline marxism-leninists who thought the former group belonged in labour camps, I find the idea of a singular "communist mind" as ridiculous as you.
      - mike_hearn 6mo ago
        All actual communist societies work the same way, so it's clearly possible to generalize.
- anovikov 6mo ago
  Was there "communist mind" in Bulgaria? Which is same as asking - did you guys perceive Communism as something homegrown, something of your own - "your take on how it is best to develop a country", or something forcibly imposed on you by the Soviets? Bulgaria was seen with disdain in the Soviet Union as seen as a country where little but tomatoes were made (even if we knew it wasn't really the case), so in our Soviet mental map of the world there was no particular image of what a Bulgarian thought about Communism. We knew Serbs liked it and we knew Czechs and Poles didn't, for instance. What about Bulgarians?
  - gostsamo 6mo ago
    I used "communist mind" as a collective term for the ideological framework in which computers were discussed. The state had a party and the party had an ideology and the ideology legitimized the other two, hence all actions of the state and the party had to be justified through it. It does not mean some other kind of consciousness that allowed one to be closer to the ghost of Marx or whatever some people seem to ascribe to it. Regarding your question, I cannot talk on behalf of everyone. Many who didn't like communism were killed or crushed otherwise in the early years, many who accepted communism did it because of the association with Russia and the historical connection there, many who had their best years in the booming years of the regime until 1970 approx remember it fondly, many who had their worst years in the nineties have a nostalgia avoiding to talk about the bad aspects of it, many didn't give a damn and lived in the system while undermining it, and many of those who would formulate intellectual criticism of it were actually well incorporated in the system to give a damn about what is good or bad. Overall, there were lots of people who disliked both the party and its dependence on the USSR, but there was not a mass movement until the very last years when things started to break down.
    - anovikov 6mo ago
      My question wasn't about liking the 'socialism' or not as much, more about seeing it as something of your own - no matter if good or bad, or something that your enemies imposed on you by force?
- unj 6mo ago
  "systems where the entire state is knowable and predictible " was exactly what got computer systems killed in Communist Poland. WEKTOR system was killed because it would made deputy minister of innovation at that time (Jan Mitręga) the best informed person in the Communist Party. INFOSTRADA/KSI (Krajowy System Informatyczny - National IT System) systems were killed because they would disrupt the falsified and controlled information flow within the Communist Party.
anovikov 6mo ago
>could not compete against illegal imports How could that be possible? Imports had to be made in hard currency which was incredibly scarce in the Soviet Bloc (a VCR cost couple years of engineer's income on a black market), and was hard to obtain both for official/communist enterprises, and private individuals. Locally made stuff was bound to be a lot cheaper.
- actionfromafar 6mo ago
  Yes, but, wasn't the prices fixed for stuff? I imagine there must have been things which were either cheap to buy, or which could easily "disappear" from a production line and sold in the West for more than it was worth on the other side of the curtain.
  - mike_hearn 6mo ago
    You couldn't just go and sell stuff in the west. The USSR had exit visas. You had to prove you had a genuine need to leave, would be searched and treated very carefully. And proving a need to leave was difficult. Merely wanting to go on holiday or see relatives wasn't close to enough. There were very few exit visas available, which is why stories about defectors are often about elite athletes or sports champions. https://www.rbth.com/history/334094-athletes-fled-ussr-how https://www.rbth.com/history/334094-athletes-fled-ussr-how Also the Soviets manufactured very little of anything valuable to the west. Their primary exports were commodities.
    - gambiting 6mo ago
      >>Also the Soviets manufactured very little of anything valuable to the west. Their primary exports were commodities. Time to mention the story of how Pepsi Co briefly had one of the largest navies in the world, because CCCP couldn't settle its debt to Pepsi with cash, so they accepted several warships instead. https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/soviet-union-pepsi-ships https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/soviet-union-pepsi-shi...
      - 6mo ago
mike_hearn 6mo ago
Quite a few words in Bulgarian are similar to words in other European languages, just written in a different alphabet. I briefly dated a girl in Bulgaria years ago and was surprised at how quickly I could find my way around by reading street signs, applying knowledge of French and German, etc. The author asks why did the communists always clone things despite having engineers who could have designed their own? You don't need an LLM to answer this. The book "Chip Wars" is a really good history of Silicon Valley and has a section on the Soviet chip industry, how it was structured and why it cloned chips instead of designing their own. The Soviets didn't just clone computers but most of their advanced tech. Partly it was just mandated top-down. You had dictators at the top who were there, as the author observes, because they were just more aggressive and swivel-eyed than anyone else. They mandated cloning, so cloning is what happened because everyone was afraid of them. But that doesn't really answer the question. Cloning things isn't just an attribute of one specific set of leaders in the Soviet era. All communist countries are like this. Western AI labs keep claiming the Chinese labs are distilling them like crazy, and we know Anthropic has anti-distillation measures hidden inside Claude Code so it's not just a PR thing, they do believe it's happening for real. It always happens because leftism rejects the role of the capitalist in society. Capitalists are workers whose output is voluntary coordination across complex projects. If you kill them all then you have a society that's unable to create voluntary coordination across complex projects. The immediate consequence is that the economy goes haywire because without capitalists nobody knows how much or what to produce; the USSR solved this by having spies steal price lists. But you also can't run a novel chip design programme. That would require finding the right people with the right skills, encouraging innovation by giving them a cut of the rewards, and other things you aren't allowed to do in leftist regimes. So ... they just couldn't produce voluntary coordination. And thus to get anything done outside the military they had to steal the output of western capitalists by just copying whatever their teams were doing, down to the last detail.
- Joker_vD 6mo ago
  > why did the communists always clone things despite having engineers who could have designed their own? Well, because they didn't always clone things, you know. But when they decided to, it was almost always pitched as "okay, we're 10/20/30 years behind in this industry, if we try to repeat that path from the zero, we'll never catch up — let's start at near of their cutting edge, and go from there". > the USSR solved this by having spies steal price lists. Oh, that's a story I'd like to hear.
Zardoz84 6mo ago
Well... The rusian Spectrum clones had some sucesfull career. And they did a lot of improvements over the original Sinclair and Amstrad designs. The Pentagon and the Scorpion with extra RAM, or the ATM come from pure rusian ingenuity .

gostsamo 6mo ago

Bulgarian is phonetic to a large degree so if you know the sound associated to a letter, you can understandably pronounce it as well. Regarding communism and computing, deterministic systems where the entire state is knowable and predictible have certain appeal for the communist mind. If you search in the HN archives, you might find even more stories about the bulgarian computer industry with a MIT publication in the mix. There could've been even more, but a combination of distrust towards the new capitalist science and later unwillingness for those pesky machines to show the real state of the USSR economy meant that this was not developed with the full backing of the eastern block.

summa_tech 6mo ago
You know, I never thought about it that way. But you're making a lot of sense here. And in older sci-fi literature, after a very early period of distrust of the concept, cybernetics as a component / enabler of perfect collectivist society did show up, before - as you said - the West advanced too far away from the local state of the art. Also, as a broader view of your point, perhaps technocratic communism degenerates by giving way to bureaucratic communism.
- gostsamo 6mo ago
  One thing to understand about communism is that lots of people believed in it, but for the most part the communist elites considered it a feudal system where one's access to resources made them valuable and gave them power. Anything that would provide the higher ups transparency and accountability would be ruinous for the balance of power and therefore met significant pushback. There was never a technocratic communism because idealists would be either defanged to act as specialist executor clas or outright removed as unreliable players. Regarding computer usage, it was increasing to the very end, but the desolution of the USSR stopped it and the industry was destroyed in the following crises. The elites tried to modernize the economies, but it was too little too late.
unmole 6mo ago
> Regarding communism and computing, deterministic systems where the entire state is knowable and predictible have certain appeal for the communist mind. Francis Spufford explores this idea in Red Plenty, which I highly recommend. More broadly, I think the book would appeal to many HN readers.
- NitpickLawyer 6mo ago
  Some explorations with an AI overlord also in LeGuin's "The Dispossessed"
  - WaxProlix 6mo ago
    Hard to talk about favorites in books, but there was a solid decade of my life where I'd have probably said this was my favorite sci fi book. Highly recommend to anyone reading this.
- keybored 6mo ago
  The incredible things I read on this site. The communist mind? Oh right, there’s a book for that, and it’s probably agreeable to people on this site. What the heck is this psycho-mysticism.
  - vidarh 6mo ago
    It's a fascinating exercise in antrhopology to see otherwise smart people confidently discuss the mind of people most of them have had no exposure to in person. Having spoken to a variety of people across the very broad spectrum of left-wing thought, ranging from libertarian marxists opposing the very existence of a state, to hardline marxism-leninists who thought the former group belonged in labour camps, I find the idea of a singular "communist mind" as ridiculous as you.
    - mike_hearn 6mo ago
      All actual communist societies work the same way, so it's clearly possible to generalize.
anovikov 6mo ago
Was there "communist mind" in Bulgaria? Which is same as asking - did you guys perceive Communism as something homegrown, something of your own - "your take on how it is best to develop a country", or something forcibly imposed on you by the Soviets? Bulgaria was seen with disdain in the Soviet Union as seen as a country where little but tomatoes were made (even if we knew it wasn't really the case), so in our Soviet mental map of the world there was no particular image of what a Bulgarian thought about Communism. We knew Serbs liked it and we knew Czechs and Poles didn't, for instance. What about Bulgarians?
- gostsamo 6mo ago
  I used "communist mind" as a collective term for the ideological framework in which computers were discussed. The state had a party and the party had an ideology and the ideology legitimized the other two, hence all actions of the state and the party had to be justified through it. It does not mean some other kind of consciousness that allowed one to be closer to the ghost of Marx or whatever some people seem to ascribe to it. Regarding your question, I cannot talk on behalf of everyone. Many who didn't like communism were killed or crushed otherwise in the early years, many who accepted communism did it because of the association with Russia and the historical connection there, many who had their best years in the booming years of the regime until 1970 approx remember it fondly, many who had their worst years in the nineties have a nostalgia avoiding to talk about the bad aspects of it, many didn't give a damn and lived in the system while undermining it, and many of those who would formulate intellectual criticism of it were actually well incorporated in the system to give a damn about what is good or bad. Overall, there were lots of people who disliked both the party and its dependence on the USSR, but there was not a mass movement until the very last years when things started to break down.
  - anovikov 6mo ago
    My question wasn't about liking the 'socialism' or not as much, more about seeing it as something of your own - no matter if good or bad, or something that your enemies imposed on you by force?
unj 6mo ago
"systems where the entire state is knowable and predictible " was exactly what got computer systems killed in Communist Poland. WEKTOR system was killed because it would made deputy minister of innovation at that time (Jan Mitręga) the best informed person in the Communist Party. INFOSTRADA/KSI (Krajowy System Informatyczny - National IT System) systems were killed because they would disrupt the falsified and controlled information flow within the Communist Party.

anovikov 6mo ago

>could not compete against illegal imports How could that be possible? Imports had to be made in hard currency which was incredibly scarce in the Soviet Bloc (a VCR cost couple years of engineer's income on a black market), and was hard to obtain both for official/communist enterprises, and private individuals. Locally made stuff was bound to be a lot cheaper.

actionfromafar 6mo ago
Yes, but, wasn't the prices fixed for stuff? I imagine there must have been things which were either cheap to buy, or which could easily "disappear" from a production line and sold in the West for more than it was worth on the other side of the curtain.
- mike_hearn 6mo ago
  You couldn't just go and sell stuff in the west. The USSR had exit visas. You had to prove you had a genuine need to leave, would be searched and treated very carefully. And proving a need to leave was difficult. Merely wanting to go on holiday or see relatives wasn't close to enough. There were very few exit visas available, which is why stories about defectors are often about elite athletes or sports champions. https://www.rbth.com/history/334094-athletes-fled-ussr-how https://www.rbth.com/history/334094-athletes-fled-ussr-how Also the Soviets manufactured very little of anything valuable to the west. Their primary exports were commodities.
  - gambiting 6mo ago
    >>Also the Soviets manufactured very little of anything valuable to the west. Their primary exports were commodities. Time to mention the story of how Pepsi Co briefly had one of the largest navies in the world, because CCCP couldn't settle its debt to Pepsi with cash, so they accepted several warships instead. https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/soviet-union-pepsi-ships https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/soviet-union-pepsi-shi...
    - 6mo ago

mike_hearn 6mo ago

Quite a few words in Bulgarian are similar to words in other European languages, just written in a different alphabet. I briefly dated a girl in Bulgaria years ago and was surprised at how quickly I could find my way around by reading street signs, applying knowledge of French and German, etc. The author asks why did the communists always clone things despite having engineers who could have designed their own? You don't need an LLM to answer this. The book "Chip Wars" is a really good history of Silicon Valley and has a section on the Soviet chip industry, how it was structured and why it cloned chips instead of designing their own. The Soviets didn't just clone computers but most of their advanced tech. Partly it was just mandated top-down. You had dictators at the top who were there, as the author observes, because they were just more aggressive and swivel-eyed than anyone else. They mandated cloning, so cloning is what happened because everyone was afraid of them. But that doesn't really answer the question. Cloning things isn't just an attribute of one specific set of leaders in the Soviet era. All communist countries are like this. Western AI labs keep claiming the Chinese labs are distilling them like crazy, and we know Anthropic has anti-distillation measures hidden inside Claude Code so it's not just a PR thing, they do believe it's happening for real. It always happens because leftism rejects the role of the capitalist in society. Capitalists are workers whose output is voluntary coordination across complex projects. If you kill them all then you have a society that's unable to create voluntary coordination across complex projects. The immediate consequence is that the economy goes haywire because without capitalists nobody knows how much or what to produce; the USSR solved this by having spies steal price lists. But you also can't run a novel chip design programme. That would require finding the right people with the right skills, encouraging innovation by giving them a cut of the rewards, and other things you aren't allowed to do in leftist regimes. So ... they just couldn't produce voluntary coordination. And thus to get anything done outside the military they had to steal the output of western capitalists by just copying whatever their teams were doing, down to the last detail.

Joker_vD 6mo ago
> why did the communists always clone things despite having engineers who could have designed their own? Well, because they didn't always clone things, you know. But when they decided to, it was almost always pitched as "okay, we're 10/20/30 years behind in this industry, if we try to repeat that path from the zero, we'll never catch up — let's start at near of their cutting edge, and go from there". > the USSR solved this by having spies steal price lists. Oh, that's a story I'd like to hear.

Zardoz84 6mo ago

Well... The rusian Spectrum clones had some sucesfull career. And they did a lot of improvements over the original Sinclair and Amstrad designs. The Pentagon and the Scorpion with extra RAM, or the ATM come from pure rusian ingenuity .