Comments by "Siana Gearz" (@SianaGearz) on "How Semiconductors Ruined East Germany" video.

  1.  @xrysf03  Near the end of WW2 Carl Zeiss which was located in Jena was split. The company core actually fled to Oberkochen in West Germany; but the leftover equipment that they failed to evacuate continued to run as VEB Carl Zeiss in Jena. Here he's talking of the East German company, later known as Jenoptik after German reunification, since continuing to call it Carl Zeiss would violate actual Carl Zeiss name rights. The key long term partner of ASML has been the real Carl Zeiss, the one in West Germany. Eventually, Carl Zeiss bought back Jenoptik and reunited the company.
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  2. U880 is a decent chip, this exact die was used under different part numbers across all of Eastern Europe and Soviet Unionn.
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  3. Two different Zeisses in a way. The Zeiss spoken of here is now known as Jenoptik. The real Zeiss ran off to the West, and the East German Zeiss was whatever remained.
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  4. Yeah my early-2000s fridge is semiconductor-free as well.
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  5. The Zeiss he speaks of here is not he same company, as real Zeiss, the one that's still Zeiss, fled to West Germany. With German reunification, you couldn't have real Zeiss and East Germany's fake Zeiss share the name, so the latter was renamed Jenoptik.
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  6. Sounds like passivation faults. You find these in Japanese ICs as well but it's very rare, scant few batches.
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  7. Buran was original development and operated differently from Space Shuttle. But it turns out if you want a reusable versatile vehicle that would land from space at an airport, you don't get much leeway on how it's going to look, because physics is the same everywher.
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  8.  @IrishCarney  Fair. Buran was fairly ill conceived and useless, there wasn't really a good place for it in the grid of Soviet space requirements, but it was made because "oh look they have a reusable spacecraft, and we should do something similar", just as you say. I wouldn't say that semiconductor push of East Germany was useless. After all Soviet Union was cut off from Western and Japanese semiconductors and semiconductor manufacturing tech suppliers, and VEB Elektron filled a vital niche for that whole region, it could potentially make a lot of bank under the circumstances. It was wasteful and there was mismanagement at hand. I think crucial thing is that already somewhere between 1986 and 1988 it became possible to import Japanese and European ICs into Soviet Union, and they weren't exactly expensive compared to the cost of semiconductor operation, so East German industry had to either adapt (at least get honest and stop chasing increasingly expensive stuff that they can't actually build economically) or crumble. The fact that Soviet Union was opening up and trying to reduce the amount of mismanagement and waste, and the rest of the world was opening up towards Soviet Union, broke East Germany's business model that they bet big on.
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