Comments by "Alexander Sylchuk" (@sshko101) on "How Semiconductors Ruined East Germany" video.
-
35
-
@dzonikg My programming professor had in his bio notes that he developed an operating system to our local copy of ZX Spectrum. Not sure what that was, wiki page says that it was just an interpreter for Basic on a casette. That PC's wiki page:
https://uk.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%9F%D0%9A_%D0%9B%D1%8C%D0%B2%D1%96%D0%B2
I only recently discovered that ZX Spectrum was reverse engineered in my alma mater and all the subsequent soviet copies were made from the documentation created in my university:
"Probably the very first clone in the USSR[8]. Development began in 1984-1985, at the Design Bureau of the Lviv Polytechnic Institute. The author of the scheme is Yuri Dmitrievich Dobush. The model was developed based on the circuitry of the original ZX Spectrum obtained from the GDR and based on waveforms taken from the real ZX Spectrum. The ROM firmware was typed from photocopies of an article from a West German magazine. The development was completed in 1986, after which the circuit was taken to Leningrad and Moscow, where, under its influence, the Moscow 48K board was created." - that's a translation of a part of a russian wiki page on ZX Spectrum clones.
i8088 clone were made in Kyiv by the Krystal factory for that computer. Not sure where exactly it was reverse engineered, most likely in Kyiv Polytechnik.
What's interesting to me is that inside USSR products, even as complicated as computers, were developed and sold predominantly in soviet countries of their origin. Only some schematics were shared, but the products themselves were developed and distributed mostly domestically (I mean inside Ukraine, Belarus, Lithuania, russia etc.). To me it's very weird when russians and people outside Soviet union think and still say that USSR was 100% monolith single country. I wonder whether there was similar competition between the states inside Yugoslavia or was it more uniform than the USSR?
4
-
@dzonikg Thanks! I might be not 100% precise about the soviet economy, but there's always this wrong debate about distribution of goods in USSR. One camp say that it was all good, the other say that it was completely corrupt and wrong. Only when you actually start to dig into what was actually the case, you see how it was in reality, and it's not in the middle, it is actually, as everything goes of that matter, is quite complicated. Even with the military equipment it seems like soviet tanks all the same, but no, ukrainian and russian are different and they can't produce parts for our models (I mean soviet) and we can't for theirs. It was designed in such a manner that different bureaus were competing, but the end products couldn't be built without cooperation of different bureaus. There was quite an interesting case when in 2014 russian army after capturing the city of Kramatorsk have stolen blueprints of jet turbines for a helicopter engine. The thing was that their most modern battle helicopters were built with ukrainian engines and they couldn't produce their own. It was only possible with those turbines. Even their missiles can't completely rely on their domestic engines, they were still made with ukrainian engines even up to 2022 (it's actually a bit of scandal). The same goes with planes - we couldn't produce our own just because we were completely interdependant on some russian tech. Every time we tried to cooperate with different partners it never worked, for multitude of reasons, or (in case with chinese) like it always goes with chinese, they just steal technology and do their "own" stuff on their own.
4
-
3