Comments by "Keit Hammleter" (@keithammleter3824) on "Why the Soviet Computer Failed" video.

Is it a Galena? These were made for two markets: Nomadic peoples living in the remote parts of the USSR, and for export. They were indeed very good radios. Sensitive and good tone. The USSR also made an unique power supply for them. It looks like a sort of kerosene lantern. It runs on kerosene or lamp oil, produces DC to run a radio, and you can heat small meals with it while you listen to Voice Of America. And it puts out light. Just the thing for a Mongolian nomad to have in his yurt (tent). It uses the Seebeck Effect to produce DC directly from heat in a series of bimetal thermocouples - no moving parts, and no need for batteries. They are very rare in the West but I have one. My Galena radio has a wooden case.
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@VPWedding : You make a very good point comparing radios to computers. But I think the rot set in with Stalin. Stalin was pretty smart albeit totally ruthless. But Stalin's mindset was that anything American was the best. He had not a lot of faith in his own people. When he needed a limousine, he directed that they copy a Packard. When they needed a strategic bomber, he directed that they reverse engineer and copy the Boeing B-29 - at a cost that almost certainly was greater than the cost to develop their own bomber. (The B-29 was engineered in American customary units. Russia was then 100% metric, so they had to reconfigure an enormous range of parts & materials making.). When they perceived they needed an atomic bomb, they had their own boffins up to the task - but they copied an American design. Their aircraft engine engineers were working on an axial-flow jet engine. But rather than wait until the engineers had got the bugs out of it, they copied an obsolete Rolls Royce radial flow jet engine, with inferior fuel consumption. Then came Khrushchev. Somehow, he thought that the Soviet Union could in a few years, maybe a couple of 5-year plans, they could surpass the USA by copying them. You cannot become a leader by copying - you can only be a follower. The USA developed a reusable space vehicle - the X-20 Dynasoar. So the Soviets copied it. Meanwhile Americans decided it was not up to the task, so they scrapped it and developed the Space Shuttle. So the Soviets scrapped their Dynasoar and copied the Shuttle. You can see what has happened - Stalin set a precedent, and like government beaurocrats everywhere, they covered their butts by making it established and continuing practice, not taking a risk on R&D like private industry does.
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@-jank-willson : Looks like you've never seen or owned a Russian Selena or Galena radio then. There were in fact very good - the equal in quality to the best US and other Western radios. The reason, as I said before, is that they were made for use by nomad tribes in remote areas, and for export. The USSR made a lot of mediocre products of indifferent quality for consumption in their own cities, but they could turn out good stuff when it mattered and if the authorities put a priority on it. For example the Kalashnikov AK-47 rifle. Their main problem was keeping up to date in technology - they never really managed it. Nomad tribes needed sensitive radios as they were remote from radio stations. They needed reliable radios because if a radio failed it could be 6 months or a year before they could take it to a repairman.
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@МирославаБерзина : Interesting - I hadn't heard quite that rationale before. So Stalin was concerned that the USSR would be something like Britain only worse, with Britain's rotten cars, dud post-war aeroplanes, and a semiconductor industry stuck in the germanium era while the USA was surging ahead with silicon planar? As a rationale of Stalin, it makes sense, sort of. But it looks like it didn't work. It's ultimate result was the 8-bit Agat personal computer, software compatible with the obsolete Apple 2 and sold for 2 years average USSR salary, while 16-bit PC's in the West sold for about one month's average Western salary. The shame of the Agat was likely one of the factors causing a collapse in public morale and the collapse of the USSR, as Putin has explained. In Svetlana Loknova's book, she explained that Stalin arranged for bright USSR young men to attend American universities and establish contacts with American industry, to spy. If instead these people could have returned to the USSR after getting their Ph.D's and use their creativity in Soviet industry, the result could have been better. That's how China did it.
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@timdunn2257 It is certainly correct that these days equipment is obsolete before it wears out. But Chinese made gear is very good, if purchased from regular dealers. Here in Australia, almost all consumer electronics, apart from TV's and desktop computers, comes from China, and it's all good. But things like portable generators can be rip-offs. For example, 10 years ago I bought a Kipor brand Chinese 2 kW generator from a major hardware chain. When I got it, I put a 2.2 kW load on and it handled it perfectly - exceeded specifications. It has never developed any fault, and still runs perfectly, having done ~6000 hours. But a certain east coast (Queensland) importer buys Loncin brand Chinese 3.5 kW generators and rebrands them as 4 kW. A rip-off, but not by the Chinese maker, by the local importer. Chinese made machine tools usually need some work/adjustment before putting to use. If you buy from Chinese suppliers at a low price, you won't get the same quality product you will if you pay a fair price. I've bought lots of books from Amazon. I find it depends who the actual supplier is. Some books come properly packed and in perfect condition. Some come inadequately packed and damaged. Some, usually from UK suppliers, come smelling of mould.
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@AstralS7orm : You wrote absolute nonsense. Universities primarily do fundamental research to uncover principles, in areas as far as possible chosen to match the interests of their researchers. Such as almost useless things like studying black holes and quantum computing. Company R&D labs do mainly targeted research and development but this certainly doesn't mean they don't do fundamentals. A classic example in the transistor - the device that rendered the vacuum tube obsolete and led to integrated circuits and computer chips. The transistor is the invention of physicists working at Bell Laboratories - a private research outfit then owned by the Bell Telephone company. These physicists expanded on the early solid state physics devised in universities, uncovering a considerable amount of new fundamental principles that no university had anything to do with. Nor was it paid for by government. Anyone who has worked in advanced R&D as an engineer or physicist knows that the Soviets did a lot of fundamental research on spec. They were not much into targetted R&D - they preferred to copy (by legal means or spying) Western technology. Soviet discoveries and measurements of physical properties continually crop up in scientific literature. Most US government subsidisation of research has been in two ways: (1) More or less targeted funds given for medical research via National Institutes eg National Institute for Cancer. (2) funding ranging from fully targetted to vaguely capability enhancing of research for military capability. In the 1960's and 1970's this was all pervasive, vast, and had many hidden and not so hidden forms: Direct grants, budgeting for industrial advancement, etc. Again, transistors/semiconductors are a good example; There are 2 main reasons why US firms have always led the world in semiconductors - 1) Domestic market size, & 2) subsidisation of semiconductor research by the US Navy and Airforce, after transistors went into mas production.
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@AstralS7orm You've got some of that right, eg US semiconductor advancement due to government funding. I said that myself in my earlier post: "In the 1960's and 1970's this was all pervasive, vast, and had many hidden and not so hidden forms: Direct grants, budgeting for industrial advancement, etc..." But on some things, you must have been using some good weed. Bell Labs pioneered the purification of germanium and silicon to make diodes for war-time radar. So, yes their boffins had some pretty good understanding of semiconductors. That was kept secret until the war ended. There was two things that made airborne (and to some extent shipborne) radar practical: The cavity magnetron perfected in England - a compact efficient way to generate very short wavelength radio energy at high power, and the germanium and silicon diodes key to detecting the tiny return echoes. Incidentally, the key purification method was zone refining - where the impurities end up swept to one end of the bar, which is usually discarded. During the War, Western Electric (the manufacturing arm of the Bell system) sold the sawn off rubbish end to British firms, who made their own inferior diodes by probe testing for fortuitous good spots. They never did tweak to what WE was doing. After the war, the Bell Labs boffins knew that junction transistors or perhaps JFETS were the way to go, theoretically, but hadn't mastered the art. They then invented the point contact transistor (physically a double diode that could amplify). They publicly announced a working device intentionally just so that the US military could not impose a secrecy order. THEN, they persevered until they mastered making the superior junction transistor. Recognising that the device - as it then was - would be useless in the telephone industry, and probably not attractive to the US military (they were wrong there), they immediately set about licencing the junction transistor to other manufacturers around the world. For a fee, any company could send production engineers to a Western Electric short training course and learn how to make transistors. It apparently was a pretty intensive course - some went away bewildered. One that was not was an engineer from Sony Japan. That wasn't the smartest move for the US, letting him in. The very competive Japanese transistor and IC industry started with him. Meanwhile, some manufacturers, principally in Britain, got sidetracked and tried to master making point contact transistors, which commercially were a dead loss. There's no way Germany could have led the semiconductor revolution instead of the US. As we both have stated, it was that immense amount of US Govt money via the US military (and really, NASA is part of that, money wise, even though NAS was/is a civilian agency) that paid for advanced semiconductor development.
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@AstralS7orm That's the problem - Congress holds the purse strings, but they are just a very large bunch of inexpert politicians with their own agendas. That's why the president needs to be persuasive - to have charisma to win Congress over. And the president does need to smart, in order to realise what Congress needs to be won over on. Kennedy has left us with a good example: He determined that a space race with the Soviet Union was a good thing to do (security, economic progress, etc) and he famously announced to the assembled politicians words something like "We will, before this decade is out, land a man on the moon and bring him safely back to Earth". That setting of a challenge (and it was a real challenge) and a clear target timeframe won Congress and virtually the whole country over, and they then proceeded to give NASA a vast sum of money to do just that. Obama figured out what had gone wrong with US education, and what needed to change. So he had the brains. But that isn't enough - and nothing got done. Countries with a more modern constitution, such as Australia work on a different system. Instead of a president, they have a prime minister who acts more like a company chairman, conducting meetings in Cabinet. The Cabinet is a small group of senior elected ministers, each having a specialist role (eg finance, defence, health, etc) and decisions are by majority vote. The elected specialists may appoint subcommittees of themselves to resolve complex issues. This means the demands on the prime minister are a lot less than the demands on a US president. Really, all he has to know is how to conduct meetings. The voting systems in western countries are generally more robust and transparent than the US systems, which helps. In Australia, we are bemused by the doubts sown over the last US election by Trump. This sort of thing would never get air in Australia, as our voting system is simpler, and run such that trust in it is easy. That helps get the right things decided on and done, because there is not much doubt that the will of the people has been expressed, and the party in power has a mandate. It's not perfect of course, and we love to criticise our politicians. But it is a better system than the US system, which only works well when you get a president who has plenty of both attributes - brains and persuasiveness.
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Nice story, Moja. There is just one problem that ruins your whole concept about any first PC, and destroys your credibility on the rest of your post: The IBM PC was NOT the first PC, in any sensible sense of the word. In 1969 I commenced work (as a technician) in an R&D lab (in Australia). Part of my duties involved doing calculations on a personal computer (that is, a computer designed for personal use by one person). It was the famous DEC PDP-8. It was about 500 mm wide, 800 mm deep, and about 400 mm high, and you operated it via a teleprinter and not a VDU. Too expensive for home use, but common in research labs throughout the West. But a PC it definitely was, and fairly old hat even in 1969. In 1978 I purchased a PC built by US company Exidy. It was microprocessor and DRAM based, had a VDU, and twin disk drives. Fully a modern PC, just not an IBM PC. Good machine too, and I still have it, still working fine. And it had back then in 1978 a multitude of competitors manufacturing in the USA, in Britain, Japan, and here in Australia. IBM was very late entering the PC market, as its top management thought and hoped the home and small business micro computer market was a fad that would go away, like desktop robot arms did. By the way, the lead engineer on the HP-35 was Paul Stoft. France Rode designed the arithmetic and logic sub-circuit and a couple of minor chips, a somewhat minor role under the direction of Paul Stoft, who had 14 other engineers assigned to the project. Ref Hewlett-Packard Journal June 1972. Google Street View's origins lie with a Stanford Uni project sponsored by Google.
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@OutOffMedia : There's no confusion here. You wrote "... Slovenian informatics developed THE PC before IBM released their PC". If you didn't have the word "the" you would have meant that Slovenian informatics developed a PC before IBM. They might well have, but it is of no relevance or significance, because PC's have bee around a heck of a lot longer than the IBM PC. IBM were about the last to enter the scene before Taiwan started pumping out clones. But you did include the word "the". That implies you think that IBM came up with the first PC (after Slovenia). That's totally wrong. And IBM never claimed to be first - they knew perfectly well that they were entering a market already created by many other firms. I have noticed that many people under 30 think that the IBM PC was the first PC. But it certainly never was. PC's date back decades before. The market exploded in about 1975 when the Intel 8080 and its competitor microprocessors made possible a dramatic price reduction. France Rode may well have been a lead engineer on some project, or even many projects. But not on the HP-35. He was one of 15 reporting to Paul Stoft in the HP-35 project. Read the account in the HP journal. Given that Rode migrated to the USA in 1960 and remained there, I'm surprised that he would be known to people still living in a community in Slovenia. Quite the name dropper, aren't you? I'll check out your YouTube channel when I get a spare moment.
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@Ajopeli : Hewlett Packard called their 9815, 9825, and 9830 personal computers "calculators" for almost the exact same reason. Their rationale was that if they called them a computer, company IT departments would get to approve or deny the purchase, and probably not approve them because (a) the product could reduce the influence of the IT department, and (b) they would think of it in terms of a mainframe and find it wanting. I used a 9815 to do engineering calculations in 1975. An excellent machine. It was then a new model that was part of the 98xx series of PC's that dates back to 1972. I still had to fight for it though, as company management mindset was that only accountants need calculators, and engineers do not. Yep - like many large companies, senior management came from accounting or legal backgrounds, and didn't understand what engineers did, they just thought we got paid too much and wanted expensive toys. It is utterly ridiculous to claim that because someone bought out a PC (if in fact they did) before IBM did in 1981, that that represents some kind of notable achievement. For years IBM was like those company IT departments in that they didn't want people to have a low cost computer for their own personal use, and only entered the market when other more nimble firms had long created a lasting PC market.
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@mick-berry5331 : ARPANET, actually. ARPANET linked universities and other organisations doing R&D for the US Department of Defence. It pioneered TCP/IP which is fundamental to fault tolerant data communication over the internet.
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@AstralS7orm You live in partly fantasy land. Britain most certainly DID NOT have the funds, nor the technology, to compete with the USA. For a start, the USA had 5 times the population, and a government less inclined to meddle with industry. Following WW2 Britain was broke. Japan is a special case in 2 ways, that led them to be very strong competitors in cars and electronics:- 1) Their constitution allows them to only have a limited defence capability and not an offensive capability. .So their military spending is very low for a country with a huge population - about half that of the US. They tax less and put their tax moneys to industrial use. 2) They indulge in industry cooperation at levels that would be regarded as anti-competitive and illegal in Western countries. However, Japan is not a innovative country. Most of their technology is either imported from the West through licensing or by copying when patents ran out. West Germany had a population only a little above Britain, so also did not have the funds the USA could deploy, However, they were better run, WW2 did not bankrupt them, the USA supported them and so their economy became strong. However, your last paragraphs beginning "That USA took...." is pretty right. It was part a reaction to the perceived Soviet threat, and part a response to the immediate post-WW2 United States Strategic Bombing Survey Committee reports. These reports seem to be almost unknown by the general public these days, but were a major influence on the US Government. To put it simply (at a risk of over-simplifying), this committee said that the USA won the War against Germany and Japan in large part through superior technology, but were somewhat unprepared and had to lift their game, and it said that the USA should never make that mistake again. As you say, we'll see how it goes from now on. The job of the US President is a difficult one, and they seem unable to find someone who is up to it. The USA is in decline and China is ascendant.
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@AstralS7orm When have I called you names, and what names did I call you? I did say you were partly in fantasy land - you were if you thought countries like Britain and Germany could have coughed up the taxpayer funds the size that the USA channelled into semiconductor R&D via their military. Japan, Korea, and China didn't what? They are manufacturing successes by using technologies developed in the USA - sometimes legally (eg with US companies setting up manufacture in China), sometimes not entirely legally, and sometimes just waiting for patents to expire. The USA is in decline - there are a multitude of reasons, including:- # a form of government that puts great demands on the president - he must be a clear thinker, and most important, inspire Congress to follow him. Kennedy and others before were up to it, Clinton was pretty good, but the last 3 no good - they either lacked persuasiveness, lacked clear thinking, or both. # They went over the top on OH&S other regulation - driving manufacturing off-shore. # Wars, space exploration, and competing with the USSR no longer inspires the American people.
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@SolomonSunder : Oh, our system is better than the US system, alright - because it works with a prime minister that doesn't have the inspirational/charismatic talent that is necessary for a US president to get things done. But our system is not perfect - something which is quite obvious at times. Effectively, the prime minister is the chairman of the cabinet, much as a company chairman of the board conducts the meetings of the board. Really, a PM just has to be good at running meetings. Decisions are made by cabinet vote, and when they vote, that is it. Not like the US where the president has to persuade congress, who may well decide otherwise. But it does of course depend on how good the prime minster and cabinet ministers actually are. Ministers on their own have very little decision making power - they must put up proposals to cabinet, to be voted on. Just as a company board is not involved in day to day running of the company, the cabinet is not involved in day-to-day running of the country - that is the job of the departments - but by their voted decisions they set the parameters and policies that departments must comply with. There is no chaos. One recent example of how the Australian system does work better than the US system is how COVID was dealt with in each country. In Australia the prime minster and state premiers took control, accepted advice from appropriate medical experts, and forthwith acted on that advice. In the USA they had decision paralysis. Result: the number of deaths per head population was miniscule in Australia compared to the USA. But there is also a recent example of the system not working well - the stuff up over submarine purchases - fundamentally because there are too many difficult conflicting requirements that Cabinet can't get its mind around.
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