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Comment by xfour | Hacker News Reader

Feel like these in no small part explain why Russians seem to have a disproportionate amount of programmers compared to all other countries outside the US.

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I don't think so because nobody could afford these. It was the education system. Standard curriculum for everybody. By the time you finished 10th (last) grade you had studied pretty advanced math, physics, chemistry, etc. Even if it's not your thing, even if you could only get the lowest passing grade, you still had to do it or fail school. It was kind of rough, but I'm still reaping rewards from what it gave me.

Also may have to do with the prestige of being an engineer in USSR. That was a popular profession.

I feel like I can only dream about such a time, such a place. Engineer? Prestige?

Well, I think, being a software engineer is still pretty cool in Silicon Valley :)

Eh, don't know about the place. You'd be respected, but stuck with working for a shitty government and shitty people with their own agendas for all of your life.

That doesn't sound unique to the USSR lol

I guess so, but at least you'd have the choice to leave :-)

I think it's the inverse. Disregard for engineers seems like an anglo-saxon phenomenon to me. The Germanic countries are, of course, famed for holding engineers in high regard, but so do most third-world countries, and China.

I think the anglo-saxon opinion of engineers is caused by blurring the line between engineer and technician.

I think its caused by the inappropriate elevation of the marketing classes, who don't have a job unless someone else does the work of building something...

Not in the late 1980s certainly.

If only they did this in the UK.

Although when I went through school, A level mathematics didn't even touch anything past polynomials and physics didn't go much past classical mechanics and energy. Now they're all over calculus and quantum mechanics!

Some of those were initially. But by early 90's you could by cheap ZX Spectrum clones. I had one and we were more on the poor side than on the rich side.

Yap, agree 100%. That is why I am a programmer.

Story time:

Growing up in the late 80's, early 90's I liked to take apart electronics. Biggest treat for me was finding an old TV or radio to disassemble.

Then I found out about computers. We got them at school for an "Informatics" course -- which is what they called "Computer Science". I thought those were great. The teacher let us play logic games on it for grades even -- Sokoban, Lemmings and others.

My mom saw that I liked computers and started saving money, even though we were pretty poor. She saved for a year, but didn't tell me then, on March 8, 1993 she bought me a Soviet ZX Spectrum clone. That was the best gift I ever received in terms on impact on my life since. The clone was pretty crappy with rubber buttons and it loaded everything from tape recorder. We connected it to our old black and white TV that still had vacuum tubes in it.

That computer helped me learn programming (had a C compiler, Pascal, assembly, lots of games) and English (since documentation, games and programs were all in English).

Fast forward many years later and programming is my day job and I still like it.

Just out of curiosity, what languages do you use today?

Erlang, Python, C, C++, wrote some Android apps in Java, looking at Rust next probably.

> The clone was pretty crappy with rubber buttons and it loaded everything from tape recorder.

Well the original was not much better...

There's another former Communist country with a "disproportionate amount of programmers": Romania.

It even had its own PC clone: https://ro.wikipedia.org/wiki/Felix_PC (in Romanian, sorry, but you can probably figure things out just from the dates and numbers :) ).

Edit: How cute! At the bottom there are links to all the Romanian-made computers. There are at least 20 models I didn't even know of.

I'd wager a guess that most of the countries in the Eastern Block did have their own computers.

In Poland, for example, there were the 8-bit Meritums [1], the Elwro 800 Juniors [2], the Bosman 8s [3], the Mazovia PC clones [4] complete with their own Polish characters encoding that has the peculiarity of containing one character that had never existed in Unicode [5], to name but a few, not to mention the Odra mainframes [6].

[1]: https://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meritum_(komputer)#/media/File... [2]: https://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elwro_800_Junior#/media/File:E... [3]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=79YSyyV9f2Y [4]: https://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mazovia_(komputer)#/media/File... [5]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mazovia_encoding [6]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Odra_(computer)

Communists had 1 positive obsession: exact sciences. See all that focus on math, physics, etc.

They probably thought they could solve all the world's problems as equations, with the head of state as the "master variable manipulator".

This was a necessary instrument for the arms race.

Of course. Someone in the Politburo read 1984.

> I'd wager a guess that most of the countries in the Eastern Block did have their own computers.

There's this beauty from Sweden:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ABC80

I'm guessing a lot of countries overall had their own computers, not just eastern block. We don't usually hear much about them because we base our computer history mostly on the canon of the US.

I was surprised to read in "The Architecture of Open Source Applications" that my former university's computer science department made a very prominent sendmail version back in the day (IDA sendmail) and that this was noteworthy in that context.

This field has been international for a very long time.

You are aware that Sweden was not a member of the "Eastern Block"?

That was exactly my point. Most likely every country (overall) had their own computer. It wasn't an "Eastern block thing". The degree of separation was obviously higher, but not all "western" manufacturers were American.

(Also: danskjävel...)

I get it now. The context was ambiguous, though, so I don't quite get the downvote.

Yes, we danskjävels made som as well. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regnecentralen

> I get it now. The context was ambiguous, though, so I don't quite get the downvote.

I can't even downvote, so it wasn't me. I edited my original post to be less ambiguous. Sorry.

> Yes, we danskjävels made som as well. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regnecentralen

There's something really beautiful about that setup. I like the splash of color in select areas and the keyboard looks amazing.

Acorn Electron, BBC Micro, Archimedes ...

Here's one build-it-yourself from Yugoslavia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galaksija_%28computer%29

Polish semiconductor company CEMI also made 8080 clone, MCY7880. die shot: http://obrazki.elektroda.pl/9525059000_1368820494.jpg

Amazingly there is a TV program from 1983 showing manufacturing process of this very CPU :o

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KHl6m93Hay0#t=24 From die shots and this program (showing different masks) it appears Polish version was almost a straight copy of the Intel, with small modifications (different feature sizes, additional debug pads).

Elwro, Polish calculator manufacturer, designed accounting system (Elwro 500/513/523) based on MCY7880, with 8-512KB ram, two 8 inch floppies, printer and a monitor made out of modified 12 inch _camping TV_ (Neptun 150) :))), all running CP/M 2.2 (pirated and translated to Polish).

http://www.elwro.zafriko.pl/kat/mikrokomputery/elwro_500

google translated journal of one of the engineers: http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=pl&u=http://w...

Yields were terrible, not surprising when you watch this clip and see chemical baths done manually by flipping wafers in liquids like fries at a fast food restaurant :) Popularity of this computer system forced CEMI to import KR580VM80A from USSR, and encapsulate them with CEMI logo (to save face I guess). Few people decapped MCY7880, and you mostly find russian dies inside.

Yep, we're one of the top countries when it comes to engineers per capita, must've gotten that from the soviets :-).

Too bad there's not enough resources to do much in the country, so everyone is fleeing it (not for long though, I hope)...

I'd say that retention is a lot better in the IT sector, definitely a lot better than in the 90s or early 00s.

Plus what I understand a good mathematics school. That helps as well.

I heard it said that this was because of Ceausescu's regime's fixation on surveillance and intelligence. So they allocated top resources to information technology, resulting in an unusually IT-capable population.

From elsewhere i got the impression that there was less pre-compiled software to be had, so unless you wanted an expensive paper weight you basically had to learn to code.

It's also very cold outside. Forever.

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