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Comment by sitkack | Hacker News Reader

I think the Soviet Union would still exist if they had their own modern semiconductor manufacturing. They had everything they needed (education, math culture) around semiconductors to make this successful. China absolutely needs their own fabs.

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East Germany had a fairly credible semiconductor industry. At the end of the Cold War, they were producing 1mbit DRAMs, about three years behind the West. This plant was shut down as uncompetitive during reunification, but the legacy of the industry lives on with a lot of semiconductor companies having operations in Dresden because they had access to inexpensive highly specialized and skilled labor.

Stasi's spies helped a lot, as told in Macrackis' book on the East German intelligence service: https://books.google.com/books?id=LLZJk4FrqwwC

Do you think that semiconductors are the only thing required to fix GOSPLAN, make adjustments to prices of everything and save Soviet economy?

Imagine soviet government running Hadoop MapReduce jobs and using "big data" to drive GOSPLAN? Would be a marvel to watch this soul-crushing efficiency machine.

Would be a good soviet-punk fiction concept, like what-if Internet were invented in and dominated by Soviet.

GOSPLAN didn't fail because of lack of MapReduce. I don't think you could make a planned economy even with all the big data tools that exist today. There's far too much important information affecting prices that isn't represented in any database.

No way it had nothing to do with semiconductor manufacturing.

Curious as to the reasoning behind your theory?

I'm not disagreeing, I honestly am not knowledgeable or well-read enough to decisively agree or disagree, but the rationale behind why semiconductors would have saved the USSR from its demise sounds fascinating

China also needs the capability to build the machines that build the machines, if automation is to be their savior as their population ages. High precision heavy industry.

They have no equivalent to a company like Bosch in Germany.

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