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Comment by chx | Hacker News Reader

I learned programming on a ZX Spectrum 48K my parents smuggled into Hungary in 1985 summer at ten years old. I have since become a senior software architect and the Speccy will always have a special place in my heart. it's been quite the journey.

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No sure why the sibling was downvoted to oblivion, the Eastern Block countries would have loved to import Western microelectronics (soft currency issues aside), but there was indeed an embargo in place which prevented this:

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

AFAIK 8-bit chips weren't really covered by this anymore during the 80's, but apparently the Amiga fell under the embargo for being 'too powerful'... probably a convenient marketing myth ;)

The Eastern countries were pretty quick to build clones of popular chips though (mostly Z80s and x86, Bulgaria also built MOS 6502 and Motorola 6800 clones).

I have a lot of respect for the eastern bloc engineers. After being throughly pillaged of all industrial infrastructure after the war, surprisingly by the early 1980s some of the stuff being churned out was amazing. Right down to minicomputer clones.

Worth to mention that it was NOT the communist "regime" who forbade citizens of Eastern Block to own personal computers but... USA under the Coordinating Committee for Multilateral Export Controls (COCOM) who banned import of personal computers or transistors to eastern block...

The Commodore 64 (and I suspect the Spectrum 48K too) got off the COCOM list in 1985 -- but the legally available C64 in Hungary was beyond the means of individuals at the time. It was more used by corporations (well, what went for corporations at the time). OTOH my parents got the ZX Spectrum in Munich heavily discounted because by then it was several years old and did not count as particularly modern. The Amiga 1000 was already released even if not yet widely available.

A community center in an outer district of Budapest have organized a "micro club" every week, I can't find a definite date of when it started, this photo is titled "some time around 1986" http://gpsgames.hu/data/games/2796/2796_1.jpg Every Friday people would haul their various microcomputers to this place and swap programs and chat. Copyright ... we kind of knew it was not "legal" but noone cared.

Those were the days.

That may have been true, but IIRC the Soviet totalitarian dictatorships also tightly controlled access to communication and content creation devices. Fax and copy machines were tightly controlled to prevent unwanted communication and underground newsletters, for example.

In fact, I read that one reason for the opening up of the USSR under Gorbachev was that the Soviets realized that they couldn't both maintain a totalitarian dictatorship and keep up in information technology.

(I read this stuff awhile ago and my memory of the details is vague. For example, I don't know if those policies existed in Hungary specifically.)

This is definitely true, at least for Eastern Germany where I grew up. The best you could get as a 'citizen' was a typewriter. Any sort of printing or copying machine was off-limits (edit: at least until the mid-80's, you could definitely buy a 9-needle-printer, but those things were scarce and expensive, I remember that I sent cassette tapes with source code via snail-mail halfway through the country to a guy who had access to a printer, and a few weeks later I got the printed listings sent back) :D

East Germany put a lot of effort into tech-education though. The "glorious leadership" realized that they were quickly falling behind in high-technology during the 70's, and they actually tried to fix this.

Most of the 8-bit computers that Eastern Germany started to manufacture in '84 were former 'grass-roots' designs done by hardware engineers as side projects.

When the government desperately needed cheap hardware for education, those side projects got green-lit and were developed into official projects. This is where reality kicked in again unfortunately, the limited resources of the "real-socialist economy" didn't allow for the mass production necessary to fulfill private demand, so everything that was built went to schools and universities (at least!), but also military academies.

One of the first things George Soros did with his Hungarian Soros Foundation did was providing copying machines starting, again, in 1985 to promote a more open society.

Coming from ex-Yugoslavia - it was not forbidden to OWN a computer - no one cared about it, it was forbidden to import computer costing more than some arbitrary sum, in order to protect domestic 'industry'. In Yugoslavia that amount was LOWER than price of ZX Spectrum, hence need for people to smuggle computers.

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