Unix in East Germany (1990) | Hacker News Reader

Unix in East Germany (1990)

groups.google.com

159 pointsmdip45 comments

This is so fascinating. By the time I understood why and how Germany was two separate states, the wall was long gone.

It is weird,actually,because I am glad I did not have to live through those times, but I do get a wave of something nostalgia-like, as I read this.

Same here.

My father and his family came from the east (they got thrown out one day) and my mother from the west. I was only 4 years old when the wall fell and didn't have any interest in the topic until I was 13 or something.

Man, you guys make me feel old.

I was 14 in 1989 when my Dad and I were watching TV and they switched over to show East and West Germans breaking through the wall and hugging each other.

I remember watching for hours because I knew I was watching history being made.

Me too. I did not understand fully what was going on, but I remember the excitement and optimism that hung in the air.

Why were they thrown out?

I don't know really.

They wanted to leave and then got harrassed.

My uncle got into prison with 18 because of their wish to leave. The government did try many things to silence them.

Then, one night, government said they should pack what they can carry and leave.

How frightening. Did they like the West better? I remember reading an anecdote that many East Germans, once they left to West Germany and Western Europe, they regretted a while and started longing for the East. I always wondered what they miss and hated about Western Europe.

Non-mobile link: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/comp.unix.wizards/QX...

Plain HTML version:

https://groups.google.com/forum/?_escaped_fragment_=topic%2F...

>> We should have been working on the development of a 386 for the past year, but so far it has not been possible for us to turn up even one such machine.

I guess that has been true for everything.

No. Basic needs like food, clothing etc. were fully covered. Any kind of electronics (e.g. a color TV) were hard to acquire. You had to wait 10 years to be able to buy a new car. And housing was a big problem. Women in the GDR typically became pregnant at a very young age (18-21) because a family with a child had the right to get its own apartment.

Well, here in the west you also had the right to get your own apartment at that age. You only didn't have the bucks ;-)

> Women in the GDR typically became pregnant at a very young age (18-21) because a family with a child had the right to get its own apartment.

This is one way to look at it. The other way: free, guaranteed child care (probably mandatory for most as well) for every kid just a few months old. You could easily have a kid and study or work - that was the norm, not the exception.

Disclaimer: I'm the kid of a woman who got her PhD in medicine in east Germany. "Feminism" was a concept I only learned about when the wall fell. In the east, as far as I can see, it was a woman's duty to be productive for society, not about a "right to work while raising kids".

In terms of women's participation in the workforce the communist states were far ahead of the West. Not sure how that came about.

> In terms of women's participation in the workforce the communist states were far ahead of the West. Not sure how that came about.

The liberation of women of all social classes in capitalism from the subservient role as an “instrument of production” in “bourgeois marriage” and/or coerced into a system of “prostitution both public and private” was called out as a natural consequence of Communism in the Communist Manifesto.

So, it's quite easy to see why it would be something Communist states would want to demonstrate success at, and when the State directs work, it's not hard to control relative penetration in the workforce to suit the goals of the leadership.

Not only that, but feminist Marxism had already taken off by that point, and it's been a present (albeit relatively quiet) topic of discussion ever since Engels. I'm honestly surprised people (especially on HN) don't know about the ideological roots of the liberation of women in Marxism (or Communism generally). Liberation is a fundamental principle; the comment you're replying to makes it seem as though women in the workforce is antithetical to Communism, or something.

> In terms of women's participation in the workforce the communist states were far ahead of the West.

Equal rights were implemented by law since inception of East Germany in 1949. In West Germany, the husband could legally forbid his wife to work until 1977(!).

Being gay was also legalized earlier than in West Germany.

> In West Germany, the husband could legally forbid his wife to work until 1977(!).

That's a feminist myth. He could only cancel her contract and only if he could prove in a court of law that she abandoned her "home duties". It is also not known how often this law was actually enforced in reality, if at all.

The other way around, husbands were legally required to provide for their family, that was their duty.

So while I think that it's wrong to have fixed gender roles enforced by the state, please stop pretending that this was a one-way-street.

My source was Wikipedia. In either case it was a West German peculiarity and unheard of in East Germany.

As far as I know - I was 9 years old when the wall fell - you had the right to get your own apartment as soon as you were married. Probably there was some kind of waiting list and several factors would determine were on that list you were.

One should probably qualify for western audience that it was not a right to get appartment that you then owned but a right to rent an appartment which was typically owned by (and the rent was heavily subsidized by) your employer.

To add to that: basic needs were also either free or heavily subsidized. Child care was completely free even for the smallest ones, free food in child care and school. Clothing for children was cheap, as were books etc. for kids. Apartments were subsidized (renting a modern apartment did cost less than 10% of montly income etc.). Health care was completely free, everything, including dentists etc.

OTOH "luxuries" like color TV, computers etc. were pretty expensive.

Despite ethics (equal rights of men and women was a big reason) one factor was macro economic ties to Russia; East Germany (as other countries) had to produce stuff for exporting into Russia, partly without the agreed-upon imports in return. Over time this created major imbalances and thus the need to import from Western Europe, which in turn meant a high need for foreign currency. To obtain foreign currency, domestic production had to be exported in higher amounts than anticipated, thus less output was there for local consumption and investments.

Only in official capacity. There was little problem smuggling computers from West Germany pre 1990. For example Amstrad PC2000 386 1989 model was priced at around 10K DM (Deutsche marks), around 50-100K DDM (east germany marks) with black market exchange rates, Vax clone Robotron K1840 mentioned in the article was 2M DDM. Amiga 500 (similar specs to K1840, minus the MMU :P) was 900 DM - average price of XT clone in West Germany. Robotron manufactured XT clones were 35-55K DDM, 3-5 times more expensive than in the west.

It doesnt take a rocked surgeon to guess what happened to Robotron after Germany unification.

The name Robotron, though, is awesome!

Please shed more detail on this aspect! Was the Amiga popular in East Germany?

http://www.robotrontechnik.de/

Have a click around here with google translate. Loads of cool info.

German is one of the languages I speak fluently, no need for Google translate (;-)

Thanks for the link!

No idea about East Germany, but it was top end hardware in Poland around 1989, cheaper and more popular than PCs, and easily obtainable even before the fall of Iron curtain as long as you had the cash. The cost was ~5-10 salaries, C64 was 1-3. PCs were rare and crazy expensive, XT cost almost twice as much as A500. 1989 salary was ~100 DM using black market exchange rate. 1990 was the year Russian occupation of Poland officially ended, salary jumped to 170 DM, owning western money stopped being illegal dissolving currency black market. 1991 salary went up to 300 DM, and so on..

Even pre 1989 CoCom embargo was not enforced on the west crossing for ordinary border traffic. Anyone on business trip could just stuff a computer into his car trunk, or a couple with appropriate bribes ready for east border guards.

Very, very interesting. I remember "Technological Death" by "Mad Elks" and "Lech" by "Freezers" demos from Poland.

That's a really interesting read. Accodring to some reports the Russians had access to 2.9 or 4.2 BSD source code in 1980-1982(?) http://gunkies.org/wiki/DEMOS not sure if they had have to do "translation by hand into another language".

A bit unrelated: Wow, I can barely tell what I've been up to 2 years ago; how do people remember things that happened some 30-40 years ago...

-ss

I believe there was a study on how people with different age perceive passing of time differently. I guess, for those people, 30-40 years ago might seem like yesterday. Another wager is that you might be younger than those people.

Trivia: the university mentioned in this story was in Karl-Marx-Stadt, a city which had this name in 1953-1990 but is today known as Chemnitz.

Trivia is always the best, most salient part of every story, which ironically makes it not trivial at all.

Google thinks I need to login to read this.

edit: which is funny, Google won't let me in, East Germany wouldn't let you out.

Better alternative link:

http://article.olduse.net/4737%40ethz.UUCP

Yes, I have an Usenet archive in my harddrive so I can search for the message, get its original Message-ID, and present you a link to Joey Hess's historical Usenet exhibition. Google Groups was originally Deja News, the most complete Usenet history archive at the time. But Google acquired it ~2000, and converted it into to Google's private forum service, instead of a museum that preserves the history. Not only the original raw archive was not available to the public anymore, but they also REMOVED the original message querying and indexing.

In Google Groups, you can read historical posts, but cannot find any technical trace of the original history - the whole thing is not indexed in the original way, I didn't even find a option to show the message header, making it utterly useless for archeology, instead, now the best Usenet archive we have is saved from some old tapes from one or two universities, and far from complete. This is really bad.

And apparently Google Groups as Google's private forum, is also already irrelevant. A lose-lose.

Did you build your archive from Usenet, or through spidering DejaNews/Google groups?

> instead, now the best Usenet archive we have is saved from some old tapes from one or two universities,

The archive is online, I just downloaded a copy.

The first major Usenet archive was dumped from the old tape of the University of Toronto's Department of Zoology, it covered the posts their server received from late 80s to 1991. You can download it from here. https://archive.org/details/utzoo-wiseman-usenet-archive. It's ~2 GiB in compressed gzip, ~20 GiB in raw. Another is The Internet Archive's "Usenet Historical Collection", contains post made in the 90s, donated by an anonymous user, around ~200 GiB. https://archive.org/details/usenethistorical&tab=collection

The UTZoo's archive is very handy to have. There are a million posts to read and no spam and low-effort posting at all (by modern standards, even many flame wars seem to be high-quality). The downside is no external resources is accessible, and nobody is going to reply you. Feels like trapping inside the fake 3D Hologram of the Usenet golden age, created by a supercomputer in the abandoned space station, as in the plot of Otomo Katsuhiro's Memories.

Unfortunately, the original archive from DejaNews/Google Groups, the most authoritative and complete source is inaccessible by the public. Google, a Search Company, Has Made Its Internet Archive Impossible to Search http://motherboard.vice.com/read/google-a-search-company-has...

I can't understand why Google just doesn't release its archives. To what end are they keeping it private? How is it a significant competitive advantage for anything they do?

Google keeping the archive locked up was what (many years ago) made it clear to me that it stopped being the company of "don't be evil". In fact, locking up the archive is about as gratuitously evil as you can get short of actual violence and theft.

Because they are building a profile of you to sell your information to advertisers and anyone else interested. If they just GAVE data away, how could they market what you are looking for?

I used the old AltaVista desktop search engine, fed it the usenet data, and setup some proxies and mod_rewrite / Substitution strings and got it online that way.

https://virtuallyfun.com/wordpress/2017/02/25/personal-altav...

But it's a super great resource to have, a decade of usenet traffic, it's about 10GB uncompressed.

Does The Internet Archive not have one? I thought they'd always have the best archive of anything worth archiving from the internet.

EDIT: Nevermind. I see now that you've posted a link to an archive from the Internet Archive in another comment.

Apparently it does this if it knows you have an account. If you open in incognito it will let you see it fine and dandy. I hate Google Groups and their abuse of requiring JS for what is nothing more than just text and this login crap.

https://utzoo.superglobalmegacorp.com/usenet/b168/comp/unix/...

It's part of the UT Zoo Usenet archive.

Funny my father did computer science and economics at that time at that university. He told me about the US computers that had special keys to make them look different, like an exchanged dollar sign. Now that appears to me just as line noise.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com