How communist Bulgaria became a leader in technology, robotics and sci-fi (2018) | Hacker News Reader

How communist Bulgaria became a leader in technology, robotics and sci-fi (2018)

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148 pointsjordybg73 comments

I wonder if Bulgaria really became leader in tech. In Czechoslovakia we also had some sort of computer industry. We also had state security agents buying western tech in disguise and importing it home for cloning.

I even know one guy who worked at computer reverse engineering institute back then. Also I have found memoirs of some random guy who worked as IT specialist for Stb (Czech equivalent of Stasi).

However, this article is really good introduction to Blugarian sci-fi which I didn't known before (unlike Polish and Soviet).

Interesting. Might you have any links or references to the memoirs you could share?

I remember in Red Plenty it describes how the USSR decided to just copy IBM machines rather than build their own at some point.

It's a shame as MSU was working on some really interesting stuff including the weird Setun ternary computer.

Red Plenty is a fantastic and unusual book, I highly recommend it to everybody with even a cursory interest in mathematics, economics, logistics, information technology, politics, or history.

I liked it - I felt it didn't really answer the question it seemed to set out with though.

That is - there was a time when it looked like the USSR was genuinely going to catch up with and surpass the USA, how did they manage this and where did it go wrong?

The USSR was never actually catching up. With access to more accurate historical data we now know that much of their reported economic development was based on falsified official statistics.

Gonna need a source for that.

https://tnsr.org/2018/02/assessing-soviet-economic-performan...

That's not entirely accurate. Between 1930-1970s (with some hiccups) the USSR was indeed "catching up", but this was because they were industrializing from almost nothing, plus rebuilding after the war.

It was the stagnation in the 1970s where the centrally planned economy couldn't adapt to consumer goods, light industry, and technology where they fell further and further behind. Various incentive problems exasperated things. Things would have been much worse in the 70s if high oil prices didn't mask these underlying problems, allowing the USSR to obtain hard currency to import goods.

Don't get me wrong, communism was bad. However, there were periods where it appeared to look superior. The quality of life in North Korea was "superior" to the south until the late 70s (much of this was backed by soviet subsidies, etc), but the optics still existed. There was a similar, though much more brief, period where east Germany had a faster growing economy than the west. There is a reason the Berlin wall was built in the 60s and not earlier.

In industrial societies, we re-invested about 20% of our GDP into production capital; under Stalin, that percentage was closer to 40%. That diminished after he died, to improve people's quality of life, but at the expense of overall productivity improvement.

They might have falsified the statistics in order to boost people's morale, but they were also very serious about actually progressing.

Bulgaria was under USSR's wing when I was a kid, and I have first-hand experience about that.

There was this thing called "kruzhoks", (a Russian word, diminutive of "circle", like in "circle of friends"), which were after-school interest-based clubs, mainly about technical stuff. Every other kid was a member of some kind of kruzhok. Back then I didn't realize that, but the state must have had some sort of "master plan" to prepare as many kids as possible for technical careers when they grow up.

I also distinctly remember the exceptional quality of the textbooks (math, mechanics, electronics). The content was presented in a pedagogical order, with increasing difficulty, and carefully selected exercises that helped the concepts sink in. I used Russian textbooks from the 60's and 70's up until I graduated the university in 2005. (I'm a mechanical engineer, physics hasn't changed much since then, heh.) The typography was also excellent. When I first saw LaTeX output, the first thing that came to mind was Russian textbooks. I don't know how they did it back then.

Command economies don’t work. The USSR experienced growth initially because Russia was an economic backwater. That ran out of steam by the 1960s. The USSR never exceeded about 50% of US GDP, despite having a much larger population.

The USSR did some amazing things, for example in space. That just proves that a command economy can divert investment to specific ends. The USSR narrowly beat the US in several space milestones. We were close behind-such that we beat the USSR to the moon when their space program stumbled. But at the same time we developed advances in electronics, medicine, chemicals, etc., that weren’t even on the USSR’s radar. And we were doing all that while dedicating far less of our economy to investment (versus consumption).

Soviet industry was also breathtakingly inefficient. The USSR required five times as much energy to produce on unit of GNP than the US: http://pure.iiasa.ac.at/id/eprint/3500/1/RR-91-07.pdf. The Soviet Union had massive oil and gas reserves. But using vastly more concrete, steel, and energy to produce less durable goods than the US wasn’t sustainable.

USSR event went as far as researching the use of psychic abilities for espionage. US only started researching PSI later, fearing USSR would get the edge on that; It's very interesting to read CIA papers about remote viewing experiments; Funny to see so much people think these things are pure fabrications, fantasy etc, but the US has been researching this stuff for decades. If they bothered to expend the resources to do that it means something;

Command economies might work better now that we have the capability to transmit accurate market information in (near) real time.

My understanding is that it wasn’t the delays as much as the incentives to lie. Tech doesn’t fix what are essentially people problems.

we're probably way too clueless on that, but it would be interesting to try out.

Chile's Project Cybersyn was coordinating productivity all the way back in the 70s, with Telex machines. Perhaps we can bottle some markets' behavior into computers and good C&C human structures.

>Chile's Project Cybersyn was coordinating productivity

should be pointed out that it was coordinating economic activity not in a 'command economy' sense. The project actually aimed to drastically decentralize economic decision making by applying cybernetic principles to factory work. The goal was for local managers to be able to respond to data in real time. De Beer's so called 'cybernetic factory' was even received positively by Hayek, who was not known for being a fan of command economies.

A significant issue was ossification of nomenklatura, essentially oligarchic rent-seeking across management. It was their backlash that stripped Khrushchev of power, as he pushed for reforms that endangered their power (I wouldn't call them "democratic" reforms but they included more power to common man and better feedback loops)

You seem interesting, please send me an email.

Didn't Dijkstra say that the USSR copying the IBM 360 architecture proved that it had lost the Cold War?

>At its peak, Bulgaria supplied 40% of the computers in COMECON. The electronics industry employed 300,000 workers, and it generated 8 billion rubles a year. [0]

That's on top of a population of just under 9 million and a working age population of 6 million [1], so 5% of the workforce was involved in the production of computer hardware alone.

It seems there was a very large bet on the computer industry from the communist party. Jumping around wikipedia [2] it also seems that pretty much all the computers were clones of western computers and several years behind the west in terms of technology.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_computer_hardware_i...

[1] https://www.populationpyramid.net/bulgaria/1985/

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_computer_hardware_i...

Vast majority of the electronic industry were not computer production, so you're off by a magnitude for sure.

Computer hardware included everything from magnetic platters for hard drives to crt displays to the silicon wafers.

It also included steel, copper and plastics, so by this logic we can throw in everyone involved into production of those. Getting really solid numbers then, like 50% working population!

Bulk of the electronics products were things like radios, TVs and rotary telephones.

IIRC, Bulgaria was among the countries that got "assigned" the low-end of ES EVM that were pushed everywhere, and of course, the low-end machines were much more common than medium/high end produced elsewhere.

As a former Soviet satellite it was in an excellent position to do so. the USSR was first in space, first to the moon, and first to invent the universally programmable computer, the MESM. in 1958 they even invented the first mobile phones.

I wonder why the Russians or even the Chinese or Indians haven’t publicly attempted to clone Microsoft Windows (a desktop os). There is a Russian Linux distro. But I would think it would be more productive to have an international software arms race than a military / space arms race.

Because it's hard and especially hard for monolithic systems (i.e. governments) to go up against private enterprises in certain spaces. Governments are really good at funding cutting edge research that does not have an immediate or obvious market (e.g. early internet, space exploration, fundamental physics research, etc.). Governments are not good at actually competing in a space where there is a market and private competition.

>But I would think it would be more productive to have an international software arms race than a military / space arms race.

There is. It's called 'the market'. We are in the midst of an 'international software arms race', and this arms race spans every category of software. You want project management software? There are a thousand options. In a top-down communist-style system, you would maybe get one option.

Yeah, I guess it’s more profitable for them to just collect taxes from Microsoft instead.

But I am not sure it can’t be done. What if the government deployed desktops to all citizens that were centrally administered, and requires them to be used for all government business / taxes, public services.

Clearly I am talking about a dystopian society... but I don’t see why some dictator or communist wouldn’t want to implement it. Aren’t large Chinese companies essentially branches of the government? Why doesn’t China want a fully controlled clone of Microsoft ? They clearly wanted their own google: baidu, their own amazon: Ali baba, their own Facebook: wechat...

It’s no more inefficient in principal to have government controlled personal computers as it is to have corporate controlled work computers. Work desktops are famously useless with all the required bloatware, encryption, antivirus, restrictive group policies and internet policies... but corporations think it’s worth the loss of efficiency, electricity, employee time to have a stranglehold on their computing. Why wouldn’t the super power hungry governments want the same ?

What if the government deployed desktops to all citizens that were centrally administered, and requires them to be used for all government business / taxes, public services.

France tried this, le Minitel.

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

just to add to your overall point:

> Governments are not good at actually competing in a space where there is a market and private competition.

they are also good at serving markets that are too unprofitable for private companies to serve (such as public transportation or housing for extremely poor people, cheap postal services, fuel subsidies etc)

Wine is kind of a clone of Windows, and available to everyone. But in general Microsoft and Apple change their desktop OSs so fast that it's impractical for cloners to keep up. The clones will always have compatibility problems and fail to support some applications software. Just implementing the published APIs is insufficient because there's so much undocumented behavior.

Not so simple. If the clone gains significant market share it can enforce compatibility.

I.E. basically what happened with IBM Compatibles in the 80's

There's ReactOS. I'm not sure but I believe that many of ReactOS developers are Russian.

Although I don't understand the point of Windows clone.

At any rate, I'm pretty sure the Russian government donated to ReactOS development a few years back.

One of the big features is being able to provide a steady controlled state.

If you have an embedded device running WinXP, there's going to be a day where no amount of premium support will get Microsoft to continue fixing the platform. This seems like it's going to get worse, or at least more confusing, with the almost rolling-release Win10 model. I think there are literally some Atom-class CPUs that would run the Win10 that existed a few years ago, but not a freshly downloaded image.

If that device runs ReactOS, you can clone the repo of the last compatible version and hire your own team to keep it running.

An interchangeable product also helps keep Microsoft honest. Buyers can easily say "you wronged us (with self-serving or stupid decisions or inferior products), so we'll swap to your competitor". Think of Dell vs. Lenovo, Ford versus GM, or Electro-Motive versus General Electric. They are aware of the market pressure and that they can't afford to ship a lemon.

I guess, the answer might be that by the time Windows became popular USSR had been no more.

If I recall my history right, a lot of the locally built small computers in the soviet union were 6502 based Apple II clones.

You're correct. My mother used to work on exactly this, reverse engineering CPUs. They just gave them a part and told them to figure out how it works, and to replicate it. It is my understanding that by that point, in the late 80s, most people in her institute were working on copying western tech, not on original IP.

I grew up there. Every school had classrooms with Pravetz 8D (apple ii clone) running Karateka and those classes were full! I was in kindergarden when my parents signed me up to learn computers and by 1st grade, I was writing chatbots in Basic. Fun times.

My first computer was a home computer from Bulgaria called Pravetz 8D. It’s amazing that it never occurred to me until now to look it up on the web and sure enough there is a Wikipedia page about them. If not for that thing, I wouldn’t be a software engineer today.

I remember that nightmare ... the software was recorded on tapes.

Just like a Commodore 64.

That was the norm for 8bit micro computers of that era. It did have some accidental benefits too because some radio stations would air software for people to record

Bulgarian here. My best friend had this one, it was an https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oric based computer clone, and fun to use :) - all you need is a TV.

My father bought me Pravetz 8C (An Apple ][ /e, or was it /c) clone with 128KB RAM! (pr#8 hi-res mode) + floppy. It was more expensive than buying a good russian car back then, and I'm thankful for what he did for me!

We had few magazines, books to learn from, and were typing like crazy hex codes to get TETRIS, or someother game on.

For a long time, I thought it was the "Merchant" that made Karateka, only later to understand that was one of the earliest cracking groups (some of them later turned into demo groups), and that's how we got most of the software in.

Years before communism fell, our biggest hard-drive maker, started making their "own" games - which were complete rip offs of other western games, and "cyrilized" to the bone (like "Karateka" again).

Another friend of mine's mom was working in a company, back then durign communism and all they did was byte-code replace english into russian in lots of DOS apps - like PC Tools. Hence the weird abbreviation, as often russian would not fit. Really, it was direct hex-editing!

All, in all, I'm somehow thankful to the regime (ahem...) for giving me "free" of a lot, here in the US, is paid. Especially the programming clubs, courses, etc. Obviously that whole scheme did not scale :) but it was good times (while I was kid).

I lived in the town (Stara Zagora) where that hard drive maker (DZU) was and knew a lot of people who worked there. In the 90s, They had an entire shift basically dedicated to piracy. Every single CD that was released in the world was immediately copied in crazy quantities and distributed. My room was full of CDs and my mom was so mad :)

The author of the Cyberpunk Manifesto (1997), Christian As. Kirtchev, is also Bulgarian. He has a collection of Eastern European cyberpunk stories on Amazon (no idea how good they are) and is apparently active on Twitter too.

- http://project.cyberpunk.ru/idb/cyberpunk_manifesto.html

- https://www.amazon.com/Chemical-Illusions-Anthology-Cyberpun...

- https://twitter.com/cyberkristiyan

I read neuromancer recently and it was interesting how commonplace the hugely creative ideas within it are today. The books ideas felt commonplace, except that it’s only because it/the genre influenced sci-fi so successfully. I wish I could have read it when it first came out

Bulgaria is the origin of the oldest, still-functioning satellite in earth orbit, the Bulgaria 1300. It will turn 40 next year.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulgaria_1300

Haha, this is absolutely brilliant, thank you for sharing.

It's so old, it was not even easy to verify it's still up there.

https://www.n2yo.com/satellite/?s=12645

The first 286 I've worked on (in the USSR) was Bulgarian. It was pretty crappy, but still, 286 DOS software ran on it just fine. CGA display. Arkanoid, Prince of Persia, good times. At the time the USSR did not produce its own PC-compatible computers.

> pretty crappy

> just fine

So... Which was it?

A crappy computer can run programs just fine. I don't see a contradiction. It was poorly made, just like the rest of Eastern Bloc stuff.

I certainly wasn't a part of the cultural context but I get the feeling that in many cases the messages werr really about the Soviet Bloc consciously or otherwise. Along with the anxieties attributed to the computers, which sound like an outlet for complaints about the top down system.

The bit about the experts seems downright allegorical for the suppression of "bourgeois pseudoscience" like cybernetics itself before they could rationalize it in the prevailing dogma for the party.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cybernetics_in_the_Soviet_Un...

I heard a story that at the opening ceremony of a semiconductor plant some Bulgarian communist party member made a speech where he said that semiconductors is just a first step and they are going in the direction of full conductors.

Not just some member, but the leader. He did know how to behave in this role (including allowing such stories become widespread), he was the leader for 45 years.

This is interesting. Are you implying a leader’s job was to act silly and maintain an image of a not-so-smart but relatable guy while the party was doing its shady deeds? A comic relief mask of sorts?

Many dissidents in Bulgaria believed exactly that. "Give the people bread and entertainment", as the Romans said.

It's not unheard of for a leader to tell a joke

[Citation needed], but it was my impression that communist jokes were occasionally spread on purpose by the security forces, just as a sort of valve to release the tension.

My favourite anecdote from that era is this slogan that a small town came up with.

"Reagan - enemy number one of the Tutrakan village system!"

Concerning the fiction of Lyuben Dilov mentioned in the article which I had not heard of before, does anyone know if there are translations of his work either in English or German? Googling does not spit out much info.

He was translated mostly in Eastern Europe. Unfortunately, I couldn't find a list of translations, but german is more likely option than english. If you are really interested, I can ask around.

if you find something out that'd be amazing. Had little luck scouring the internet.

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