Minsk Family of Computers (2001) | Hacker News Reader

Minsk Family of Computers (2001)

computer-museum.ru

42 pointstosh10 comments

Dad used to work at Ordzhonikidze factory in Minsk while these things were still in production. Giant monsters, by todays standarts, that would gobble up kW's and spit out enormous amount of heat. I saw remains of one of these machines while i was working at the, now defunct, airport Minsk-1. Great stuff. Sadly most of the ones that i saw were stripped for radio components and precious metals during the 90s.

It would be amazing to have some of those systems implemented as emulators or as FPGA clones.

It's very sad that nearly all computer science and history is biased towards western systems with common myth that Soviet Block did not invent/made their own hardware and software. Same goes to digitization of manuals...

Fun facts:

- It is common western myth that Soviet Block citizens were in any way forbidden from owning personal computers in 80".

- Life was good: free healthcare, education, guaranteed retirement pension, almost free apartments from government, 1 bit computing, RISC, parallelism, decimal computers, fast floating point accelerators, vector computers - we had it all in late 70".

For some reason no one brags about it, and no one cares about preservation of such historical artifacts or knowledge alone. Many Wikipedians also reject such claims as there are no western sources available to quote...

Almost free apartment... I think you mean almost free room for a family of four, inside a three bedroom apartment with two other families.

It’s easy to look back now and say: “They had free health care, everything was great!” But that doesn’t explain why they had to build a wall and use exit visas to keep people in.

>I think you mean almost free room for a family of four, inside a three bedroom apartment with two other families.

You must be ironic and for sure NOT from post soviet block.

I meant normal 2 bedroom apartment in newly build, modern building for family of 2+2 for free(you revived one after working for around 10 years[including studies!], at age of around 28.

It was not really "free" as you had to pay around ~4% of your income for those 10 years. (Another perk: in communism you did NOT pay any from of income tax as ordinary worker).

In my country government made and gave away few few millions(!) of such apartments. In matter of fact - I'm still living in one of it, and apart from asthetics, they are warmer, strudier and quiter(!) than modern apartments.

>But that doesn’t explain why they had to build a wall and use exit visas to keep people in.

There is simple explanation: GREED and wish for political freedom.

Greed: As soon as all population had jobs, healthcare, free apartments, free education and insane levels disposable income (no taxes, no mortages): they got greedier, and wanted to have all stuff from socialist state but lifestyle seen western movies. Millions belived that west is like in Hollywood.

Political freedom - during the communist era people did not have any political freedom, as in modern China. Many could not stand it so they wanted to escape.

Very skewed picture.

> Another perk: in communism you did NOT pay any from of income tax as ordinary worker

Income tax was of course collected: https://aif.ru/money/mymoney/kakoy_podohodnyy_nalog_byl_v_ss...

of which workers might have been not fully aware (as it was deduced before wiring/handing-out the cash).

But there was also such a thing as "childlessness" tax on income, and concerned workers were well aware of it.

I feel and sympathize your nostalgia of the past, but it doesn't seem proper to extrapolate your personal experience to the "millions" of other USSR inhabitants. Western republics of the USSR were the proverbial land of milk and honey, out of reach for the vast majority of them.

Unlike 99.999% of posters who praise free Soviet perks, I really lived in USSR in 80s, and can say life was quite hard. Things like healthcare were indeed free. They were also close to useless due to crumbling equipment, impossibility to get sufficient up-to-date information from outside of SU for continuous education of MDs (did anyone mention free education?), constant "defitsit" of medicines (actually it was almost total, everything was hard to buy starting from toilet paper).

If to speak specifically about computers we weren't forbidden from having PCs indeed, but it was almost impossible to buy one for many reasons, already mentioned defitsit being probably the most important, but also let's not forget the SU was lagging behind the West technologically, and had troubles fulfilling much more basic demands than computers. Most privately-owned computer hardware were self-made in 80s in USSR, and - I'm not kidding - you had at times to deal with very shadowy guys to buy necessary electronic parts. It's definitely easier to buy cocaine in today's US.

As for original research in the USSR it was buried by central-planned socialist system which never sufficiently rewards risk-taking (and there's no riskless innovations) so no matter how cool is your idea in theory it was always easier for everyone - from engineers to gov't ministers - to just copy Western examples (USSR didn't pay royalties anyway). Exceptions were only in military field, and in situations when USSR's industry was simply unable to copy.

I wonder if part of the disconnect is that we're comparing the wrong countries. Even at their peak, the USSR was a much poorer country than the US or Germany.

Many of the differences we blame on a command economy may be either caused by, or exaggerated by, the wealth gap. The US could afford to make both bombs and toilet paper, but the USSR couldn't. It would be interesting to compare Soviet quality-of-life and achievements to a free-market country of similar per-capita GDP.

The "clone the West" decision process at least did build some knowledge, infrastructure and manufacturing base. In contrast, there are plenty of wealthy Western countries with no meaningful semiconductor or electronics industry, because they could just buy American/Japanese/Korean gear.

We can start from the fact that unlike USSR's, US gov't didn't bother itself with production of toilet paper. But by some magic it was available in the States, almost as if some invisible hand...

Claiming that bad economy stats can vindicate failures of a particular economic system is putting the argument upside down.

USSR as a state wasn't poor anyway: it possessed huge deposits of mineral resources, vast cheap, and controlled workforce which wasn't allowed to strike, or even negotiate - so gov't could offset the need to increase QoL for workers for almost indefinite time. It apparently was quite enough to successfully wage a number of proxy wars around the world against mightiest of enemies, support dozens of allied regimes with money, material, and resources.

similar in Poland - general shortage of everything, corruption. Dont know the details of how it was with appartments but for sure you had to wait long (like 10 years), there was never enough appartments available and the system of distributing these was unclear and corrupt. On the positive side, there was no problem with trash, there were no packages, no plastic containers, no pre-packaged foods (we had food rations), and newspapers were printed on such low quality paper that you could use it intead of toilet paper (which wasnt available of course). Computers were extremely expensive as they were imported and had to be bought for dollars, and exchange rate was like your monthly salary was the equivalent of 20 dollars

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