Socialist Romania Computer Chips
cpushack.com
cpushack.com
This is all false. Source: I was there.
The beauty of communist central planning, nothing really worked unless you were in communist party.
Also for other people reading this, please note that all stores in most of the country (with exception of capital city and a couple others) were controlled by the state. Leaving the country was forbidden in general.
So if they wanted people not to use refrigerators on large scale or vacuum cleaners they could just decide to not sell them. It was that simple to restrict something like electronics.
Just add more: again in most of the country there were very few cars running as there was a limited supply of petrol/gas for cars. You could have a fixed amount of gas.
They even decided at one point that on Sunday to restrict circulation of cars the following way: one Sunday cars that have an odd number are allowed, the other Sunday cars that have an even number were allowed.
Same. Pretty sure we vacuumed regularly and never unplugged the refrigerator.
If you were in a state heated apartment building after 1980, the heating was limited to non existent though. And there may have been a hot water schedule. More like twice per day not twice per week though.
I was there before 1989 and grew in the small town in a house. Not a village, but a small town.
We had electricity only a couple of hours per day.
I don't know of any specific rule against refrigerator but it was not useful to buy one as you cannot connect it to anything.
The main source of light during winter was the fire and some kind of liquid gas (I don't know exacly what was that) that we used with a gas lamp.
The same goes for kitchen: most of the cooking was done using the stove or using some gas tanks that were limited - I think one per family per month or I am not sure. But the gas tank was a precious possession there.
The same was true for bread or any other food that was produced by the state. There were rations of how much we can buy.
That's the mentality of a communist dictator.
My dad told me relatively recently how sometime during a winter from the late '80s a lady from the power company showed up at our apartment's door and told my father that we should lower our energy consumption, i.e. not use an electrical heater to, well, heat the house. That would have course meant having a freezing house, which wasn't ideal for kid me, so my dad, logically, called that lady some names and invited her inside the apartment to share the bed with all of us (because of the cold I was sleeping as a kid between my parents during the winter, we couldn't physically heat two rooms at the same time). Interesting times.
Bonus points for us, kids, booing and swearing out loud when the power was being cut off in the evening, and cheering when it was being restored, like true "freedom" fighters against the regime (I'm talking about the summer months when we were all outside to play well into the evening/dark hours).
That the access to electricity was limited?
You are saying
> "the power was being cut off in the evening"
How is not the power limited if this was happening? :)
But, yeah, on a more general level whoever was designing any electrical-related stuff had to have that in mind (the power cuts and the reduced power consumption asked from us, that is).
This discussion also reminded me that, as a kid, I was really in awe in how the (analogue) telephone network was still working even when the power went out, it seemed like magic. There was an article posted yesterday here on HN about how we're expecting rolling black-outs in our mobile phone network over parts of Europe, goes to show that in some ways the system back then that we had in Romania was a lot more resilient in face of power-cuts compared to what we have now available over most of Europe.
That resulted in a stunning result for Romania. It ranked number 2 in gold medals, right after the US (the host country).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1984_Summer_Olympics_medal_tab...
Look inside an old Apple II and you’ll see a sea of chips accomplishing what can be done with only a few today. The Cobra clones looked much the same, but with even more chips. Using whatever they could get their hands on, the students would make 30 chips do the job of an elusive $10 chip. No two computers were necessarily alike. Even the keyboards were hacked together, sometimes using keys designed for mainframe computers but with faults from the molding process. These were cleaned up and new letters put on.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coordinating_Committee_for_Mul...
There are still conflicting stories to this day though (e.g. some licensed clones from other Western manufactures also differed in behaviour in those areas - so the U880 design could have been stolen from those), the only thing that's for sure is that the U880 isn't a "transistor-perfect" clone of an original Z80.
Soviet TVs came with a huge blueprint of everything electronic what's inside so the customers (and repair booths) could repair it on the spot.
The pacepa event you are referring to is when ceausescu was directed by the russians to “penetrate” texas instruments. Here is an article about it from 1987: https://apnews.com/article/e45f1f4ba20cfa8c6e400948177970ed
"The socialist bloc of countries that arose after World War II was not a monolithic entity, it had significant country and cultural differences."
"Unlike the Soviet integrated circuit designation or the East German semiconductor designation, the Romanian government did not set standards for the labeling of semiconductors."
"Nationalistic propaganda" told you that Eastern Bloc countries didn't celebrate Christmas, wat? The whole religious aspect of Christmas was extremely toned down of course, but even the communists didn't have the power to dismantle the Church (surveil and suppress they did though).
Huh? I'm Russian and I don't remember when Christmas even is. We celebrate the new year, and yes, there are trees. Christmas is very much a religious holiday for religious people.
Also, Christmas in Russia isn't celebrated on the same date as in the US either (Dec 25th), it is around Jan 7th or so due some old-time disagreements about calendar system transitions.
By the way, all of this applies to other ex-USSR countries too, including at least Ukraine, Belarus, and Kazakhstan.
History is always fascinating and is sad to see parts like this of the industry get destroyed. In every major city, where major industry was (they built quite a lot of things like tractors, cars), now we have Apartment Buildings. In the 90s, after the fall of communism, everything from the industry was bought by members of "Romanian Mafia"(people who had connections and knew how to buy them) and got sold as scrap.
On the other hand, non-IT Romanian industry is very much struggling on almost all fronts, and most of it is nowhere near where it was in terms of competitiveness or just basic output compared to the communist area, thanks in large parts to what the GP was mentioning (a systematic dismantling for parts by opportunistic apparatchiks after the revolution, but also before the revolution itself, as money dried up and the demented regime became more enamored with grandiose projects rather than any practical economy).
Romania's GDP in 2019 was about 5x that of 1989.
The privatization of the inefficient communist industry was indeed a joke. But the free markets and the switch to capitalism allowed a mixture of home-grown entrepreneurial industry and foreign corporations and investments to more than replace and overtake the centrally-planned dying communist-era dinosaurs.
While there has definitely been growth, I doubt industry is more than twice in overall dollars compared to 1989, especially if we exclude IT.
Also note that the largest part of industry today is car making, one of the very few industries whose factories were not entirely sold for parts in the 1990s.
Pre-revolution industry was definitely unproductive and primitive in most sectors compared to EU or US counterparts, but many industries that were actually working, even badly, in the 1970s and 1980s basically don't exist at all today (pottery, clothing, many kinds of chemical industry).
Note that the country is still much much better off today than under the communist regime, in all ways measurable or not - I am in no way seeking to say that "it was better before".
You ok?
> thanks in large parts to what the GP was mentioning
Highly inefficient industries have all but died. Not sure how y’all communist sympathisers have swamped this post and indeed HN.
- Soviet Union and Eastern block wanted Romania as a supplier of agricultural goods, which Romaina has refused while staying on the block and sticking to its own policy.
- EU wanted Romaina as a supplier of agricultural goods (and exported labor?), which Romania has accepted and realistically had no other choice.
That is BS. EU never dictated Romania what industries to develop, as Romania is not a planned economy. Private enterprise decides what to create and build, just like in every other free country of the world.
Japan is a free country yet it had an unambiguous policy to industrialize and produce export goods as a government policy. Which has brought a lot of fruit, but if they didn't have one, Japan might have looked more like Philippines today.
Ditto South Korea whose chaebols (such as Samsung, LG, etc) were created by a government decree with "assigned moguls" to lead them.
Not to mention China which is pouring huge amount of effort not just into infrastructure but also industrial capacity.
I'm also quite confident that post-war France and Germany had programs to keep and develop their industrial capacity.
In this regard, not having a policy and letting private enterprises build whatever they want (and can) using their own money is a policy of itself.
It's called capitalism. And freedom.
But my point was: EU did NOT prevent member countries from investing and growing into whatever direction they want. No purely agrarian economies, no "labor exporters" (unless that's what they wanted, of course).
No, its not. What you are describing is called lack of governance. The western wold has entire industries spawned by government projects one way or another. Either by means of research or outright subsidies.
> EU did NOT prevent member countries from investing and growing into whatever direction they want
Yeah it did. The reason you and your brigade comrade cry over not seeing “factories” around cities is because eu regulation means using standards on par with the rest of the eu. This means the barrier to entry in various manufacturing industries is extremely high. Basically romania is forced to perpetually take eu funding to develop industries, often subsidising those of germany and other eu countries. Instead of starting small and iterating from there machinery used in romania needs to meet the same quality standards as those in richer countries. Surely you understand the issue here.
The leftist governments tried to keep some of it above water (with money grants and granted monopolies) in the name of "the jobs" at huge costs to the rest of the economy and tax payers. The resulting corruption and various party mafias are still marring those societies today.
But eventually various private enterprises grew, took over and became the success stories of today.
Fast forward to today, where we have an economic centralisation and pollution around 3 or 4 major cities. The economic profile is mainly made up of exports of raw goods and services for local use with a low added value. There is a disconnect between the educational system and the economy, the culture (music, theater) has steadily declined.
IT industry is about 5-6% of Bulgaria's GDP.
The former communist economy of Bulgaria was a very different beast altogether. Services were practically non-existent, or entirely in the gray sector where individuals were repairing cars or giving music lessons to children for cash and mutual favours. The structure of society eliminated the need for whole classes of services which are in the private sector today - think private healthcare, travel agencies, consulting agencies, analytic agencies, etc.
The current IT industry in Bulgaria is not a game-changer for the whole country. It consists mainly of outsourcing companies concentrated in Sofia, exploiting the relatively cheap labour there. Few local companies develop their own product and accumulate their capital locally.
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.KD.ZG?locat...