So, back in the day Poland must have had quite a few people working in hi-tech. Which leaves me wondering, has the country been able to retain its corps of specialists, and what is Poland’s most hi-tech product today?
USSR was able to do whatever it wanted of course.
So, to this day we make good military RF-related tech (see WB-Electronics and Radwar for example). But when we tried a space program in 60s ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meteor_(rocket) ) - USSR made us stop pretty quickly.
Back to the subject - East Germany and USSR was supposed to do integrated circuits, so our industry wasn't very good in that regard. We made some, but nothing modern. Polish-made computers were mostly using foreign ICs with the exception of a Polish-made clone of 8080 used in a series of computers by Elwro.
Nowadays we have one pretty big IC factory in Poland ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilk_Elektronik ), and a few specialized IC factories for military and industrial automation.
On the other hand Poland is pretty big in software, especially gamedev.
For me, it’s the Polyend Tracker [0].
As for designers of hardware – K-202 and later MERA-404 were the most advanced TTL architectures that originated under communist regime in Poland. As for CMOS single chip CPUs whole eastern bloc only managed to copy 8 bit western designs, most notably by teams from Ukraine and Bulgaria (that was also a main Floppy Discs producer in the bloc BTW, other than that cassette tapes and reel to reel tapes were the most common storage media).
As for retaining specialists specialized in deign - they weren't too numerous to begin with. In later years of communist era regimes designed mostly to switch from attempts of developing of own designs to reverse engineering and copying western designs which involved a lot of industrial espionage and smuggling of components and software which even further limited size of group of people who were designing own solutions. Tho Poland continued to produce own designs based on own components as well as parts from the West and Soviet Union well into the 1980s. By the time communist ended a lot of them were well into their 40s and 50s with the biggest group that was about to turn 60. Poland by that time had no manufacturing capabilities to produce modern components in high quantities essential for survival of such businesses. Younger generation was more interested in developing software for western minicomputers like PC, Commodore and Atari products. So there was quite a gap in generations and their main focus.
As for today there is some research on quantum computing and photonics being done in academia. As for manufacturing of more innovative hardware and software most specialists emigrate to Germany, Scandinavia, the UK and the US. Poland is not too friendly for such business (lower level of economic freedom, overcomplicated taxation system etc) compared to these countries especially as risky ones as innovative high tech.
The local gaming industry attracts talent from the region and has a few globally successful products - even if companies themselves are incorporated in Cyprus.
But that only gained momentum relatively recently - there was no carryover from the communist era.
There are also payment systems - there's a lot of experimentation going on in that field. All the more interesting because the population is particularly price-conscious and intolerant to friction in payment processing.
The rest is largely outsourcing. We have a few large domestic IT companies doing projects for the government.
Lastly Poland is where around 3% of the world's li-ion batteries are manufactured. Not a lot in absolute terms, but it's, weirdly enough, half the manufacturing capacity of the US and in the EU second only to Hungary.
That's about it. Academia mostly gave up and resorted to pumping out masters' degrees. There is still a significant amount of brain-drain in IT, but it's countered with generous tax incentives.