Jacek Karpińśki, the computer genius the communists couldn't stand (2017)

Between this and the GA144 I wonder if clockless architectures aren't an under-explored area, since they seem to be able to achieve a lot of performance per watt and per gate if done right

>Thus in 1970, the Microcomputers Plant was established. Located in Warsaw, it employed Polish workers but used British components and financing.

The British were involved in every step.

Small correction and historical note: Poland, like the other USSR-aligned countries such as Czechoslovakia and Hungary, while under the oppressive thumb of the Soviet regime and the regimes they installed in those countries, were not part of the Soviet Union. So they weren't Soviet, but they most certainly were communist, or rather, socialist people's republics.

No. The genius was in the design and how the components were used.

> It seems entirely legitimate to me for the Communists to have favored a more secure supply chain.

It mentions in the article that the bottleneck with getting components that were high quality was that the local government did not want to spend the money to develop their own secure supply chain.

He demonstrated a proof of concept. If they were concerned about national security, they could have made it a priority to get him equivalent components.

My feeling from the article was that he worked outside the box, and THAT was simply unacceptable to the authorities, no matter how good the underlying technology was.

This is a cautionary tale. The same thing has happened to our nation, America, with the attendant decline across the board over the past 20-30 years.

Poland was embargoed so it was tricky to obtain western components. Poles had to pay for them in hard currency, because Polish Zloty was not a convertible currency. There were two exchange rates, the official one at which hard currency was exchanged into zlotys and the the unofficial street rate used by illegal money changers. Those rates varied wildly. Poles who did earn hard currency would have currency accounts, but were forbidden from withdrawing actual dollars or german marks, instead they were given special tokens they could spend in the so-called internal export shops selling western food, clothes, household equipment, radios, TVs, and even toilet paper, because that was one of the things communism struggled with near its end. Those fake dollars had a lower exchange rate on the street.

Ownership of real foreign currency was forbidden as was possession of a passport. There were two types of passports, one for the countries of the Soviet block and the other for the whole world. You had to bring your passport to the local police station for safe keeping and interrogation. Passports would not be issued to all members of a household to prevent them from fleeing the country.

Economically, Poland was getting massively squeezed by the Soviet Union who ordered a lot of ships to be built in the Polish shipyards, but would only pay for them in "transferrable rubles", the currency which was not convertible and pretty much useless. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/305054272_The_Trans... The exchange rate vs. local currencies was controlled by Moscow. In order to deliver those ships to Russia, Poles had to purchase materials and equipment outside of the Eastern Block and pay for it in hard currency. Eastern European countries quickly developed a barter system, but non-Eastern European suppliers wanted to be paid in US dollars. Poland tried to sell its agricultural and industrial output, but could not compete with Western suppliers so the earning were meagre. This has led to lowering of living standards beyond which people had enough of communists and the party was over.

>The manufacturer of Odra, the Elwro company, was, however, better connected with the regime than Karpiński. Instead of improving its product to catch up with the competition Elwro began to subvert Karpiński’s position in any way they could, not shying away from slander.

Italy.

USA.

Did do his most important work in Poland but wouldn't be notable globally if not for his time in the Vatican.

France.

USA and Switzerland.

USA (for generations). And strangely now Serbia.

A group that worked against one occupier is likely to work against the next as well.

That was the case in many countries. In France for example a huge part of the resistance was way too sympathetic with Stalin's ideas (and btw didn't join the resistance up until 1941 and Hitler's operation Barbarossa, when Hitler betrayed Stalin) so one of the very first thing the government did in France right after WWII was to disarm the resistance as much as they could. Most people don't read about that but it's well documented.

These (back then) superpowers were paranoid and rightfully so: the cold war started right after WWII and both blocks were very careful not to have ennemies from within.

I think it's fair to consider Poland the birthplace of the modern computer: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bomba_(cryptography)

Maybe not a global superpower, but it is very easy to me to imagine a Poland not destroyed by Nazi then communist rule being an innovation center of the world.

It’s not a stretch to think that Poland would be on equal terms with Spain or Italy had these things not occurred. But of course then you have to dig into the history of colonialism, of which Poland was a colonized state and not a colonizing one, and places like the UK, France, or Germany don’t like considering the fact that abundant resources from colonies might have played a role in their industrialization.