Comment by tivert | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tivert | Hacker News Reader

> Thus in 1970, the Microcomputers Plant was established. Located in Warsaw, it employed Polish workers but used British components and financing – the required parts weren’t available in Poland and the communists weren’t at all eager to throw money at the project....

> Karpiński’s computer could be so small and resilient because it used Western components. Even though they were vital to the functioning of the K-202, they might have raised suspicion among the authorities of the Eastern Bloc, as they were elements imported from beyond the Iron Curtain and used in the sensitive field of information processing.

What the superior performance of his machine mainly due to the Western components he was using?

The article makes it seem he was treated very unfairly so as to favor his competitors (and maybe he was), but it seems entirely legitimate to me for the Communists to have favored a more secure supply chain, given the political situation at the time.

If supply chain was the issue, surely they could have worked to create a more local source for things; but it seems like a flavour of corruption to use slower and inferior machines instead of trying to leverage the best of both.

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.

> 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.

USSR had a planning economy, so they decided ahead what good and in which quantity must be produced in a coming five years. And then comes some genius and makes a computer better than planned. What should they do?

Something alike was with Setun[1], there was no place for Setun in 5-years plan.

Moreover I suspect that what will be included into the next plan was a big politics. No low engineer could change that. Centralization is evil.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Setun

> Centralization is evil.

This.

It doesn't matter what the official regime is, as long as the decisions are made by a disconnected committee with no way for the periphery to steer, it's always shit.

> USSR had a planning economy, so they decided ahead what good and in which quantity must be produced in a coming five years. And then comes some genius and makes a computer better than planned. What should they do?

They should do what most management textbooks tell you: adjust the planning to include this innovation in the plan.

Centralization is also fragile, a single point of failure, which fails without fail. even quantum mechanics doesn’t make a decision in advance.

> What the superior performance of his machine mainly due to the Western components he was using?

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.

Any nation that becomes captive to ideological selection for its key sectors will naturally tend to selecting subpar individuals in position of power.

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.

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