Unix in East Germany (GDR) (1990)
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I probably have some old school photos somewhere.
quote:
There were several PDP-11 clones made in Zelenograd near Moscow. Both multi-chip and, later, single chip versions.
Most quantities were 1801VM1 and 1801VM2. Second was much faster (over 10 MHz clock frequency). Both did not have extended addressing and were limited to 64k bytes address space. Later 1801VM3 appeared, containing 22 address extension much like PDP-11/70, but slightly different so original DEC programs could work with only 18 bit (256 kbyte).
These three CPU were not copy of any real chip from DEC. But there was another 5 chip CPU clone of DEC Professional 350. This model was cloned incredibly close, and called "Electronica 85".
Those are still standing in the lobby of the Computer Science Department of FU Berlin (Takustraße 9)
You are probably referring to Zuse Institute Berlin which is the building right next to it.
I visited Odessa in Ukraine circa 2019 and saw all kinds of interesting computing devices and cameras.
It was more about saving resources on software development. East German standard software was usually pirated copies of western standard software with the copyright strings patched to something else. Creating an entirely different evolutionary branch for hardware and software instead of copying doesn't make economic sense, especially when the goal is to catch up.
More like they didn't see the need and didn't invest in early computing and so lagged behind. Something the US very nearly almost did as post-war a lot of people didn't see the point. Software engineers (though they weren't called that) were seen as unimportant secretaries who just typed letters into the computer. Grace Hopper's Navy computing unit famously had to raid other offices at night for resources.
> I suspect this was partly to facilitate cloned hardware, but i do also suspect they wanted their systems to be approachable by engineers from around the world, too, so diverging too much would have been detrimental.
Computing advanced so quickly it showed the Soviet-style communist system for the lumbering boondoggle it was. By the time the central committee deigned to allocate resources for computing they were a generation behind and that only got worse. They stole western design and software because they didn't have the economic leeway to do it themselves.
You need to remember: by the 60s/70s the western economies were taking off in says Warsaw countries were never able to match. They simply did less and did it less efficiently across almost all sectors of the economy. No one had to cheat them or restrict them. They shot themselves in the foot repeatedly.
There were no startups. You had to petition the central government for permission to build more computers. They would assign you a quota. You built that many computers. In the mean time 12 new startups were founded in the US and two of them came up with new chip designs and shipped them to customers. Doesn't take a genius to understand why the soviet sphere was a compete non-entity in computing.
> Whether this comes through cooperative projects with other institutions, through industrial research or however, is almos irrelevant to us -- we want, as far as possible, to determine our own future and not wait until it comes to us from `above'.
What happened next?
MUTOS 1835 was a UNIX port which we did under contract for an AT-compatible from Robotron. Since this machine was never produced, the whole thing must be seen as a flop."
Yeah, just about 20 EC 1835s were built (the "C" is the Russian "S"; they're ESER (ES EVM) machines, after all). But then again, there's MUTOS 1700 (for A 7100 and A 7150) and MUTOS 1834 (for EC 1834)... along with CP/M, CP/M-86 and DOS, of course. The 32-bit (386) follow-up to the 1835 was planned for 1993/94. Well, history had other plans. I remember my first programming lessons in my school's computer lab in 1991... on Amstrad 386DX/20 machines.
1. ES EVM (EN) [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ES_EVM]
2. ESER/ES EVM (DE) [https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einheitliches_System_Elektroni...]
3. ES EVM (RU) [https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/ЕС_ЭВМ]
4. A 7100 (DE) [https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_7100]
5. A 7100 @ "Starring the Computer" [https://starringthecomputer.com/computer.html?c=630]
6. A 7150 (DE) [https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_7150]
7. EC 1834 (DE) [https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/EC_1834]
8. EC 1834 (EN) [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EC_1834]
9. EC 1835 (DE) [https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/EC_1835]
I remember being challenged to learn about the file system. All I was told was, use the man command. I knew CP/M, or better the East-German clone SCP, but that OS didn't know directories. I had to learn the concept from the man pages. There were no UNIX books in libraries or book stores. But it was fun, I managed to write a simple compression program doing run-length encoding on that system.
There was so much exploring to do, and sites weren't filled with AI slop either.
You'd easily go ... "Ah, lookie here, this is interesting.. Unix usage in East Germany".. after 4-5 hours you'd still be reading, maybe about Elektronika (PDP-11 compatible clonest in old Soviet), etc.
Fun times!
And then the amount of focused work they needed, which they probably had because they weren't doomscrolling:
> Since we had no machine with a `C' complier, we chose the same method: translation by hand into another language. In a finite time (about 3 months), we had a `C' compiler which produced PDP/11 assembler.
The C64 wasn't affected by the COCOM embargo, so 'export' was legal from West Germany, and import into East Germany anyway. East German citizens who had access to D-Mark (again: western relatives were the key here) could also simply walk into an 'Intershop' and buy a Commodore or Atari 8-bitter. Finally there was also the so-called GENEX catalogue, which was a delivery service run by East Germany where West German citizens could directly buy both Eastern and Western products for hard currency and had them directly delivered to their East German relatives (including C64s):
https://www.spiegel.de/geschichte/genex-kataloge-der-sonderb...
16-bit computers were affected by the western COCOM embargo though. It was technically illegal to export a PC or even an Amiga from West Germany into East Germany. So if you wanted to bring an Amiga over the border that would technically be smuggling - in the sense of smuggling them out of West Germany, since that was the illegal part - I bet nobody gave a shit though since quite a few Amigas found their way into East Germany, they were just prohibitively expensive on the 'private market' (around 20..30k (East-) Mark, which was the equivalent of a higher end car - like a Lada 1500 - or about 3..4 years of a typical wage).
Only after 1985 https://repository.uclawsf.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1... page 19 Relaxation of COCOM Controls:
"In December 1984 COCOM relaxed its controls on computer exports. 125 The Commerce Department issued new regulations on April 26, 1985,126 that reflected new COCOM policy. The regulations eliminated validated license requirements for certain low-level computers with processing data rates (PDRs) 127 of less than two Megabits per second and total internal storage of 1.1 Megabits or less 128 and related peripherals. Although exports of computers and related equipment generally require validated licenses, 129 personal computers such as Apple II, Commodore 64, and Radio Shack Model 100, which were no longer state-of-the-art, were excepted."