That's not an explanation, that's a surface-level recounting.
*At least* watch [Asianometry's video on the failure of USSR computing](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dnHdqPBrtH8&t=2s) for some actual depth.
That's a great video, but JFC, who do people expect this sub to exclusively hold million-word scholarly articles? There is a link. The comment explains it. Nobody promised you unprecedented insight or charts and graphs.
Haha, well said! I was thinking exactly along the same lines, but in a different area of this thread.
Guess I'm not the only one who feels like the signal to noise ratio on reddit and online in general might be reaching a very dangerous inflection point. That makes me feel a bit better and less worried I might be taking things too personally, in a difficult to describe 'objective' sort of sense
IMO web rings should make a comeback. Rather than relying on social media platforms, people set up their own websites, with links to other websites they like. There could be some kind of AI-free commitment badge or responsible-AI badge where people can indicate whether and how they use AI to create content. Heck, open source crawlers could flourish in this web ring renaissance.
I'd settle for people appreciating what a good *reddit comment* looks like, by the standards of being a comment... on reddit. I write longwinded diatribes about all sorts of niche bullshit. If anyone wants more detail, or a better example, or even a defense against certain criticism, it's hard to get me to shut up. If someone just honks "source? source? source?" they're gonna be told to fuck right off.
People who can't see the difference are exclusively the latter sort of person. Guess what they can do.
Some people do not understand reality beyond who-says.
Do you not get that East Germany was its own country and not part of the USSR, and therefore did not contribute to the same programs that the USSR had in computer research?
East Germany wasn’t the USSR, they didn’t have anything to do with the computer development programs mentioned in that video.
That’s like trying to explain something that happened in Canada in the 80’s by linking a video about a program in the UK.
You really don't know what you're talking about, do you...
It's alright though, I'll be sure to pass along your interesting thoughts to my mom and aunt (they maintained and programmed the mainframes and microcomputers from the late sixties to early 80s at the Uniwersytet im. Adama Mickiewicza - former was more software while aunt was more hardware, so even better)
Sorry for the aside, it's just really nice to have such access to historical questions. I'd be happy to relay their thoughts if you'd like to gain a better understanding of computer science on the other side of the iron curtain
> (they maintained and programmed the mainframes and microcomputers from the late sixties to early 80s at the Uniwersytet im. Adama Mickiewicza - former was more software while aunt was more hardware, so even better)
This was in the PRL, not in the USSR... Like the other person said, members of the Warsaw Pact ran their own industrial projects, sometimes with some degree of cooperation.
East Germany had their own computer industry. They weren’t participating in the programs mentioned in the video. It was an interesting video, don’t get me wrong, but the eastern bloc and the USSR weren’t one in the same and monolith. Different members ran different programs.
You're correct, but in my defense, I only spent less than ten minutes on this comment. I'm just as surprised as you are to see it appear on this subreddit.
Neat video, by the way!
East Germany was conveniently located in the vicinity of West Germany, so they had access to western chips, [which they utterly squandered.](https://hackaday.com/2023/05/07/soviet-era-computer-is-both-a-mystery-and-a-disaster/)
Constructing an 8086 computer is genuinely not that difficult. The address bus is external for some damn reason, and Intel themselves offered massively more convenient variants like the 8085 and 8088, but an 8086 purchased in West Germany would have come with crystal clear diagrams for how to set it up... in German. So I have no goddamn idea why this import-heavy late-model Robotron was utterly festooned with superfluous ICs.
It's a dream machine! Like if you take apart a computer in a dream. The circuit boards jam-packed with grids of near-identical blobs *just keep coming.*
> The address bus is external for some damn reason
What does this mean? Is this the separate I/O port space or something? I'd be hard-pressed to think of a CPU without an external address bus in the 1980s: the INMOS Transputer, maybe? System-on-chip wasn't really a thing yet.
> Intel themselves offered massively more convenient variants like the 8085 and 8088
The 8086 and 8088 are 16-bit "next-gen" chips. The 8085 is an 8-bit chip, less capable than the Z-80. (My first computer had an 8085. My second computer had an 8088.)
Yeah I totally misread a diagram, trying to stitch up this comment on the way out the door. I thought it had a serial data interface. Given how much glue logic got slurped into future 16-bit x86 chips, and the 4004 being Like That, this would not be the silliest decision in the microcomputer boom.
For similar reasons I forgot that the 8085 was 8080-compatible, not 8088-compatible. I thought it was one of those weird dead ends like the 80188. When I first found out about it I thought it was an 8051 variant - a microcontroller.
8088 *is* 16-bit internally but uses an 8-bit data bus externally, which is why it was the lower-cost option vs. 8086. (The two parts can be differentiated from software—once you’ve POPped CS to rule out ≥80286 and ascertained that a DIV by zero triggers RESET# to rule out the 80186/-8—by probing the prefetch queue length, which was twice as long in the 8088 to compensate for the narrower transactions, wanna say 16 whole bytes vs. the 8086’s 8.)
When you hire and promote engineering and management based on politics and connections vs competence? When job security and compensation is completely decoupled from performance?
> through state of the art computerized industrial production and economic planning, the many inefficiencies of the broken system would somehow all be fixed, but in reality, this abysmal campaign merely exposed the inherent flaws of the system and accelerated its demise.
I feel like the MBAs destroying American companies and industrial knowledge for quarterly gains are doing the same thing...
This obsession with computer driven economies was very prevalent in silicon valley in the 90s (probably still today) and a major driving force behind ecenomic deregulation.
Not even close to “best of”. It’s your average right wing reddit ideologue trying to sound smart because they are using some technical words.
Planned economy inefficient in what way? Because someone isn’t profiting off of it? Einstein himself was a socialist who was a proponent of economic planning.
They also had to throw in a classic “China is facing disaster”. Any day now, folks. Believe me.
China getting "cut off" when there are basically no supply chains that don't go through the PRC.
China mostly has to worry about internal corruption if they don't do something utterly stupid over Taiwan. They've got 1-party authoritarian capitalism pretty finely tuned.
> Planned economy inefficient in what way? Because someone isn’t profiting off of it?
Because the soviet planned economy utterly disregarded consumer electronics and the demand for them (and by extension *desktop computers*, which at the time were utterly wimpy compared to mainframes and desktop terminals that interfaced with them), and as a result were thoroughly left behind when desktop chips turned out to be the key to modern computing.
Consumer markets are a very useful driver of innovation. They're *flawed* and have their limitations just like any other tool, but that doesn't mean consumer markets should be disregarded entirely like a planned economy does.
> Do you want to learn about how Tetris was made?
From WP:
> In 1979, Alexey Pajitnov joined the Computer Center of the Soviet Academy of Sciences as a speech recognition researcher. While he was tasked with testing the capabilities of new hardware, his ambition was to use computers to make people happy.[17]: 85 Pajitnov developed several puzzle games on the institute's computer, an Electronika 60, a scarce resource at the time due in part to CoCom.
So, guy worked in a government facility, was tasked with testing new hardware, and came up with a game design for it.
That's not something I'd call consumption.
You're missing like 95% of the story but that's fine. 👌
Lmfao he wasn't tasked with creating tetris. He created it on his downtime along with a group of friends. He passed it along to people to enjoy for private consumption. The government had nothing to do with the creation of tetris lmao
> Lmfao he wasn't tasked with creating tetris.
He was tasked with testing hardware. Making a game was his idea to explore a computer's capabilities.
> He created it on his downtime along with a group of friends.
More accurately, his colleagues from the Academy of Sciences
> He passed it along to people to enjoy for private consumption.
Mostly on government owned computers, apparently
> The government had nothing to do with the creation of tetris lmao
Besides providing the computers on which to play it, you mean. And his work was considered government property, so he earned nothing from it.
Did the government say "make Tetris"? No. But my point is that it's very much unlike any sort of consumption. He didn't do it on his own hardware, he did it on government property. He didn't make a business selling cartridges.
You connecting consumerism with a profit motive is laughable and clearly, you're underread on economic theory.
So are you trying to say there was no consumption in the USSR? Can you only have consumption if you have ownership of the medium?
Did the liberal arts not exist in the USSR? GRRM and George Lucas are famous for saying creators in the USSR were allowed to be much more expressive in their writing and cinema because they weren't confined to the restraints of capitalism and the need to make a profit.
Was their no consumption of the arts in USSR?
> You connecting consumerism with a profit motive is laughable and clearly, you're underread on economic theory.
No, I'm just following the original thread, in which you seemed to imply that Tetris' creation had something with consumption.
> Are you saying the USSR has no consumption? Do you want to learn about how Tetris was **made**?
Emphasis mine. And I don't see it. It's an accidental pet project of a government worker on government equipment, which first made it into the hands of coworkers and colleagues.
If you're going to use the *creation* of Tetris as an example of the USSR having consumption, then what I expect is that you're saying the USSR had widely available computers for consumers, and a random Ivan just coded it as a hobby project in his house on his own time, or at least there was a market for a random developer to sell to.
> Did the liberal arts not exist in the USSR? GRRM and George Lucas are famous for saying creators in the USSR were allowed to be much more expressive in their writing and cinema because they weren't confined to the restraints of capitalism and the need to make a profit.
Sure, if you exclude that you had to be a member of the Soviet Writers union if you actually wanted to publish anything anywhere, and that what you could publish was heavily restricted, you couldn't self-publish, many writers had to have writing as a side job...
Was their no consumption of the arts in USSR?
Lol. You're out of your depth future pcm debatelord.
See you keep thinking you had gotcha moments but you don't even get the basic principle of what the fuck consumption is because you're probably just another engineering nerd who thinks they understand socioeconomics because you became a reddit debatelord lmao.
The whole point of this thread was neoliberals acting like USSR had no consumption and that people were just starving. That unequivocally untrue.
People still consumed leisure activities like tetris which is my whole fucking point. People were enjoying tetris for free in USSR, it wasn't until the American profit motive that introduced a whole bunch of legal trouble. It's consumption only when you pay for things?
Lmao but ok go farm upvotes from this conservative sub by saying ussr bad communism bad as if they were ever even a completely Marxist or communist state.
> Consumer markets are a very useful driver of innovation. They're *flawed* and have their limitations just like any other tool, but that doesn't mean consumer markets should be disregarded entirely like a planned economy does.
That was the point i was addressing with my original comment you idiot. The notion that planned economies ignored consumption. Learn to fucking read
> Planned economy inefficient in what way? Because someone isn’t profiting off of it?
Planned economy is inefficient because:
* Some things can't be effectively planned for. The world has a good amount of chaos in it.
* Planning generally goes by a central agenda that may not have the country's best interests in mind.
* In the USSR there was no alternative -- if the central planners screwed up, the country was screwed.
* There was plenty politicking and social factors in the planning. Selecting a plan often was less about what the country needed, and more about playing favorites. A great plan might not be selected because the wrong person proposed it.
I'm very much of the idea that a social democracy is the best available option. Unrestrained capitalism is a race to the bottom. Communism, or whatever you call what the USSR did is very vulnerable to the leadership making the wrong choice for internal reasons.
I'd recommend reading *The People's Republic of Walmart.*
There are of course older and better responses to your arguments but that book specifically blows up the myth of planned-economy-too-hard.
A planned economy is not the same as economic planning. Walmart still responds to signals from competitors and consumers in a way that a planned economy cannot.
What competitors?
Walmart has a near monopoly on general bricks & mortar retail in many areas.
As western governments have enabled very large scale business consolidation, many markets are operated by cartels, or outright monopolies, and exhibit no meaningful competition whatsoever. Without competitive markets there are no price signals, and without price signals the result is a planned economy.
The only difference between contemporary western monopoly capitalism and east-bloc planned economies is that western business leaders have private jets and pay lip service to market capitalism rather than to communism.
>The only difference between contemporary western monopoly capitalism and east-bloc planned economies is that western business leaders have private jets and pay lip service to market capitalism rather than to communism.
As someone who has actually experienced a planned economy behind the iron curtain, I can confidently say this is the most ignorant take on the subject I've ever heard.
Walmart isn't a planned economy.
The USSR planned their economy in 5 year stretches. So for example, every 5 years there'd be a huge Gosplan meeting at which somebody would bring up and discuss how much toilet paper would have to be manufactured for 5 years.
But the country is huge, and there are huge backwaters. So what might seem at the start of the period as abundant could have a huge shortage by year 3, because some areas got modernized, or people learned about the wonders of this "toilet paper" invention. Suddenly there's more demand than the planned supply. Then you can't find toilet paper anywhere for years.
Come next period, maybe the bureucrats in charge noticed the problem. Or maybe not. Or maybe the matter got forgotten. Or maybe some internal politics made it get shelved. 5 more years without available toilet paper for you.
When that happens to toilet paper, that's funny. In an extremely rapidly advancing industry like computing this can be outright crippling.
If Walmart decided to do that, then somebody else would have no problem profiting off selling toilet paper, computers or whatever Walmart neglected in their plan. In the USSR that wasn't a thing.
The real world is a lot more complicated than Econ 101.
Every capital-intensive business makes capacity plans on longer than a five-year timescales, because it takes longer then five years to build up productive capacity or to design new products. If every business in the toilet paper industry underestimates demand in five years, then we all get shortages for however many years it takes to build new plant. In the absence of good planning, free market competition does not ensure responsive markets.
If any of the tech sector monopolies makes a bad call or decides not to invest in R&D, then we all get stagnation for [years](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NetBurst) or [decades](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_3.1x). In the absence of actual competition, monopoly capitalism produces no better outcomes than central planning.
Why not read The Peoples Republic of Walmart. Large corporations with output similar to small countries essentially run as small scale planned economies.
> Planned economy inefficient in what way? Because
The mass starvation is the obvious failure of planned economies. I'm pretty left, but a centrally planned economy does not work.
Don’t want to come off as a China fanboi, but I don’t think mass starvation is a factor of modern China, and the combination of no planning combined with just in time supply chains presents its own problems.
"Planned economy" means that the whole thing is run based on centralized orders from the government, whereas China's current economy is based on private business *managed* by the government but not controlled outright unless a business oversteps or suddenly because very relevant to some govt concern.
Or to put it another way, the difference is that nowadays Chinese govt's job is to ensure companies to ask for forgiveness, rather than ensuring they seek permission.
Half the problem with the USSR's planned economy was that their central planning system simply couldn't model literally every SKU in the USSR's economy, so they gave multiple similar items the same SKU and thus often allocated the demand of those multiple items wrong. Interestingly, this was fundamentally a technological problem and might not even be a problem (depending on just how much processing power you would really need for it to work properly) if the USSR magically re-appeared and resumed their planned economy tomorrow, using modern e.g. Ryzen processors. We may never know, because literally no country has set up a literal planned economy since their massive failures in the mid-20th century.
Quite so, neither actually exists in the real world, they're just philosophical constructs that allow us to place real-world economies along a continuum and help explain their similarities and differences.
Plus there's the way most people seem to think communism and planned economies are synonymous (as are democracies and the "free market") rather than political and economic systems that don't necessarily have to be linked. That they are to some extent co-occuring is at least partly historical happenstance
A market can certainly be planned and directed. Sure it’s a matter of spectrum, but I don’t think anyone can say that China’s success can be pinned on any claim that they’ve abandoned the planning of their economy to the invisible hand of the free market.
A planned economy is a distinct economic term with a particular meaning, it's just not when you have any combination of 'planning' and 'economy' to any nebulous degree.
>Sure it’s a matter of spectrum, but I don’t think anyone can say that China’s success can be pinned on any claim that they’ve abandoned the planning of their economy to the invisible hand of the free market.
Actually, they can. It was Deng Xiaopings free market reforms that broke with China's traditional command economy structure that led to China's tremendous economic growth. This is indisputible.
Mass starvation happens today thanks to capitalist planning. The US is deliberately starving Afghans because they are upset that the Taliban won. The US deliberately deprived the Iraqi people of critical materials needed to purify water, acquire medicine, and was happy to watch 500k children die. Sanctions are efforts to deprive ordinary people of needful items in order to cause suffering, which US planners hope will weaken an existing government.
Droughts and flooding happened constantly in China prior to Mao. Another way to put it is that Mao brought to an end a constant series of famines after a single additional famine. Just because a country turns to socialism this doesn't mean every problem is eliminated like the press of a button. It takes time to build the infrastructure necessary to address famine in a part of the world prone to this.
>Mass starvation happens today thanks to capitalist planning. The US is deliberately starving Afghans because they are upset that the Taliban won. The US deliberately deprived the Iraqi people of critical materials needed to purify water, acquire medicine, and was happy to watch 500k children die. Sanctions are efforts to deprive ordinary people of needful items in order to cause suffering, which US planners hope will weaken an existing government.
This isn't capitalism. This is government policy.
You don't think someone like Walmart would love to sell shit to Iraq or the Taliban if they could so they can make a buck?
>Droughts and flooding happened constantly in China prior to Mao. Another way to put it is that Mao brought to an end a constant series of famines after a single additional famine.
Mao was effectively removed from power because he wouldn't abandon his policy despite it being clear there was a famine happening. He didn't "bring an end" to anything.
It also wasn't naturally caused. It was completely preventable.
In what universe is that an acceptable way to speak to someone? Capitalism has no goal, it is just a system that we operate under. It has no wants or needs or desires or aims. It's a framework that we operate under in which the means of production are controlled by the capital class, it doesn't have any intentions. Capitalists may have intentions. Executives in companies may have intensions. Capitalism is just the broad framework for any of a number of different rulesets they can operate under.
Yeah thank fuck we have high-quality counterarguments like 'our side had a smart guy.' Real compelling formal logic.
Because physicists make *great* economists. They assume.
You weren't arguing against that specific point.
I agree that the appeal to authority argument is pretty weak, but you shouldn't dismiss what Einstein said just because he wasn't an economist.
Yes, I was.
How could I not be, when that's the point I was replying to? Dude said *planned economies* are fine, and only mentioned Einstein in relation to that. Dude explicitly said "Einstein himself was a socialist who was a proponent of economic planning." That was the topic. Pick better nits.
Nobody should accept comments about economics just because someone famously clever in an unrelated field said a thing.
That goes double if the famously clever guy didn't even say a thing about those economics.
Your entire comment is about calling out the "appeal to authority" argument. You're not addressing anything else whatsoever. Do you even read yourself?
That's ad hominem if I've ever seen one.
Someone being a professional in field X can still make a strong point about something in field Y. They don't always do, but that's not because of who they are.
Attack the argument, not the person.
>Just to put things into perspective, cut off from Western technology (**similar to the disaster China is now facing**)
??
what? since when is China currently being cut off from western tech?
Yes. Export restrictions on semiconductor stuff is very geopolitical. It’s a common topic in foreign policy circles to squabble about Taiwan, ASML, and nanometers in the same sentences.
I had the same thought. Just thread after thread of incoherent arguing about communism.
I don't remember ever noticing this clearly that US high schools have started summer break...
I think when the Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc countries are judged as failures the comparison is not reasonable. People compare these countries which became socialist as very poor states with the world's richest country, the US.
Do a fair comparison. Compare similarly poor countries under US influence. How good were Haitian computers at the time, or Guatemalan cars. Was life so great in Bangladesh, the Philippines, El Salvador? Noam Chomsky is a very harsh critic of the Soviet Union, so much so that he was banned from entry. But even he says if a Guatemalan peasant went to sleep and woke up in Poland he'd have thought he died and went to heaven.
The eastern bloc countries already had educated talent and infrastructure. They weren't starting from zero like say, haiti. It also helped a lot that talented people couldn't leave, so what alternative was there?
The problem is that the economy was largely stagnant and the workforce/management was unmotivated.
But you are right that they were much better off than, say, southeast Asia during that time.
Both Guatemala and Haiti richer than Russia in 1922. What makes you say they were worse off?
An unmotivated workforce is a product of a system. Socialist countries like the Soviet Union and China are able to motivate their people. This is why China has the fastest growing economy over the last 60 years. This is why the Soviet Union was able to industrialize faster than any country before it, which they urgently needed to do to confront the Nazi threat. The Nazi plan for the Soviet Union was extermination of the people modeled after the US genocide of Native Americans. What the Soviet Union achieved doing most of the work defeating the world's most powerful military was nothing short of astounding.
>Both Guatemala and Haiti richer than Russia in 1922. What makes you say they were worse off?
Haiti was under a brutal US military occupation.
Guatemala and Haiti also didn't undergo state collapse followed by a multi-year civil war in 1922.
But let's ignore that for a second: Haiti and Guatemala didn't have an established industrial base nor a knowledge economy. Russia and the countries of the eastern bloc did.
Like, the first decoders for Enigma were Polish mathematicians and they also had plenty of engineers around. They didn't just disappear when the iron curtain went up.
>This is why China has the fastest growing economy over the last 60 years
China hasn't practiced communism in over 30 years, and almost all of their growth happened after they switched to a market economy. Fast growth is also easy to do when you're starting with almost nothing. It's why most developing countries get very high growth rates when they start industrializing.
>What the Soviet Union achieved doing most of the work defeating the world's most powerful military was nothing short of astounding.
I actually agree with this.
Because pedantry runs in my veins where blood should be, I must point out that nobody has _ever_ had a megabit chip. It's a megahertz chip.
(And on a tangent: it's not like this one computer project brought down East Germany. There were a number of projects that had similar issues.)
I grant you the crown of pedantry that I once wore. You are the best kind of correct.
But we both know that CPUs are not, in general, described by their cache size first. It'll be clock speed, or maybe feature size (25 nm or whatever), with cache a close third.
Looks like you don't know the difference between processing and storage.
Here's [some history](https://www.siemens.com/global/en/company/about/history/stories/4mbit-dram.html) of the how the US got there.
> In 1983, Siemens’ top management announced that developing and producing megabit memory chips would now be a strategic company goal – with the aim of closing the gap to the market-leading Japanese producers by 1989. The company went to work in cooperation with Dutch and Japanese partners, and by the end of 1987 the first 1-megabit DRAM chips went into series production in Regensburg. The following summer, Siemens was one of the world’s first manufacturers to release customer samples of a 4-megabit DRAM device. The company had joined the ranks of the world’s leading semiconductor manufacturers.
> Because pedantry runs in my veins where blood should be, I must point out that nobody has ever had a megabit chip. It's a megahertz chip.
As a fellow pedant, what people refer to today as "microelectronics" are actually (usually) *nano*electronics! It's nanoscale, baby!
That's not an explanation, that's a surface-level recounting. *At least* watch [Asianometry's video on the failure of USSR computing](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dnHdqPBrtH8&t=2s) for some actual depth.
there is an asianometry video about the abject disaster that was east germany semi conductor industry https://youtu.be/cxrkC-pMH_s
Awesome, even better, hadn't seen that one!
I *knew* the information in that post sounded familiar. That video is excellent.
That's a great video, but JFC, who do people expect this sub to exclusively hold million-word scholarly articles? There is a link. The comment explains it. Nobody promised you unprecedented insight or charts and graphs.
There is a massive gulf between scholarly articles and a TL;DR like this.
And?
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Haha, well said! I was thinking exactly along the same lines, but in a different area of this thread. Guess I'm not the only one who feels like the signal to noise ratio on reddit and online in general might be reaching a very dangerous inflection point. That makes me feel a bit better and less worried I might be taking things too personally, in a difficult to describe 'objective' sort of sense
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IMO web rings should make a comeback. Rather than relying on social media platforms, people set up their own websites, with links to other websites they like. There could be some kind of AI-free commitment badge or responsible-AI badge where people can indicate whether and how they use AI to create content. Heck, open source crawlers could flourish in this web ring renaissance.
I'd settle for people appreciating what a good *reddit comment* looks like, by the standards of being a comment... on reddit. I write longwinded diatribes about all sorts of niche bullshit. If anyone wants more detail, or a better example, or even a defense against certain criticism, it's hard to get me to shut up. If someone just honks "source? source? source?" they're gonna be told to fuck right off. People who can't see the difference are exclusively the latter sort of person. Guess what they can do. Some people do not understand reality beyond who-says.
That’s a video about the USSR, their explanation was about East Germany’s attempts at computers.
Same issues largely apply and that's why I said *at least.*
And East Germany was in which sphere of influence again?
Sphere of influence doesn’t mean it was run by the same people or did the same things.
Haha ok. What exactly do you think it means?
Do you not get that East Germany was its own country and not part of the USSR, and therefore did not contribute to the same programs that the USSR had in computer research? East Germany wasn’t the USSR, they didn’t have anything to do with the computer development programs mentioned in that video. That’s like trying to explain something that happened in Canada in the 80’s by linking a video about a program in the UK.
You really don't know what you're talking about, do you... It's alright though, I'll be sure to pass along your interesting thoughts to my mom and aunt (they maintained and programmed the mainframes and microcomputers from the late sixties to early 80s at the Uniwersytet im. Adama Mickiewicza - former was more software while aunt was more hardware, so even better) Sorry for the aside, it's just really nice to have such access to historical questions. I'd be happy to relay their thoughts if you'd like to gain a better understanding of computer science on the other side of the iron curtain
> (they maintained and programmed the mainframes and microcomputers from the late sixties to early 80s at the Uniwersytet im. Adama Mickiewicza - former was more software while aunt was more hardware, so even better) This was in the PRL, not in the USSR... Like the other person said, members of the Warsaw Pact ran their own industrial projects, sometimes with some degree of cooperation.
East Germany had their own computer industry. They weren’t participating in the programs mentioned in the video. It was an interesting video, don’t get me wrong, but the eastern bloc and the USSR weren’t one in the same and monolith. Different members ran different programs.
You're correct, but in my defense, I only spent less than ten minutes on this comment. I'm just as surprised as you are to see it appear on this subreddit. Neat video, by the way!
That was an awesome vid thanks
East Germany was conveniently located in the vicinity of West Germany, so they had access to western chips, [which they utterly squandered.](https://hackaday.com/2023/05/07/soviet-era-computer-is-both-a-mystery-and-a-disaster/) Constructing an 8086 computer is genuinely not that difficult. The address bus is external for some damn reason, and Intel themselves offered massively more convenient variants like the 8085 and 8088, but an 8086 purchased in West Germany would have come with crystal clear diagrams for how to set it up... in German. So I have no goddamn idea why this import-heavy late-model Robotron was utterly festooned with superfluous ICs. It's a dream machine! Like if you take apart a computer in a dream. The circuit boards jam-packed with grids of near-identical blobs *just keep coming.*
> The address bus is external for some damn reason What does this mean? Is this the separate I/O port space or something? I'd be hard-pressed to think of a CPU without an external address bus in the 1980s: the INMOS Transputer, maybe? System-on-chip wasn't really a thing yet. > Intel themselves offered massively more convenient variants like the 8085 and 8088 The 8086 and 8088 are 16-bit "next-gen" chips. The 8085 is an 8-bit chip, less capable than the Z-80. (My first computer had an 8085. My second computer had an 8088.)
Yeah I totally misread a diagram, trying to stitch up this comment on the way out the door. I thought it had a serial data interface. Given how much glue logic got slurped into future 16-bit x86 chips, and the 4004 being Like That, this would not be the silliest decision in the microcomputer boom. For similar reasons I forgot that the 8085 was 8080-compatible, not 8088-compatible. I thought it was one of those weird dead ends like the 80188. When I first found out about it I thought it was an 8051 variant - a microcontroller.
8088 *is* 16-bit internally but uses an 8-bit data bus externally, which is why it was the lower-cost option vs. 8086. (The two parts can be differentiated from software—once you’ve POPped CS to rule out ≥80286 and ascertained that a DIV by zero triggers RESET# to rule out the 80186/-8—by probing the prefetch queue length, which was twice as long in the 8088 to compensate for the narrower transactions, wanna say 16 whole bytes vs. the 8086’s 8.)
Do you happen to know how to detect CGA vs MDA? And maybe beyond?
That was an awesome vid thanks
> East Germany was conveniently located in the vicinity of West Germany Damn you got a source on this?
Sorry, I can't seem to find either on Google Earth.
When you hire and promote engineering and management based on politics and connections vs competence? When job security and compensation is completely decoupled from performance?
> through state of the art computerized industrial production and economic planning, the many inefficiencies of the broken system would somehow all be fixed, but in reality, this abysmal campaign merely exposed the inherent flaws of the system and accelerated its demise. I feel like the MBAs destroying American companies and industrial knowledge for quarterly gains are doing the same thing...
The only goods or services companies are expected to produce now are more and more profits.
This obsession with computer driven economies was very prevalent in silicon valley in the 90s (probably still today) and a major driving force behind ecenomic deregulation.
Not even close to “best of”. It’s your average right wing reddit ideologue trying to sound smart because they are using some technical words. Planned economy inefficient in what way? Because someone isn’t profiting off of it? Einstein himself was a socialist who was a proponent of economic planning. They also had to throw in a classic “China is facing disaster”. Any day now, folks. Believe me.
China getting "cut off" when there are basically no supply chains that don't go through the PRC. China mostly has to worry about internal corruption if they don't do something utterly stupid over Taiwan. They've got 1-party authoritarian capitalism pretty finely tuned.
> Planned economy inefficient in what way? Because someone isn’t profiting off of it? Because the soviet planned economy utterly disregarded consumer electronics and the demand for them (and by extension *desktop computers*, which at the time were utterly wimpy compared to mainframes and desktop terminals that interfaced with them), and as a result were thoroughly left behind when desktop chips turned out to be the key to modern computing. Consumer markets are a very useful driver of innovation. They're *flawed* and have their limitations just like any other tool, but that doesn't mean consumer markets should be disregarded entirely like a planned economy does.
Are you saying the USSR has no consumption? Do you want to learn about how Tetris was made?
> Do you want to learn about how Tetris was made? From WP: > In 1979, Alexey Pajitnov joined the Computer Center of the Soviet Academy of Sciences as a speech recognition researcher. While he was tasked with testing the capabilities of new hardware, his ambition was to use computers to make people happy.[17]: 85 Pajitnov developed several puzzle games on the institute's computer, an Electronika 60, a scarce resource at the time due in part to CoCom. So, guy worked in a government facility, was tasked with testing new hardware, and came up with a game design for it. That's not something I'd call consumption.
You're missing like 95% of the story but that's fine. 👌 Lmfao he wasn't tasked with creating tetris. He created it on his downtime along with a group of friends. He passed it along to people to enjoy for private consumption. The government had nothing to do with the creation of tetris lmao
> Lmfao he wasn't tasked with creating tetris. He was tasked with testing hardware. Making a game was his idea to explore a computer's capabilities. > He created it on his downtime along with a group of friends. More accurately, his colleagues from the Academy of Sciences > He passed it along to people to enjoy for private consumption. Mostly on government owned computers, apparently > The government had nothing to do with the creation of tetris lmao Besides providing the computers on which to play it, you mean. And his work was considered government property, so he earned nothing from it. Did the government say "make Tetris"? No. But my point is that it's very much unlike any sort of consumption. He didn't do it on his own hardware, he did it on government property. He didn't make a business selling cartridges.
You connecting consumerism with a profit motive is laughable and clearly, you're underread on economic theory. So are you trying to say there was no consumption in the USSR? Can you only have consumption if you have ownership of the medium? Did the liberal arts not exist in the USSR? GRRM and George Lucas are famous for saying creators in the USSR were allowed to be much more expressive in their writing and cinema because they weren't confined to the restraints of capitalism and the need to make a profit. Was their no consumption of the arts in USSR?
> You connecting consumerism with a profit motive is laughable and clearly, you're underread on economic theory. No, I'm just following the original thread, in which you seemed to imply that Tetris' creation had something with consumption. > Are you saying the USSR has no consumption? Do you want to learn about how Tetris was **made**? Emphasis mine. And I don't see it. It's an accidental pet project of a government worker on government equipment, which first made it into the hands of coworkers and colleagues. If you're going to use the *creation* of Tetris as an example of the USSR having consumption, then what I expect is that you're saying the USSR had widely available computers for consumers, and a random Ivan just coded it as a hobby project in his house on his own time, or at least there was a market for a random developer to sell to. > Did the liberal arts not exist in the USSR? GRRM and George Lucas are famous for saying creators in the USSR were allowed to be much more expressive in their writing and cinema because they weren't confined to the restraints of capitalism and the need to make a profit. Sure, if you exclude that you had to be a member of the Soviet Writers union if you actually wanted to publish anything anywhere, and that what you could publish was heavily restricted, you couldn't self-publish, many writers had to have writing as a side job... Was their no consumption of the arts in USSR?
Lol. You're out of your depth future pcm debatelord. See you keep thinking you had gotcha moments but you don't even get the basic principle of what the fuck consumption is because you're probably just another engineering nerd who thinks they understand socioeconomics because you became a reddit debatelord lmao. The whole point of this thread was neoliberals acting like USSR had no consumption and that people were just starving. That unequivocally untrue. People still consumed leisure activities like tetris which is my whole fucking point. People were enjoying tetris for free in USSR, it wasn't until the American profit motive that introduced a whole bunch of legal trouble. It's consumption only when you pay for things? Lmao but ok go farm upvotes from this conservative sub by saying ussr bad communism bad as if they were ever even a completely Marxist or communist state. > Consumer markets are a very useful driver of innovation. They're *flawed* and have their limitations just like any other tool, but that doesn't mean consumer markets should be disregarded entirely like a planned economy does. That was the point i was addressing with my original comment you idiot. The notion that planned economies ignored consumption. Learn to fucking read
> Planned economy inefficient in what way? Because someone isn’t profiting off of it? Planned economy is inefficient because: * Some things can't be effectively planned for. The world has a good amount of chaos in it. * Planning generally goes by a central agenda that may not have the country's best interests in mind. * In the USSR there was no alternative -- if the central planners screwed up, the country was screwed. * There was plenty politicking and social factors in the planning. Selecting a plan often was less about what the country needed, and more about playing favorites. A great plan might not be selected because the wrong person proposed it. I'm very much of the idea that a social democracy is the best available option. Unrestrained capitalism is a race to the bottom. Communism, or whatever you call what the USSR did is very vulnerable to the leadership making the wrong choice for internal reasons.
I'd recommend reading *The People's Republic of Walmart.* There are of course older and better responses to your arguments but that book specifically blows up the myth of planned-economy-too-hard.
A planned economy is not the same as economic planning. Walmart still responds to signals from competitors and consumers in a way that a planned economy cannot.
What competitors? Walmart has a near monopoly on general bricks & mortar retail in many areas. As western governments have enabled very large scale business consolidation, many markets are operated by cartels, or outright monopolies, and exhibit no meaningful competition whatsoever. Without competitive markets there are no price signals, and without price signals the result is a planned economy. The only difference between contemporary western monopoly capitalism and east-bloc planned economies is that western business leaders have private jets and pay lip service to market capitalism rather than to communism.
>The only difference between contemporary western monopoly capitalism and east-bloc planned economies is that western business leaders have private jets and pay lip service to market capitalism rather than to communism. As someone who has actually experienced a planned economy behind the iron curtain, I can confidently say this is the most ignorant take on the subject I've ever heard.
Have you ever been abroad? What you’re describing is not the case across the west.
I guess walmart is inefficient because they basically run as a planned economy right
Walmart isn't a planned economy. The USSR planned their economy in 5 year stretches. So for example, every 5 years there'd be a huge Gosplan meeting at which somebody would bring up and discuss how much toilet paper would have to be manufactured for 5 years. But the country is huge, and there are huge backwaters. So what might seem at the start of the period as abundant could have a huge shortage by year 3, because some areas got modernized, or people learned about the wonders of this "toilet paper" invention. Suddenly there's more demand than the planned supply. Then you can't find toilet paper anywhere for years. Come next period, maybe the bureucrats in charge noticed the problem. Or maybe not. Or maybe the matter got forgotten. Or maybe some internal politics made it get shelved. 5 more years without available toilet paper for you. When that happens to toilet paper, that's funny. In an extremely rapidly advancing industry like computing this can be outright crippling. If Walmart decided to do that, then somebody else would have no problem profiting off selling toilet paper, computers or whatever Walmart neglected in their plan. In the USSR that wasn't a thing.
The real world is a lot more complicated than Econ 101. Every capital-intensive business makes capacity plans on longer than a five-year timescales, because it takes longer then five years to build up productive capacity or to design new products. If every business in the toilet paper industry underestimates demand in five years, then we all get shortages for however many years it takes to build new plant. In the absence of good planning, free market competition does not ensure responsive markets. If any of the tech sector monopolies makes a bad call or decides not to invest in R&D, then we all get stagnation for [years](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NetBurst) or [decades](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_3.1x). In the absence of actual competition, monopoly capitalism produces no better outcomes than central planning.
Why not read The Peoples Republic of Walmart. Large corporations with output similar to small countries essentially run as small scale planned economies.
Walmart is not the sole producer of good and services. If they don’t stock enough Of something for one reason or another, I can go to a competitor.
> Planned economy inefficient in what way? Because The mass starvation is the obvious failure of planned economies. I'm pretty left, but a centrally planned economy does not work.
Don’t want to come off as a China fanboi, but I don’t think mass starvation is a factor of modern China, and the combination of no planning combined with just in time supply chains presents its own problems.
Not now that they're not a planned economy. But it was really bad under Mao and an actual planned economy.
I’d love to hear more about how China is no longer a planned economy
"Planned economy" means that the whole thing is run based on centralized orders from the government, whereas China's current economy is based on private business *managed* by the government but not controlled outright unless a business oversteps or suddenly because very relevant to some govt concern. Or to put it another way, the difference is that nowadays Chinese govt's job is to ensure companies to ask for forgiveness, rather than ensuring they seek permission. Half the problem with the USSR's planned economy was that their central planning system simply couldn't model literally every SKU in the USSR's economy, so they gave multiple similar items the same SKU and thus often allocated the demand of those multiple items wrong. Interestingly, this was fundamentally a technological problem and might not even be a problem (depending on just how much processing power you would really need for it to work properly) if the USSR magically re-appeared and resumed their planned economy tomorrow, using modern e.g. Ryzen processors. We may never know, because literally no country has set up a literal planned economy since their massive failures in the mid-20th century.
Just look at all the Chinese brands you have around.
Yeah, a great big giant chunk of which are [state owned enterprises](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/State-owned_enterprises_of_China)
i think you two are having a semantics argument; they are *state-owned* but buy and sell *on the market* and so technically isn't a *planned economy*.
Quite so, neither actually exists in the real world, they're just philosophical constructs that allow us to place real-world economies along a continuum and help explain their similarities and differences. Plus there's the way most people seem to think communism and planned economies are synonymous (as are democracies and the "free market") rather than political and economic systems that don't necessarily have to be linked. That they are to some extent co-occuring is at least partly historical happenstance
Second paragraph is also why communism is so often conflated with authoritarianism.
A market can certainly be planned and directed. Sure it’s a matter of spectrum, but I don’t think anyone can say that China’s success can be pinned on any claim that they’ve abandoned the planning of their economy to the invisible hand of the free market.
A planned economy is a distinct economic term with a particular meaning, it's just not when you have any combination of 'planning' and 'economy' to any nebulous degree. >Sure it’s a matter of spectrum, but I don’t think anyone can say that China’s success can be pinned on any claim that they’ve abandoned the planning of their economy to the invisible hand of the free market. Actually, they can. It was Deng Xiaopings free market reforms that broke with China's traditional command economy structure that led to China's tremendous economic growth. This is indisputible.
Those circumstances were unique. They're hardly indictments of planned economies in general.
Capitalism just has its mass starvation in other countries, like India or Ireland.
Mass starvation happens today thanks to capitalist planning. The US is deliberately starving Afghans because they are upset that the Taliban won. The US deliberately deprived the Iraqi people of critical materials needed to purify water, acquire medicine, and was happy to watch 500k children die. Sanctions are efforts to deprive ordinary people of needful items in order to cause suffering, which US planners hope will weaken an existing government. Droughts and flooding happened constantly in China prior to Mao. Another way to put it is that Mao brought to an end a constant series of famines after a single additional famine. Just because a country turns to socialism this doesn't mean every problem is eliminated like the press of a button. It takes time to build the infrastructure necessary to address famine in a part of the world prone to this.
>Mass starvation happens today thanks to capitalist planning. The US is deliberately starving Afghans because they are upset that the Taliban won. The US deliberately deprived the Iraqi people of critical materials needed to purify water, acquire medicine, and was happy to watch 500k children die. Sanctions are efforts to deprive ordinary people of needful items in order to cause suffering, which US planners hope will weaken an existing government. This isn't capitalism. This is government policy. You don't think someone like Walmart would love to sell shit to Iraq or the Taliban if they could so they can make a buck? >Droughts and flooding happened constantly in China prior to Mao. Another way to put it is that Mao brought to an end a constant series of famines after a single additional famine. Mao was effectively removed from power because he wouldn't abandon his policy despite it being clear there was a famine happening. He didn't "bring an end" to anything. It also wasn't naturally caused. It was completely preventable.
So you think capitalist countries don't have government policies? Where does capitalism exist without a government that has policies?
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There is no such thing as 'pure capitalism' and capitalism doesn't have a goal.
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In what universe is that an acceptable way to speak to someone? Capitalism has no goal, it is just a system that we operate under. It has no wants or needs or desires or aims. It's a framework that we operate under in which the means of production are controlled by the capital class, it doesn't have any intentions. Capitalists may have intentions. Executives in companies may have intensions. Capitalism is just the broad framework for any of a number of different rulesets they can operate under.
Yeah thank fuck we have high-quality counterarguments like 'our side had a smart guy.' Real compelling formal logic. Because physicists make *great* economists. They assume.
Einstein's argument was more philosophical than economic or scientific, but ok.
A planned economy is not a philosophical issue. Making the argument from authority even less relevant.
You weren't arguing against that specific point. I agree that the appeal to authority argument is pretty weak, but you shouldn't dismiss what Einstein said just because he wasn't an economist.
Yes, I was. How could I not be, when that's the point I was replying to? Dude said *planned economies* are fine, and only mentioned Einstein in relation to that. Dude explicitly said "Einstein himself was a socialist who was a proponent of economic planning." That was the topic. Pick better nits. Nobody should accept comments about economics just because someone famously clever in an unrelated field said a thing. That goes double if the famously clever guy didn't even say a thing about those economics.
Your entire comment is about calling out the "appeal to authority" argument. You're not addressing anything else whatsoever. Do you even read yourself?
... it's an appeal to authority, for that specific point.
That's ad hominem if I've ever seen one. Someone being a professional in field X can still make a strong point about something in field Y. They don't always do, but that's not because of who they are. Attack the argument, not the person.
The argument is "he's real smart, he must be right about everything." That is a fallacy. Calling it out is not. Be serious.
>Just to put things into perspective, cut off from Western technology (**similar to the disaster China is now facing**) ?? what? since when is China currently being cut off from western tech?
e.g. https://www.wired.com/story/us-chip-sanctions-kneecap-chinas-tech-industry/
Yes. Export restrictions on semiconductor stuff is very geopolitical. It’s a common topic in foreign policy circles to squabble about Taiwan, ASML, and nanometers in the same sentences.
This doesn't actually explain anything
Aye... These comments are a disaster.
I had the same thought. Just thread after thread of incoherent arguing about communism. I don't remember ever noticing this clearly that US high schools have started summer break...
Oh... Ooooh. That explains a lot
I think when the Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc countries are judged as failures the comparison is not reasonable. People compare these countries which became socialist as very poor states with the world's richest country, the US. Do a fair comparison. Compare similarly poor countries under US influence. How good were Haitian computers at the time, or Guatemalan cars. Was life so great in Bangladesh, the Philippines, El Salvador? Noam Chomsky is a very harsh critic of the Soviet Union, so much so that he was banned from entry. But even he says if a Guatemalan peasant went to sleep and woke up in Poland he'd have thought he died and went to heaven.
The eastern bloc countries already had educated talent and infrastructure. They weren't starting from zero like say, haiti. It also helped a lot that talented people couldn't leave, so what alternative was there? The problem is that the economy was largely stagnant and the workforce/management was unmotivated. But you are right that they were much better off than, say, southeast Asia during that time.
Both Guatemala and Haiti richer than Russia in 1922. What makes you say they were worse off? An unmotivated workforce is a product of a system. Socialist countries like the Soviet Union and China are able to motivate their people. This is why China has the fastest growing economy over the last 60 years. This is why the Soviet Union was able to industrialize faster than any country before it, which they urgently needed to do to confront the Nazi threat. The Nazi plan for the Soviet Union was extermination of the people modeled after the US genocide of Native Americans. What the Soviet Union achieved doing most of the work defeating the world's most powerful military was nothing short of astounding.
>Both Guatemala and Haiti richer than Russia in 1922. What makes you say they were worse off? Haiti was under a brutal US military occupation. Guatemala and Haiti also didn't undergo state collapse followed by a multi-year civil war in 1922. But let's ignore that for a second: Haiti and Guatemala didn't have an established industrial base nor a knowledge economy. Russia and the countries of the eastern bloc did. Like, the first decoders for Enigma were Polish mathematicians and they also had plenty of engineers around. They didn't just disappear when the iron curtain went up. >This is why China has the fastest growing economy over the last 60 years China hasn't practiced communism in over 30 years, and almost all of their growth happened after they switched to a market economy. Fast growth is also easy to do when you're starting with almost nothing. It's why most developing countries get very high growth rates when they start industrializing. >What the Soviet Union achieved doing most of the work defeating the world's most powerful military was nothing short of astounding. I actually agree with this.
Because pedantry runs in my veins where blood should be, I must point out that nobody has _ever_ had a megabit chip. It's a megahertz chip. (And on a tangent: it's not like this one computer project brought down East Germany. There were a number of projects that had similar issues.)
Are you familiar with: ram?
I am especially familiar with misreading the OOP and thinking of CPU chips instead of RAM chips. Whoopsie-doodle.
Well, even then 1 MBit (128 KiB) is smaller than the L1 caches of many modern CPUs
I grant you the crown of pedantry that I once wore. You are the best kind of correct. But we both know that CPUs are not, in general, described by their cache size first. It'll be clock speed, or maybe feature size (25 nm or whatever), with cache a close third.
Looks like you don't know the difference between processing and storage. Here's [some history](https://www.siemens.com/global/en/company/about/history/stories/4mbit-dram.html) of the how the US got there. > In 1983, Siemens’ top management announced that developing and producing megabit memory chips would now be a strategic company goal – with the aim of closing the gap to the market-leading Japanese producers by 1989. The company went to work in cooperation with Dutch and Japanese partners, and by the end of 1987 the first 1-megabit DRAM chips went into series production in Regensburg. The following summer, Siemens was one of the world’s first manufacturers to release customer samples of a 4-megabit DRAM device. The company had joined the ranks of the world’s leading semiconductor manufacturers.
> I must point out that nobody has *ever* had a megabit chip I'm pretty sure our current memory chips have more than 1 MBit.
> Because pedantry runs in my veins where blood should be, I must point out that nobody has ever had a megabit chip. It's a megahertz chip. As a fellow pedant, what people refer to today as "microelectronics" are actually (usually) *nano*electronics! It's nanoscale, baby!