The Personal Computer Revolution Behind the Iron Curtain 115
szczys writes Obviously the personal computer revolution was world-wide, but the Eastern Bloc countries had a story of PC evolution all their own. Martin Malý tells first hand of his experiences seeing black market imports, locally built clones of popular western machines, and all kinds of home-built equipment. From the article: "The biggest problem was a lack of modern technologies. There were a lot of skilled and clever people in eastern countries, but they had a lot of problems with the elementary technical things. Manufacturing of electronics parts was divided into diverse countries of Comecon – The Council for Mutual Economic Assistance. In reality, it led to an absurd situation: You could buy the eastern copy of Z80 (made in Eastern Germany as U880D), but you couldn’t buy 74LS00 at the same time. Yes, a lot of manufacturers made it, but 'it is out of stock now; try to ask next year.' So 'make a computer' meant 50 percent of electronics skills and 50 percent of unofficial social network and knowledge like 'I know a guy who knows a guy and his neighbor works in a factory, where they maybe have a material for PCBs' at those times."
I really don't fucking care (Score:2, Funny)
I just want another Bennett Haselton contribution
We're so far from that now! (Score:2)
Re:We're so far from that now! (Score:4, Insightful)
And sometimes the chips are even genuine!
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Too bad the same magic that throws up things like that cant throw up a few hundred of the obsolete Knowles speaker the Neo900 project has been trying to source (or the other hard-to-get components that project has a need for)
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Care to explain why they are "not supposed to be publicly available"?
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Example: Last year (or maybe 2012) I got an unused N900 by jumping through various hoops with the remains of Nokia but the Neo900 project can't just buy the remaining stock of unused phones and parts due to various bullshit that's the nature of the industry and not just Nokia. Making an offer is ignored, you've got to have a "valid" reason even if the hardware is otherwise jsut waiting to bec
Re:We're so far from that now! (Score:5, Interesting)
Back in those days, start of the art technology in CPU's were "restricted exports". The USA wanted to show that Communism didn't lead to as many advancements in technology as Capitalism, so they restricted exports on technology such as chip design software, CPU's and other chip logic (remember the A-team trying to block smugglers exporting flip-flop chips? It was that serious). This led to the Eastern European countries doing various work-arounds. They could get gray imports through third-party countries that weren't part of the Western trade block, and weren't part of the USSR either. Or they could set up fake companies in the host country that would export the technology.
Another strategy was to make their own logic chips. However, yields for complex logic such as CPU's, wasn't that good, so they ended up with CPU's with missing instructions. But that wasn't a problem, mathematician/software engineers figured out ways of emulating broken instructions using other instructions. If JMP was broken, then use CLR; BCC. Arithmetic operations like ADD could be replaced by NEG and SUB, and so on... So they ended up with an abstraction layer using assembler macros that provided a set of functioning instructions.
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What's that got to do with XBox 360 GPUs?
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True, true. With ADHD it's easy to get sidetracked when you ... oh, look, a dog with a puffy tail!
'it is out of stock now; try to ask next year.' (Score:1, Insightful)
And academic leftists wonder why Communism collapsed...
"But we can do it the Right Way!!!" Yeah, sure, bud, because (modern) Liberal Arts professors have soooo much experience outside the Ivory Tower...
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Re:'it is out of stock now; try to ask next year.' (Score:5, Informative)
Most leftist academics believe that the argument of what should be government-provided versus what should be laissez-faire is the crux, and it's finding a balance. Anyone so leftist as to seek true communism is as unrealistic as anyone thinking that complete capitalism without government moderation of the market would work. Both are fantasies. Both get subsumed into oligarchies or dictatorships in some fashion or another without counter-forces to keep them in check.
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and once kids are out of school and have reached the age of majority then no one is required to care about what happens to them anymore.
Then what should society do with adults whose disabilities interfere with working or with finding a job?
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Same with kids in schools; the staff care about the kids because they're being paid to care about those kids. If they weren't being paid, there'd be a lot less paying attention to those kids' interests.
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Someone is required to care about those people only because the State has decided that someone has to care about those people.
Do you disagree with the State's decision that someone has to care about those people? If so, what would you do with them instead? And how would you cope if you were one?
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you're in a loop. teachers get paid because someone cares.
socialism isn't about reducing everything to the lowest common denominator, but about raising common denominator as much as possible. same as capitalism, actually, which hopes that wealth and wellbeing will automatically multiply with individual ambition, whereas socialism intends to rationally drive the process. and you're right, pure communism and pure capitalism fail for the very same reasons: individualism and greed. however, one difference is t
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As a group, we agree, that 'we' care, but rather than impose that someone take responsibility, we entice someone to take responsibility through salary. We pay them to care.
Would you be the first? (Score:2)
If you discovered you had such a disability, would you step up to be euthanized?
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Communism will work. As soon as man prefers working to earning money.
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And that won't ever happen.
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Well, that depends on what you consider a guaranteed secure future. Having everything you ever want forever? Nope. Mostly because we do not have unlimited resources (yet, let's wait for energy-matter conversion). Basically that's why we're in the current economic crisis, because we noticed that it's impossible for us to maintain a luxury living standard for everyone, so to secure the luxury living standard of the upper crust the plebs have to be pushed back down.
Re:'it is out of stock now; try to ask next year.' (Score:5, Interesting)
It wasn't Communism or Socialism that collapsed, it was Sovietism.
Communism as a means of where workers own the firm and means of production hasn't failed. Look at manufacturing and worker coops. Some succeed, some fail. I'm guessing around the same rate that private and publicly owned firms do. Given that though, I'm willing to say that the idea isn't a failure.
John Green said it best. "Truth resists simplicity."
If you have a system where worker owned firms are exchanging goods and services on an open market using currency and capital as means of trade, is that a communist or capitalist society? What about when state governments establish rules that govern trade?
I'm a descriptivist when it comes to language. However, when the use of language is twisted as a way to paint people and ideas as "other" I have a massive problem with it. Don't get me wrong. I do understand that when we talk about "Capitalism" we're talking about western style capitalism where production and markets are more or less handled privately(Government regulations not withstanding). Conversely and by "Communism" we're talking about Soviet style communism where the state controls the means and focus of production. It's been a few years since I've read Marx and Engels, but I don't think this was the point of the mid 19th century communist movement.
So it becomes important to remember when we talk about things like Communism and Capitalism, things are pretty complex when you start to get serious into the terminology.
Did communism fail? Probably not. Has capitalism failed? Probably not either. It's likely that these are mutually exclusive ideas that can coexist.
Furthermore, how a state governs itself and interacts with it's markets complicate things further.
One thing i'm willing to bet on being pretty simple is that state planned production systems probably won't work. Not unless you got really lucky and the Government wasn't corrupt and somehow manages to provide for everyone.
Re:'it is out of stock now; try to ask next year.' (Score:4, Insightful)
If I understand the principal intent of Communism, the individual is to be provided for without question, and the individual is supposed to work to the best of their abilities without question. The problem with this is that lots of people won't work if they're provided for without having to do so, and if the system attempts to impose metrics on individuals to compel them to work, they'll look for ways to skirt the rules. In manufacturing that means poor quality goods as various stages do the minimum needed to pass, which compounds as the products go through multiple stages of production.
Re:'it is out of stock now; try to ask next year.' (Score:5, Insightful)
The principle intent of communism was to end the oppression of the working class by those who had capital and wealth. Not so lazy people could leech off the system. I don't think that I've read anything like that in some of the original communist works.
I think the problem with Soviet style communism was that central planning bureaucracies were trying to balance authoritarian political power and economic production.
It's a pretty Brady Bunch view of the world, but had the Soviet Union not been a paranoid authoritarian bureaucracy, we might have a different view of what "communism" means.
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The experiment is still going on in North Korea and Cuba. I think what we saw in the Soviet Union is actually the middle road. North Korea shows us what can happen in the worst case scenario, which Cuba shows us the best scenario... which is still not great.
We'll know that communism has succeeded when we find a communist country that doesn't prevent its citizens from leaving.
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but leaders are not willing to give up their power to transition to that phase,
Orwell wrote a book about that...
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We'll know that communism has succeeded when we find a communist country that doesn't prevent its citizens from leaving.
This. Oh, so very much this.
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Well, we already got the paranoid, authoritarian bureaucracy over here, too. And the economy isn't doing too well either.
Fuck, the commies won.
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The Breitbart and Fox News offices haven't been busted and rounded up for treason.
My point was that if the whites had won instead of the Reds, what would the opinion of communism be?
Re:'it is out of stock now; try to ask next year.' (Score:5, Insightful)
Not so lazy people could leech off the system.
Thus the fundamental failure of Marx: ignoring the reality of human nature.
had the Soviet Union not been a paranoid authoritarian bureaucracy
That many people -- in the Russian Empire, Germany, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, Romania, China, Korea, etc, etc, -- can't just accidentally be paranoid and authoritarian.
Good socio-political theories must take people's baser instincts into account. That's the genius of Adam Smith's Invisible Hand: it presumes that people will be selfish and greedy.
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Clearly you have not actually READ the manifesto,or much of Marx's rhetoric. Marx does indeed rail against freeloading, and outright says that any system that permits it cannot be sustained, as the number of freeloaders will rapidly outpace the number of producers, bankrupting the system. (in general in his rhetoric)
In fact, he sets the univeral requirement of *ALL* to labor, as bulleted item #8 in his manifesto.
These measures will of course be different in different countries.
Nevertheless in the most advanced countries, the following will be pretty generally applicable.
1. Abolition of property in land and application of all rents of land to public purposes.
2. A heavy progressive or graduated income tax.
3. Abolition of all right of inheritance.
4. Confiscation of the property of all emigrants and rebels.
5. Centralisation of credit in the hands of the State, by means of a national bank with State capital and an exclusive monopoly.
6. Centralisation of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the State.
7. Extension of factories and instruments of production owned by the State; the bringing into cultivation of waste-lands, and the improvement of the soil generally in accordance with a common plan.
8. Equal liability of all to labour. Establishment of industrial armies, especially for agriculture.
9. Combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries; gradual abolition of the distinction between town and country, by a more equable distribution of the population over the country.
10. Free education for all children in public schools. Abolition of children's factory labour in its present form. Combination of education with industrial production, &c., &c.
(Found in chapter 2 of the manifesto, in case you wondered)
Marx is not strictly against the prov
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4. Confiscation of the property of all emigrants and rebels.
Xenophobia much?
7. ... the bringing into cultivation of waste-lands
Lack of agricultural knowledge. There's a reason it's a waste-land.
8. Equal liability of all to labour.
But... compassion!!!
Establishment of industrial armies, especially for agriculture.
Inherent disincentive to efficiency, and why the Soviet Union -- with those huge Ukrainian wheat fields -- had to import *lots* of US wheat.
9. Combination of agriculture ... more equable distribution of the population over the country.
What utter stupidity. There are damned practical reasons that cities grow up where they do, and positing crap like "more equable distribution of the population" denies those realities.
Capitalism and the free market sure aren't perfect, but they are the reason that th
Re:'it is out of stock now; try to ask next year.' (Score:4, Insightful)
You seem to have mis-identified my political affiliation. I am not a marxist communist. I have simply read the manifesto, and marx's rhetoric. I was pointing out that the AC above had clearly not done so, having created such a strawman to beat.
Genuine criticisms, such as "You cant cultivate marginal lands as if they were fully arable! It's madness!" are fully fair game, and I apply them with gusto. However, asserting blandly that Marx had not contemplated human nature? That's clearly not supported by his rhetoric, but is rather a consequence of ingesting pre-chewed propaganda pieces.
I value correct, well based arguments. that's why I bothered to read Marx's rhetoric in the first place. It is a necessity to develop and use proper analytic skills.
Does Marxism work? Fuck no.
Did Marx think about the freeloader problem? Definitely.
That latter part is all I was trying to point out. It never ceases to amaze me how such a correction makes people instantly apply "You must be a marxist!" as a reactionary measure.
Please avoid doing so in the future. Thank you.
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It never ceases to amaze me how such a correction makes people instantly apply "You must be a marxist!" as a reactionary measure.
Because seemingly anyone who could finish dense writing like that (I tried reading both the Manifesto and Capital in college) must be a true devotee. (I didn't get much farther with Wealth Of Nations but attributed that to the archaic words and references rendering it meaningless to me.)
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Yes, and agricultural mismanagement is one of the reasons. Desert reforestation is important.
You forget one important thing - perhaps you live in a country that was settled not too long ago - there were practical reasons that cities grew up where they did many
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That's the genius of Adam Smith's Invisible Hand: it presumes that people will be selfish and greedy.
haven't read mr smith, actually, but his invisible hand is screwing up the planet pretty impressively. if he was genius, i'm guessing he wasn't that confident about the invisible hand as his disciples have been trumpeting around.
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true, but all that doesn't come from thin air. specifically industralization has a high cost on the environment that we privileged don't pay. part of the magic is that we are shoving much of those costs on poor countries (which incidentally constitute the majority of the population and who do not eat better than ultra wealthy did 100 years ago).
so i guess i might do have some concerns besides eating, sleeping, fucking and dying.
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you realize that you live in a plutocracy, right? your regime is just softer, more photogenic, but not fundamentally different from those tyrannies. so are you, your precious lifestile is just a different manifestation of poverty: with all your gadgets (or maybe just because of them) you are powerless. you need to rise up and have a revolution. fancy that. :P
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deregulating life insurance so that anyone can buy/sell it for anyone else anonymously
that actually sounds like a pretty simple and good idea.
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Yes. Because they are voluntary. When the government forces communism on you, it is not.
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Third position is absolutely a fine thing to bring up but it's like trying to insist loudly we talk about RC Cola when the context is the cola wars of the 80s.
Sure, there's a lot of alternatives to the dichotomy of capitalist vs communist, but that dichotomy was rhe backdrop to the context here.
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In other words, the emperor penguins at the South Pole and the elves at the North Pole are successful communists. So how can we emulate them?
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The joke was something like
Question to great radio Jeriwan: We hear that the victory of communism is already at the horizon. What is a horizon?
Answer from great radio Jeriwan: The horizon is an imaginary line where the ground meets the sky, and no matter how fast you try to run towards it, you will never reach it.
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Tetris clone irony (Score:4, Interesting)
Mr. Pajitnov prototyped Tetris on an Electronica 60, a Soviet clone of a PDP-11. Yet he goes RIAA on anyone who clones his own work [slashdot.org].
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Let me try to make the parallelism more obvious: Mr. Pajitnov used a clone to make his game. Yet he doesn't want gamers to use a clone.
No irony - rusty argument that falls apart (Score:2)
If I am then that can of worms is huge and hits a Godwin as soon as IBM is in the mix.
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If cloning the computer were as illegal and as vigorously prosecuted as cloning the game is now, he couldn't have made "a thing he did himself" in the first place. And yes, Tetris licensees do pursue users of clones through YouTube takedown actions against videos of clones. How would Mr. Pajitnov feel if Digital had similarly slapped him down for having used a clone of its product?
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Should I be responsible for what IBM did in the 1940s if I use an IBM product?
If not, why is Pajitnov in some way responsible for cloning the PDP-11 just by using a knockoff?
Should Pajitnov be personally responsible for what the lawyers of the people he sold his rights to are doing?
Getting the idea of how utterly ridiculous your moralising is yet? Or was that the entire idea and you are playing some idioti
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Should I be responsible for what IBM did in the 1940s if I use an IBM product?
No.
Should Pajitnov be personally responsible for what the lawyers of the people he sold his rights to are doing?
Last time I checked, the Tetris keiretsu (Tetris Holding, The Tetris Company, and Blue Planet Software) was managed by Alexey Pajitnov and Henk Rogers. So yes.
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Moral != legal (Score:2)
My intent was not to make a rigorous argument from current law but to make a statement about the morality of cloning. Law rarely perfectly matches morality. Pajitnov's actions through The Tetris Company combined with his previous statements, such as that free software "destroys the market" and "should never have existed" [slashdot.org], imply that he believes that cloning is immoral. But by that standard, he used the product of immorality to make his flagship product.
Not even immoral (Score:2)
I know being otherwise simplifies things and lets you f
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And academic leftists wonder why Communism collapsed...
The former East Germany (DDR), was proof that the Communist system sucks.
If you take a nation full of Germans, and manage to make a poor country out of it . . . the system sucks!
Re:'it is out of stock now; try to ask next year.' (Score:5, Insightful)
Hitler took a nation of Germans and made a poor country out of it.
Only US provided welfare brought it back!!
Welfare is great!
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Uh, no. West Germany largely recovered on its own. They didn't have access to Marshall Plan funds until after their economic recovery had started. In fact the US and its allies started the postwar period by removing lots of valuables (coal and steel industry, patents, scientists) from Germany.
Re:Wait, how is this possible? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Wait, how is this possible? (Score:5, Insightful)
Most engineering failures occur when "outdated" technology gets replaced with new shiny (because, new shiny!), and the new shiny bites you in the ass with the unexpected.
Not to say that things shouldn't be updated if the technology improves, but if you just need a relatively robust low tech computer technology, sticking with what works isn't such a bad thing.
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BS, we have new shiny at work, the biting in the ass was entirely expected, as was the catastrophic loss in functionality and performance. It's all about some stupid fuck justifying his salary to his superiors
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Different not ancestor (Score:2)
With analog you get the solution within the limits of noise and not the solution digitized into a certain number of bits. They were good for some things, the last I saw was in 1992 being used to refine a fluid flow model in real time to match the exper
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Re:Wait, how is this possible? - Ground Units (Score:2)
They didn't actually. For example, Soyuz-U still has analog control computers. So you didn't get advanced computers as spin-offs of the space program, because the space program didn't have advanced computers in the first place.
Just because the computers ON spacecraft were primitive (because they were made to be failure proof in extreme conditions) doesn't mean that advanced computers ON THE GROUND weren't developed to design and test the space craft and its components.
You've clearly demonstrated thinking so focused on proving your point that you missed the obvious.
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Command economies like the USSR, Cuba, and DPRK work poorly in general; but they can concentrate their efforts to excel in specific areas. Thus, the USSR could beat the US in the early days of the space race; but couldn't supply consumer goods very well. Cuba also still operates much like the USSR, with similar problems in daily living. OTOH, they produce a lot of doctors and send them all over the world. Their command economy actually focuses on this. It almost makes you want to like their government.
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They don't work because they're susceptible to corruption. The "commanders" in the command economy quickly find out they can use their position of power to enrich themselves. And do. Every time.
Unchecked capitalism has the same problem, as we're currently experiencing here in the US. The capitalists can use their positions of power to enrich themselves. And do. Every time.
Wealth redistribution mechanisms used to keep a lid on these things but the capitalists have found that they simply need to engineer publ
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It is quite amusing to note that America got to the Moon by a command, and Russia beat America into space in the first place by using various competing design bureaus.
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you leave out the part where the Jupiter C rocket the army had available was so advanced because it was the next generation of the Nazi rocket program. The US had Von Braun due to Operation Paperclip
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intermediate-range_ballistic_missile
http://www.businessinsider.com/nazi-scientists-space-program-2014-2
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DPRK? I'm not sure if they excel in anything. Even their feared nuke program is kind of a joke.
The North Korean military [wikipedia.org] is intimidating, especially if you live in South Korea.
Also, they seem to be the world's leading experts on dictator kitsch style monuments, and build them around the world.
Russia recently upgraded (Score:3)
.
Take that capitalist scum!
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Maybe was better in the long run (Score:3)
Better skills and all that.
Lots of QWERTY... no cyrillic? (Score:4, Interesting)
Maybe I'm wrong here, but were there any machines then that had non-western keyboards and layouts?
Just weird seeing QWERTY keyboards on Soviet machines is well.. weird. I was expecting something else. Or is this just the nature of cloning?
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You're just wrong here. The article is about computers built in Czechoslovakia, where Czech and Slovak languages are spoken. Both of those languages use Latin letters, not Cyrillic. It makes sense that the keyboards aren't Cyrillic.
Also, at least one of the pictures shows a QWERTZ.
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There were many Russian computers with Cyrillic keyboards, but TFA seems to be focusing on the few that were more direct copies of western versions and so presumably used QWERTY to maintain compatibility with pirate ROMs. However, most of the successful machines improved on the western designs and either modified or completely re-wrote the ROM code to support Cyrillic.
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C64 (Score:5, Interesting)
There were a lot of "enterprise" software written for the C64 in the late 80ies in the communist block because it didn't fell under the import ban.
It also supported a lot of peripherals, like floppy disk, hard drive and mouse. It also had a lot of documentation in German, which was easier to learn in the Eastern block.