1980's Soviet Bloc Computing: Printers, Mice, and Cassette Decks 74
szczys writes Martin Maly rode the wave of computer evolution in the 1980's while living in the former Czechoslovak Republic. Computers themselves were hard to come by, peripherals were even more rare and so enthusiasts of the time hacked their own, like dot-matrix printers and computer mice. If your build was impressive enough, the government would adopt it and begin manufacturing the design somewhat widely. Was your first computer mouse built into a plastic spice container? We covered what the personal computer revolution was like in Eastern Bloc countries back in December.
C64 had a cassette drive (Score:5, Insightful)
My C64 had a cassette recorder (DataSette I think it was called). It wasn't being Soviet, it was being cheap when the floppy disk drive more expensive than the computer.
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The IBM PC had a cassette interface. There was a connector for it right next to the keyboard connector on the motherboard. If you booted up the PC and it didn't find a bootable floppy disk, or even a floppy disk controller on really stripped down machines, it would boot into ROM basic which had cassette i/o. They pulled the interface connector on PC-XT and later models but the ROM basic remained.
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Most home computers from that era had cassette recorders.
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Ahh, yes, the early days of software piracy (or my experience of it) - copying Sinclair Spectrum games onto C90 cassettes using twin cassette decks. If you tried, you could fit like ten games on one cassette. Those were the days.
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Of course, as soon as you started with tapes from others, you entered the eternal process of turning the alignment screw on the recorder head.
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I owned a Sinclair Spectrum and used to copy tapes using a dual deck and I never, once, had to adjust anything.
One of us was doing it wrong, or one of us is making shit up.
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Early 5.25" floppy disks could only store around 180K of data. An extended play tape cassette could store 3 hours of audio per side, with the data transfer rate at 600 baud (around 60 bytes/second). So a tape cassette could store a maximum of 632K of data per side. In practice, it was less than that because you had to find space to store each program on the tape cassette, and handle your own "sector management" by allocating a good segment of space for each program. Your only clue was the little counter in
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You never had a 3.25" floppy. [retrotechnology.com] You mean 3.5".
Perhaps you are talking about an ANSI X3.171-1989 90mm drive? ;^)
Which some people in the UK occasionally called a 3.5" "stiffy" to distinguish it from its larger/floppier predecessor like the 8" floppy and the 5.25" mini-floppy...
FWIW, although I never personally had a 3.25" drive, one of my buddies did purchase the Amdisk 3" compact floppy disc system for his Apple ][+....
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Early 5.25" floppy disks could only store around 180K of data
The single-sided, single-density 5.25" floppies I used with my TRS-80 Model 1 stored 72K of data.
http://classiccmp.org/dunfield... [classiccmp.org]
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The TRS-80 Level 1 only had 64k ram. I remember having to trim code to get it to fit and run.
Believe it or not, the Model I "Level 1" had 4K of RAM. The Level II brought it up to 16K. If you added an "Expansion Interface" (also knows as the "Expensive Interface") you could increase the RAM to it's maximum: 48K.
So the Model I never got up to a whopping 64K...
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An extended play tape cassette could store 3 hours of audio per side
I'm sorry, a what now?
The Compact Cassette standard had one tape speed (4.76 cm/s). Readily available cassettes came with 60-minute or 90-minute runtimes (total). You could get C-120 cassettes with 1 hour per side, but those used extra-thin tape that jammed easily. The longest tapes ever made were C-180, for 90 minutes per side, these used even thinner tape and so unreliable they never sold widely.
I've never seen one, and I was a bit of an audiophile in those days.
You'd have to combine a C-180 tape with a n
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I usually made 3 copies of programs and data because the cassette was so unreliable. At least my cheap gittup was. You can only buy so much on weekend-lawn-mower wages.
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Actually, that was the point where you should hit Shift+Run/Stop, which would abort the tape load you might have inadvertently started.
Second thing to try was Run/Stop+Restore (and you had to hit Restore hard because it was designed to prevent accidental closure), to warm-reset the machine.
Then you restart.
. . . Unless, that is, you had one of the defective machines (there were, admittedly, a hell of a lot of them -- I went through 6 before I found one that worked worth a damn), the first step above should
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So many good times were had with the C64 simply because the jump in technology from what we had before it was so huge. We got our C64 a little over half a year before the NES. Its hard to imagine so much technology jump in one year. If you look at video games today, not much changes(more polys) each console generation anymore since we already had enough computing power to
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That always mystified me - what magic incantations did they do so that that command would actually load it off disk AND auto start the program. (I never did find out, so I don't know today).
Or how that even worked...
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http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4344234/how-to-autostart-a-program-from-floppy-disk-on-a-commodore-c64
Admirable aspects (Score:5, Interesting)
Modernism and human efficiency aside, they repaired and reused a lot of equipment and parts rather than make version N be landfill and buy version N + 1. You have to admire that aspect. The throw-away culture we have now is an embarrassment to humanity. Plus, there's the fun side of their MacGyver-ism.
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I'm not sure what you mean. If you quietly fix stuff without complaining to get your work done (i.e., carry out your orders), you shouldn't have any problems with authorities over such.
And I didn't mean to say life was overall better there. I was just pointing out it had some up-sides to it. Every culture and country has something to admire about it. Life is b
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Me neither. Probably a Rand Paul supporter who forgot to put in something about Agenda 21, the mark of the beast, or gay marriage before hitting [send].
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I thought improvising was expected for technicians there, because supplies were hard to come by. Now, if you are talking about something outside of your area of work, I can see potential problems. The article did say they eventually allowed some degree of hobby projects in order for their students' knowledge to keep pace with the west.
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Try modifying your BluRay player now. You'll get that knock on the door.
Re:Admirable aspects (Score:4, Insightful)
Can we please stop repeating the blatantly false claim that Soviets were communist? They may have cynically flown the flag, but in practice they were unapologetically fascist (same small group of elites controls both government and industry). Communism involves the workers owning the means of production - that's only compatible with the government owning the means of production if the workers own the government, and NOBODY is making that claim about Soviet Russia.
Maybe one day someone will be able to attempt state-level communism, but we're going to have to make some massive advances in democracy first.
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You're the only one who mentioned the 1%ers. One group controls both the government and industry - can you think of a better way to describe them than as a small group of elites?
Also, I think your description of Fascism and worker syndicates is more generally applicable to... well pretty much every socio-economic system ever, really. Without some form of worker alliance the powerful will continue amassing a greater percentage of wealth until it begins to threaten the ability of the masses to continue produ
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It had it's downsides as well - the hardware at hand was often ancient and the planned state production we relied on for a lot of source components was very inefficient because of communist cadres - basically incompetent bureaucrats created a lot of e-waste by manufacturing useless junk (a lot of which was not salvageable even for DIY) - buggy ASIC clones, poorly done circuit boa
And the less admirable aspects ... (Score:5, Interesting)
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Perhaps that's why the state-distributed printers and kits described in the article were so slow: it makes it too difficult to print mass amounts of "subversive" flyers. It wasn't necessarily lack of technology keeping them slow, but political paranoia.
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A former coworker who worked in a Soviet client state during that period told me that the distribution of printers was controlled because it was a "printing press" and could be used to create anti-government propaganda for distribution.
This is what frustrates me so much when people refer to the USA as a 'police state.' They have no idea what a real police state is - In a true police state you can't even have a printer.
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And this is what frustrates me when people make the No True Scotsman argument - they don't even realise they've made it, or that the thing they're claiming runs a spectrum.
Tell you what, you go and take a few photos of government buildings today, see what happens to you.
I'll tell you what happened when a friend of mine, as a symbol of solidarity, took a photo of an American flag in another country - four cop
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Don't worry. You soon won't be able to have a 3D printer without a license, and thereby officially become a police state.
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I was in a western nation in the 1980s The hoops that had be jumped through to import a digital audio tape recorder for a small radio station were ridiculous and were placed in fear of violations of music company copyright. It took well over a year, possibly even into a second, and by then CD burners were available without ridiculous legal restriction
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Sounds like the Vietnam war in the U.S.
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I'm not sure either conflict counts as a "meat grinder". Total USSR losses were under 15,000 troops over a 9 year period. Total US losses in Vietnam were under 59,000 over 19 years (but almost all over a 7 year period). To put this in perspective, WW2 cost the Russians around 9-14 million troops, depending on who you ask. The US lost 400,000. WW1 cost Russia around 2 million troops and the US around 100,000 - and the US was only in that for around 6 months! Hell, even the Korean War managed to kill 36,000 i
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Fair enough, but nimbus was using the term to describe why they needed so many conscripts from the Eastern Bloc satellite states. I'm claiming that there simply wasn't that kind of need for men. Same with Vietnam. Losses there were heavier, but there were still many, many men available for the draft. Most of the army was volunteer.
By whatever standard you want to use, it is hard to lump the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan into the "meat grinder" category. There are more highway deaths in half a year in the
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It sounds like the Vietnam war because as nimbius describes it, students in the Soviet Union could get a good science and mathematics education, but the purpose of the education system was to provide soldiers for the war.
Some of our political leaders believed during the cold war that we needed an educated workforce to fight Communism, and our educators encouraged that belief in order to get a lot of money.
There was some truth to that. After all, we won WWII through industrial production and technology. You
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It sounds like the Vietnam war because as nimbius describes it, students in the Soviet Union could get a good science and mathematics education, but the purpose of the education system was to provide soldiers for the war.
That's great, except that going to college was one way to have a good shot at dodging the draft. Heck, only about 1/4 of US troops were drafted. This just doesn't fit that narrative.
I don't know enough about how the Soviets manned their force in Afghanistan, but with so few losses it is hard to imagine that they needed troops so desperately. It certainly was not a "meat grinder".
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My point wasn't that it was a meat grinder war.
My point was that educators on both sides were exploiting the cold war to promote education.
One of the trump cards that U.S. colleges used to promote science education was, "We have to keep up with the Soviets." It was shameless but it worked. As I recall, I got something called a "National Defense Scholarship" to study science and math.
I'm sure the Soviet educators were doing the same thing.
The cold war would have been pretty good if all they did was compete w
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My point wasn't that it was a meat grinder war.
It was not clear from your initial comment - it sounded like you were agreeing with all of the parent's points and saying that the same situation was true in the US. In fact, nimbius was making exactly the opposite point - he was saying that they were trying to churn out uneducated "working man" soldiers. You are making the point that education was seen as essential to prevailing in the Cold War. I happen to think you are correct and nimbius is wrong. Or at least that nimbius's comments cannot be applied to
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Nah, computer periphials don't make a good AK. Well, maybe a Model M keyboard could be used for a receiver flat. But a shovel [northeastshooters.com] could do the job pretty good... (with photo evidence)
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Eh? Are you talking about the actual satellite states or the union republics?
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Czechoslovakia was no speed-bump.
Standard of living was higher than in Soviet Union.
It was not an agrarian society and was definitely not a drain of Soviet resources. The drain was in different direction.
In Czechoslovakia, in 70s and 80s if you had money you could buy lots of interesting stuff, including cars. In Eastern Germany or Soviet Union you had waiting lists for those.
The infrastructure in Czechoslovakia was superior to what was available in Moscow.
Yes, I had a lot of fun... (Score:3)
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FWIW the title is a bit incorrect, as both hackaday posts deal mostly with computer scene in czechoslovakia, not soviet bloc as a whole - MM is recycling/abridging existing computer history series from root.cz into english.
lolwut (Score:5, Funny)
Going from nothing to serious cyber espionage in four months is pretty impressive.
My first joystick... (Score:2)
...was built into a piece of drainpipe.
Lame joke (Score:1)
3D printers (Score:2)
Looking at all these home-made dot-matrix printers and pen plotters reminds me of the DIY 3D printers.
Editor: 1980s' (Score:1)
Hula!
1980s' decade's worth
1980's year's worth
Non-native writers exempted! It's a wonder you can write it at all!
Thanks for the info. (Score:1)
Thanks for the info. (Score:1)