Soviet Computer Technology

April 22, 2001 10:42 PM

Soviet Computer Technology circa 1988 (Google Cache).
posted by mutagen (7 comments total)

Via Lake Effect by way of Disturbing Search Requests. Interesting glimpse at a point in time. The freedoms that came soon after this was written have put many of the former Soviets much closer to the west in terms of computer technology. We've also seen that they can learn to hack the latest technology.

I find it a little ironic that this is at a Chinese site, some of the same attitudes exist about the Chinese (copy instead of invent, computers could make for social change, etc) but I for one think that they are much closer to us than the Soviets were in 1988.
posted by mutagen at 10:48 PM on April 22, 2001

Oh, and credit where credit is due, the archive is originally the work of the Chaos Computer Club.
posted by mutagen at 11:13 PM on April 22, 2001

Heh. I thought that looked mighty familiar .... ;-)

However, mutagen, .ch is the two-letter country code for Switzerland (from Confoederatio Helvetica, its official name; the abbreviation for Swiss francs is CHF).

China's top-level code is .cn.
posted by dhartung at 11:24 PM on April 22, 2001

"The ROM still had Steve Wozniak's name written in it...."

LOL!
posted by briank at 8:46 AM on April 23, 2001

I knew that!

DOH!

And I've made mistakes like this before... (.za & .nz among others)

OK, I'll wipe the egg off my face and go back to lurking.
posted by mutagen at 10:48 AM on April 23, 2001

Actually, I doubt that bit about Woz's name being in the ROMs very much. He's too much of a hacker to waste bytes on vanity when he could use those bytes to cram in another feature. The original "monitor ROM" was a mere 2K in size and it needed every single byte. I know for a fact that the Apple II+ and later ROMs don't have any credits embedded in them (Apple used to provide the source code to the ROMs with the machines and later with their reference manuals -- I spent many hours poring over the ones for the II+, IIe, and IIc and never saw Woz's name except in comments). I never saw source for the original Apple II ROMs, the ones with Integer BASIC instead of Applesoft BASIC, but I'd be really surprised if Woz put his name in those. Besides, I think the Russian machines were in fact II+ clones. The Cyrillic fonts were part of the DOS Tool Kit, which was also called the Applesoft Tool Kit and was released after the II+.

AFAIK the Apple IIGS was the first Apple II model to have credits of any sort in ROM. It also had a sound sample of the engineering team shouting "Apple II!" That is probably the first time Woz was credited in the ROM of a computer.

(I know entirely too much about Apple IIs.)
posted by kindall at 10:50 AM on April 23, 2001

kindall, I suspect as well that's an urban legend along the lines of "[insert adversary here] capture WWII bomber and build copy including combat-repair patches". Got some new circulation during the Hainan business.

Similar to the legend about the [complicated broken part] that was taken to an Asian machine shop for duplicating and came back with a perfectly reproduced crack.
posted by dhartung at 12:31 PM on April 23, 2001