from the if-you-build-it-they-will-come dept.
Hackaday has an article on computer peripherals from former Soviet Union countries used in 80's era home computing.
... the lack of spare parts, literature and technology in Czechoslovakia forced geeks to solve it themselves: by improvisation and what we would today call “hacking.” Hobbyist projects of one person or a small party was eventually taken over by a state-owned enterprise, which then began to manufacture and deliver to stores with some minor modifications. These projects most often involved a variety of peripherals that could only be found in the Czechoslovakia with great difficulty.
This is a followup piece to an earlier article on home computers, originally discussed in a previous SN article.
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Hackaday has an article on Home computing in 80's Czechoslovakia.
My hobbies were electronics and – in the middle of 80s – computers. The history of computers behind the Iron Curtain is very interesting, with a lot of unusual moments. For example – communists at first called cybernetics as “bourgeois’ pseudoscience” (as well as sociology or semiotics), “used to enslave a mankind by machines”. But later on they understood the importance of computers, primarily for science and army. So in 50s the Eastern Bloc started to build its own computers, separately and “in its own way.”
As a Soviet satellite state, part of the former Eastern Bloc, then the personal history of 80's computing presented in this article is a fascinating insight for those of us that grew up in the "parallel" scene in the west.
(Score: 4, Informative) by Geotti on Wednesday April 15 2015, @03:34PM
In Soviet Russia country unions you...
No, seriously, it should read something like:
Hackaday has an article on computer peripherals from former Eastern Bloc countries used in 80's era home computing.