[digi_owl]

There was perhaps also the aspect that when the microcomputers showed up on their side of the curtain, they didn't get a market for boxed software to go with it. So either they wrote their own, or cracked western software. Either way they got intimate with software innards.

[Stranger43]

It could be interesting if we could measure the damage done to computer literacy skills by the huge spending on easy to use well managed edutech like one to one deployments of chromebooks, or worse iPads, compared to forcing the students to wrestling with obsolete poorly managed systems in order to hand in computer typeset term papers.

It might be that the economic constraints imposed on the former USSR states by their failed experiment with reagonomics is in fact themselves the reason why they produce more programmers and fewer failed athletes and actors then America.