So, back in the day Poland must have had quite a few people working in hi-tech. Which leaves me wondering, has the country been able to retain its corps of specialists, and what is Poland’s most hi-tech product today?
In Warsaw Pact countries were assigned specialized roles by USSR. Poland was supposed to make tanks, radars, radio, agricultural machines (including planes), etc. And we had pretty good industry in these domains. But in each case - for example tanks - there were always some parts you couldn't make in one country to prevent uprisings. So for example for tanks we took some crucial parts from Czechoslovakia.
USSR was able to do whatever it wanted of course.
So, to this day we make good military RF-related tech (see WB-Electronics and Radwar for example). But when we tried a space program in 60s ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meteor_(rocket) ) - USSR made us stop pretty quickly.
Back to the subject - East Germany and USSR was supposed to do integrated circuits, so our industry wasn't very good in that regard. We made some, but nothing modern. Polish-made computers were mostly using foreign ICs with the exception of a Polish-made clone of 8080 used in a series of computers by Elwro.
I work with Poles all the time. There definetly is a huge market for IT type work in Poland. Lots of contracting in the rest of Europe since Poles are still quite cheap but in the EU.
Communist Poland was a producer of acceptable quality peripheral computer hardware, but meh central processing unit parts due to outdated semiconductor production lines and shortages of needed materials and money needed for research and production (central planing sucks at delivering that) and complicated procedures of obtaining governmental permission to import semiconductors from the West (as you needed to use US dollars to pay for them and only government was allowed to perform international transactions using foreign currencies). And even when you get the permit you could have been denied access by western producers if parts you were looking at were covered by western sanctions.
As for designers of hardware – K-202 and later MERA-404 were the most advanced TTL architectures that originated under communist regime in Poland. As for CMOS single chip CPUs whole eastern bloc only managed to copy 8 bit western designs, most notably by teams from Ukraine and Bulgaria (that was also a main Floppy Discs producer in the bloc BTW, other than that cassette tapes and reel to reel tapes were the most common storage media).
As for retaining specialists specialized in deign - they weren't too numerous to begin with. In later years of communist era regimes designed mostly to switch from attempts of developing of own designs to reverse engineering and copying western designs which involved a lot of industrial espionage and smuggling of components and software which even further limited size of group of people who were designing own solutions. Tho Poland continued to produce own designs based on own components as well as parts from the West and Soviet Union well into the 1980s. By the time communist ended a lot of them were well into their 40s and 50s with the biggest group that was about to turn 60. Poland by that time had no manufacturing capabilities to produce modern components in high quantities essential for survival of such businesses. Younger generation was more interested in developing software for western minicomputers like PC, Commodore and Atari products. So there was quite a gap in generations and their main focus.
As for today there is some research on quantum computing and photonics being done in academia. As for manufacturing of more innovative hardware and software most specialists emigrate to Germany, Scandinavia, the UK and the US. Poland is not too friendly for such business (lower level of economic freedom, overcomplicated taxation system etc) compared to these countries especially as risky ones as innovative high tech.
Not first hand info, but I hear there's a good high level of tech competence there now. Also, apparently a decent manufacturing capability, with good quality control and low wages (compared to much of Europe). Which apparently is setting them up as an EU-local competitor to China.
A couple of my computer science professors at university were Polish. They’d both done their PhDs in Poland in the 70s/80s. Like many other bright Poles, when communism ended, they took the opportunity to depart for greener pastures (and being Australia, sunnier too).
The local gaming industry attracts talent from the region and has a few globally successful products - even if companies themselves are incorporated in Cyprus.
But that only gained momentum relatively recently - there was no carryover from the communist era.
There are also payment systems - there's a lot of experimentation going on in that field. All the more interesting because the population is particularly price-conscious and intolerant to friction in payment processing.
The rest is largely outsourcing. We have a few large domestic IT companies doing projects for the government.
Lastly Poland is where around 3% of the world's li-ion batteries are manufactured. Not a lot in absolute terms, but it's, weirdly enough, half the manufacturing capacity of the US and in the EU second only to Hungary.
That's about it. Academia mostly gave up and resorted to pumping out masters' degrees. There is still a significant amount of brain-drain in IT, but it's countered with generous tax incentives.
Not a trace of it remaining, now we're doing brain dead software outsourcing. Last artifact remaining - Elwro - was subject of hostile takeover by Siemens during the awful filthy corrupted 90s.
USSR was able to do whatever it wanted of course.
So, to this day we make good military RF-related tech (see WB-Electronics and Radwar for example). But when we tried a space program in 60s ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meteor_(rocket) ) - USSR made us stop pretty quickly.
Back to the subject - East Germany and USSR was supposed to do integrated circuits, so our industry wasn't very good in that regard. We made some, but nothing modern. Polish-made computers were mostly using foreign ICs with the exception of a Polish-made clone of 8080 used in a series of computers by Elwro.
Nowadays we have one pretty big IC factory in Poland ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilk_Elektronik ), and a few specialized IC factories for military and industrial automation.
On the other hand Poland is pretty big in software, especially gamedev.