[ck45]

Coincidentally I saw this video on youtube yesterday about how the attempt to keep up with the west regarding semiconductors ruined the economy of East Germany. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cxrkC-pMH_s

Edit: Added link to youtube instead of HN

[flohofwoe]

I can't see anything under your link, but I'm very interested in the video :)

I would be surprised though if this would have been the singular event that ruined the East German economy (if there was one main reason then it was the central planning and micromanagement of the entire ecomony which was mostly based on made up numbers and wishful thinking instead of reality), if anything, the focus on microelectronics was an unintended long term investment into the post-GDR future ;)

(Dresden and Jena are still high-tech hotspots, and without having access to computers and then catching the "computer virus" as East German teenager I wouldn't have become a programmer later)

[argulane]

The video is probably this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cxrkC-pMH_s

[flohofwoe]

Thanks! Watching it now :)

PS: it's a good video, but focuses a bit too much on the political background ... which may of course be interesting as introduction for people without 'first hand' East German experience ;).

The video doesn't mention the most interesting unsolved mystery: how the Z80 was actually cloned. There are a couple of contradicting stories around (with the two extreme ends being (1) the Stasi stole the masks directly from Zilog or another Z80 vendor - which makes a good James Bond story, and (2) somebody just literally walked into a West German electronics store, bought a handful of Z80s, smuggled them back over the border, and the rest was reverse engineered via traditional decapping - which is a much more boring story, but also much more likely.

The only fact that helps to clear up some of the myths is that the East German Z80 is not a 1:1 clone of an original Zilog Z80 because it differs slightly in undocumented behaviour, but it could probably be 1:1 clone of a non-Zilog Z80 clone (such as Hitachi's).

[ck45]

Yes, that's the video. Thanks! I updated my comment