[flohofwoe]

Deals happened, but on a small scale.

For instance, East Germany had so called "Intershops" stuffed full with western consumer products (also home computers), but those were sold for hard currency only, and their main purpose was to siphon off the circulating D-Marks which were coming into the country via relatives from West Germany, or to directly sell to western visitors, because some prices were cheaper than in Western Germany.

From time to time Western companies also did one-time deals for industrial products (East Germany had a pretty good optics and mechanical engineering industry which could come up with competitive products from time to time, but usually such deals didn't benefit the general population).

[vasac]

In Yugoslavia, various companies 'produced' computers by essentially relabeling Western equipment, especially during the eighties when I was a child. For instance, the Electronic Industry in Niš (EI Niš) imported Honeywell computers. My father worked on a Honeywell DPS-6 imported from the U.S., which bore EI stickers. Surprisingly, sometimes they didn't even bother applying the EI stickers.

During my time at university we had VAX 11/785, MicroVAX 3100, and by the mid-'90s, we even had an SGI Indigo. Additionally, we had some IBM VM computer, though I can't recall the exact model. There was an IBM 1130 in the seventies.

As far as I can recall, the western parts of Yugoslavia had around 300 VAX machines deployed across various companies. Each republic developed its own computing ecosystem, resulting in a diverse landscape.

While there were some microcomputers in limited production, such as the Orao, Pecom, and Oric Nova, the ZX Spectrum and C-64 enjoyed far more popularity. Later, the Atari ST and Amiga took their place.

In the late eighties, my high school had a collection of original Apple II computers, along with IRIS 8 clones.