[gremlinunderway]

Really cool to see other attempts at historically understanding Warsaw Pact and fUSSR tech industries.

Every other treatment I've ever seen for describing the Soviet computing and internet development has always just been a lazy "well it wasn't innovative like silicon valley" which, while not necessarily wrong, sounds more like awkward and insecure attempt at justifying our own processes, and also isn't all that descriptive or useful.

This isn't surprising because we still have a very heavy Cold War stink on history to do with the USSR and just continue to discover we were wrong about certain aspects of that experiment or didnt quite fully understand it without heavy ideological bias.

[pvg]

we were wrong about certain aspects

I think the wrongness of popular perception tends to go in the other direction. People often misunderstand just how badly the Soviet bloc lagged in high technology, precision manufacturing at scale, etc. This makes sense because they remember and have read about the military parity, the brief period of (very roughly) comparable middle class standard of living, etc. But Moore's law (among other things) dramatically exacerbated the technology gap - you can have, say, a steel or oil industry that's a couple of decades behind the state of the art. An IC industry that far behind is barely a meaningful IC industry at all.

[rdtsc]

> Every other treatment I've ever seen for describing the Soviet computing and internet development has always just been a lazy "well it wasn't innovative like silicon valley"

It depends on the decade and if we're are talking about the Soviet Union, keeping in mind that Warsaw Pact countries also had their own trajectories and specifics, like the article mentions. By the 1970s the Soviets themselves realized they were lagging behind, and decided to mostly "borrow" Western designs. So it isn't just us judging them from an orange forum years later, it was a judgement they came to on their own at that time. In the end they were cloning the computer systems of the West, not vice-versa. And, if we know anything about the Soviets, is they did not like to lose face. Everything from space to sports was always them showing off their superiority, so the decision to concede and start copying computer systems designed by the "evil capitalists" likely wasn't done lightly.

[pvg]

the decision to concede and start copying computer systems designed by the "evil capitalists" likely wasn't done lightly.

It's not really how the Soviet Union operated, this sort of "technology transfer" was fundamental to Soviet development from the start. It was so ingrained in Soviet leadership that it was sometimes counterproductive - one famous example is Beria's insistence on strictly following the atomic bomb designs lifted from the Manhattan project which probably didn't make the bomb makers' jobs any easier. A down-to-the-last-rivet replica of the B-29 was also not what Tupolev would have done without orders from the top.

[rdtsc]

> It was so ingrained in Soviet leadership that it was sometimes counterproductive - one famous example is Beria's insistence on strictly following the atomic bomb designs lifted from the Manhattan project which probably didn't make the bomb makers' jobs any easier.

That's because because they had realized they were behind already. And it's not like the Americans and the Soviets were going to open their nuclear bomb blueprints so they world got to laugh at the copy-cat design.

> It's not really how the Soviet Union operated, this sort of "technology transfer" was fundamental to Soviet development from the start.

As far as computers went in the 1950s and 1960s the Soviets initially did pretty well. Their BESM-1 machine was the fastest in Europe for some years. They even had revolutionary designs like the Setun with its famous ternary logic. So they had the brains and the capability do build them. But due to planning and political hubris they lost their lead.

But once they were behind it was considered better to copy than not have the technology at all, but yes, those were made by political appointees and people who did not listen or take the scientists' or engineers' opinions seriously.

[pvg]

The point is that they didn't suddenly realize they were behind and on such occasions looked to imitate foreign technology, shamefaced and with great ideological trepidation, as you were suggesting. This was fundamental Soviet policy from the get-go, the Soviet state would not have survived without it and Soviet leadership recognized that.

It was obvious they were copied.

Obvious to whom counts. It's not like every Lada came with a 'licensed from Fiat' sticker on the bumper. "Half the cars on the street" tells you a great deal about how much the Soviets cared about the visibility and appearance of copying things to the world at large.

[rdtsc]

> The point is that they didn't suddenly realize they were behind and on such occasions looked to imitate foreign technology, shamefaced and with great ideological trepidation,

Bashir Rameev and Victor Glushkov disagreed from https://www.sigcis.org/files/SIGCISMC2010_001.pdf

They wrote that:

> Copying foreign work excludes the possibility of utilizing our own collective experience of computer research, and in the immediate future, will hinder our ability to employ new principles. This will bring the development of computer technology in our nation to an end

They wanted to co-develop a new system with ICL. But you're right, the political and military leaders where the ones wanting to quickly copy the IBM-360 to catch up.

> Obvious to whom counts. It's not like every Lada came with a 'licensed from Fiat' sticker on the bumper.

They did a better one, and renamed a whole city where the cars were built after the Palmiro Togliatti https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tolyatti