[MountDoom]

> It reminds me of stories I've heard about the Cold War and how Soviet scientists and engineers had very little exchange or trade with the West, but made wristwatches and cameras and manned rockets, almost in a parallel universe

They also had an extensive industrial espionage program. In particular, most of the integrated circuits made in the Soviet Union were not original designs. They were verbatim copies of Western op-amps, logic gates, and CPUs. They had pin- and instruction-compatible knock-offs of 8086, Z80, etc. Rest assured, that wasn't because they loved the instruction set and recreated it from scratch.

Soviet scientists were on the forefront of certain disciplines, but tales of technological ingenuity are mostly just an attempt to invent some romantic lore around stolen designs.

[scrlk]

> They were verbatim copies of Western op-amps, logic gates, and CPUs.

DEC etched a great Easter egg on to the die of the MicroVAX CPU because of this: "VAX - when you care enough to steal the very best".

https://micro.magnet.fsu.edu/creatures/pages/russians.html

[Rendello]

Seems analogous to Apple and Microsoft in the 80s and 90s. Though I'm not sure which country Xerox would be. Maybe Germany in terms of the technology lifted by the later powers, but it seems a like a bit of a rude comparison!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pirates_of_Silicon_Valley

[antegamisou]

> tales of technological ingenuity are mostly just an attempt to invent some romantic lore around stolen designs.

This is a biased take. One can make a similar and likely more factual claim about the US , where largely every innovation in many different disciplines is dictated and targeted for use by the war industry.

And while there were many low quality knockoff electronics, pre-collapse USSR achieved remarkable feats in many different disciplines the US was falling behind at.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_Russian_innovation...

[MountDoom]

> One can make a similar and likely more factual claim about the US , where largely every innovation in many different disciplines is dictated and targeted for use by the war industry.

That's a complete non-sequitur.

[some_random]

>where largely every innovation in many different disciplines is dictated and targeted for use by the war industry.

As opposed to the USSR who's wikipedia page for innovations proudly features, lets see;

Aerial Refueling

Military robot Paratrooping

Flame tank

Self-propelled multiple rocket launcher

Thermonuclear fusion (bomb)

AK-47

ICBMs

Tsar Bomb

to name a very small selection

It's almost as if you have it completely backwards and it was the USSR who was centrally planning to innovate in the art of killing.

[antegamisou]

I don't know if you deliberately skipped the 90% of other inventions that had nothing to do with -mind you- defense from American imperialism or you're being dense on purpose. Probably both?

Anyway just glancing the respective page for US "innovations" one can easily tell which country had the most obsessive offensive war industry.

[hinkley]

There was a Star Talk recently where they talked about how when they divided up the German aerospace scientists after WWII, Russia ended up with majority KISS scientists and we got the perfectionist, superior engineering ones. I always figured that was just a US vs Russia ethos difference. And maybe that’s why they picked who they did but maybe I have it backward.

[some_random]

That seems completely unbelievable to me, of the thousands (tens of thousands?) of scientists captured and recruited by the allies they just happened to split along philosophical lines? And then they had some huge cultural impact? As opposed to just being Shanghai'd by whatever nation got to them first then absorbed into the greater social and economic fabric of that nation.

[SoftTalker]

I always assumed it was just which army captured them.

[MountDoom]

Yes, and many German scientists went to great lengths to surrender to Western forces. I think von Braun was one of them.

[hinkley]

“Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down?

That's not my department!" says Wernher von Braun