[ahmedfromtunis]

I wish the Soviets had focused more on developing an independent computer industry and their own distinct flavors of programming languages.

Imagine the thrill of studying languages built to run on completely separate hardware architectures, featuring entirely novel paradigms and structures.

This would be the closest thing to experience reverse-engineering a computer from an alien spaceship.

[przemelek]

But they simply weren't able to sustain it.

In the West, while the military industry initially pushed computer development, private companies quickly adapted those technologies for the consumer market. Over time, the Western consumer market became vastly larger than the military one.

In the USSR, this cross-pollination wasn't possible because anything that even touched the military was immediately classified as a state secret. This obsession with secrecy even affected civilian infrastructure like nuclear power plants. Plant operators weren't fully trained on how the systems worked under extreme conditions, and they were kept completely in the dark about inherent design flaws—because in the Soviet system, everything was by definition perfect and superior to the West.

Furthermore, because the consumer market was strictly controlled by the government and the party, the Soviet economy lacked any organic market signals regarding what people actually wanted or needed. Apparatchiks had to look elsewhere for data, so they resorted to copying Western solutions—sometimes just copying the basic concept (like a radio where users could choose their own stations), and sometimes cloning the entire machine.

While Soviet scientists had some highly innovative and interesting ideas in the beginning, central planners eventually decided it was faster and easier to copy a Western solution that was already 5, 10, or 15 years ahead in mass production.

[vbezhenar]

I think it's a bit different.

USSR just wasn't rich enough to afford experimentation and innovation. Resources (including human brain power) were quite limited. So they had to copy proven solutions. Simple as that.

It's easy to judge them in the retrospective. But they had to make decisions, using the information the had at the moment, weighing risks as they saw them at that moment.

[ajcp]

The comment you are replying to is correct. The Soviet Union had massive amounts of resources and capital (both human and economic) to be able to develop and support technical innovations. The wider-Soviet bloc itself was of such a scale as to be able to completely support their own divergent technologies and innovations. The higher education systems themselves were sufficient to provide and foster the talent, even if they were overly-politicized.

Of issue, especially as time went on, was the overly-centralized nature of national resource and economic strategy and planning. Especially ESPECIALLY constraining was the dual-circuit monetary system of its economy, which literally prevented half of its "capital" to follow innovation or market forces outside of centralized allocation.

I highly recommend the book Collapse: The Fall of the Soviet Union by Vladislav Zubok

[Insimwytim]

> overly-centralized nature of national resource and economic strategy and planning.

This is a common misconception. Supported by the Soviet Union government in the 80s.

The fact is, that the efforts to sabotage and disband central planning started as early as 1954.

In 1954 an executive order of 14 Oct 1954 reduced the amount of administrative personnel by 450 thousands.

The amount of metrics went down from 9 940 to 6 308 in 1954, to 3 081 in 1955, and to 1 780 in 1958.

Khrushchev moved most of the planning power from central planning institution to the regions and down to the factories and enterprises. What previously was strict targets from the center now became soft suggestions.

Imagine you are a CTO and your workforce is heavily reduces and the goals you set are considered to be a mere suggestions. Not a very efficient instrument indeed. But not because it is overly-centralized.

[wasfgwp]

You are assuming the interest of people making those designs were aligned with the interests of consumers. They obviously were only to a very small degree since there were almost no incentives for Soviet companies to produce anything that wasn’t complete crap. Consumers had no choice since even the crap products they produced were hardly ever available to normal people anyway.

> USSR just wasn't rich enough

To an extent by choice. They really didn’t utilize the resources they had optimally.

[justsomehnguy]

> USSR just wasn't rich enough to afford experimentation and innovation. Resources (including human brain power) were quite limited. So they had to copy proven solutions. Simple as that.

"me good other stupid" in a nutshell.

[WorldMaker]

I think the "anything computing was seen as state secrets thing" is also possibly easiest to see in any documentaries and books on the history of Tetris (including the 2023 movie on Apple TV+). It's weird to say that Tetris was one of the most innovative software programs in USSR history and that the USSR almost crushed it before it had a chance to soar in the minds and dreams of millions of players, but that's basically what it was.

Even accepting the counter-narrative that the story of Tetris was "evil" capitalists taking advantage of the USSR to "steal" Tetris from the people of the USSR and the output of their socialist labor, the USSR was never in the position to offer Tetris to every worker in the country as a gift for their hard work because it was a state secret and computing wasn't something everyone had access to.

It is interesting to ponder if the USSR had made different decisions on the usefulness of general computing for the masses rather than the military what would have happened to Tetris as one interesting microcosm of the USSR's relationship to computing.

[przemelek]

It wasn't a lack of raw brainpower or wealth; it was a structural and ideological failure of resource allocation.

The USSR and the Iron Curtain bloc had a massive population and world-class scientific talent. The problem was that the Soviet system viewed independent thought and individuality as a threat, actively sabotaging its own geniuses:

Persecution of Top Minds: Sergei Korolev, the literal architect of the Soviet space program, was sent to the Gulag, where he lost his teeth to scurvy and survived a broken jaw before being pulled out to work in a sharashka (a prison lab). Andrei Sakharov, the father of the Soviet hydrogen bomb, was relentlessly persecuted and exiled later in life for pointing out systemic flaws.

Ideology Over Reality: The state actively banned the teaching of modern genetics for decades because Trofim Lysenko’s fraudulent agricultural theories were deemed "more communist."

When you look at where the USSR did choose to spend its massive resources, it wasn't on pragmatic, cost-saving solutions. It was on hyper-expensive, top-down military prestige projects—many of which the West mathematically evaluated and discarded as impractical.

They built the RBMK reactors (like the one at Chernobyl) specifically because the dual-use design allowed them to generate civilian electricity while simultaneously harvesting plutonium for weapons, creating a fundamentally unstable system. They spent fortunes building the "Caspian Sea Monster" (a giant ground-effect vehicle) and the Tsar Bomba.

The tragedy of the Soviet computer industry wasn't a lack of money or smart people. It was that any "von Neumann" or "Seymour Cray" born in the USSR who asked the wrong questions or challenged a party bureaucrat's stupid idea was far more likely to end up in a labor camp than heading an independent tech company.

Those born in countries like Poland, Hungary, Bulgaria or Czechoslovakia were usually "asked" to leave country and they were working for the West ;-)

[BoxOfRain]

> They built the RBMK reactors (like the one at Chernobyl) specifically because the dual-use design allowed them to generate civilian electricity while simultaneously harvesting plutonium for weapons, creating a fundamentally unstable system.

It was more that the RMBK was more designed around existing Soviet manufacturing capacity, they could and did build more conventional reactor designs as well but they required enormous pressure vessels the USSR only had one factory to produce. The RBMK on the other hand is not a monolithic pressure vessel, it's a collection of hundreds of individual pressurised tubes which were much easier for the Soviet manufacturing base to produce. It was actually a clever idea on the face of it, the problem was more it had inherently dangerous behaviour in certain regimes (the infamous positive void coefficient of reactivity) and the positive scram effect wasn't known until well into their deployment. The operators were also given contradictory operating instructions which failed to highlight the safety-critical nature of certain parameters.

[Insimwytim]

> Sergei Korolev, the literal architect of the Soviet space program, was sent to the Gulag, where he lost his teeth to scurvy and survived a broken jaw

That's just a scary tale, that was created long after he died.

> Trofim Lysenko’s fraudulent agricultural theories were deemed "more communist."

Not exactly. His "fraudulent" theories delivered real value, and saved millions of people from starving. But he didn't belong to fancy scientific establishment (which traveled to conferences abroad while studying things with no impact to the people). He was a regular man, with experience working on land and with an aim for a practical results. He was not from "the club". So said establishment hated him and seized the first opportunity to attack him. Said establishment in all forms and shapes still hates him and other talented outsiders.

Discussion between Trofim Lysenko and his challengers actually public - you can read it yourself, not distorted conclusion-ready version presented by his haters.

I'm not saying you are wrong on all counts, but at least with those two examples you seem to just follow the usual narrative.

[lstodd]

Oh my, we have an actual Stalinist here.

[lo_zamoyski]

> Those born in countries like Poland

One famous example is Jacek Karpiński [0]. Soviet pressure, opposition to the use of Western parts, and intense jealousy of the commie state bureaucracy which sought to hold a monopoly over computer production (e.g., through the state-owned companies Odra and Elwro) halted production.

Here's some English language documentation for one of his models (the K-202) which was exported to the UK [1]. (The state-produced Mera 400, a heavily modified version of the K-202, did achieve a great deal of success, however, despite high production costs.)

There was an article posted here about him about 10 years ago [2].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacek_Karpi%C5%84ski

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20241012182627/https://www.zenke...

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41072026

[przemelek]

Exactly, and Jacek Karpiński is the perfect tragic example of this dynamic.

It's worth noting that Poland was actually one of the least ideologically rigid countries in the Eastern Bloc. While you couldn't openly oppose the regime, it was entirely possible to have a brilliant career in science or medicine (like Zbigniew Religa, who pioneered Poland's heart transplantation program) without strictly toeing the Party line.

Yet even in Poland's relatively relaxed climate, Karpiński’s revolutionary K-202 was strangled by bureaucratic jealousy, state monopolies (Elwro), and the paranoia of central planners.

If that was the fate of an innovator in Poland, imagine how much worse it was inside the borders of the USSR proper. The Soviet system operated on a near-literal interpretation of totalitarian control, where maintaining absolute party monopoly over every facet of life was prioritized above efficiency, wealth, or technological progress.

In that environment, independent thinkers weren't just seen as eccentric or inconvenient—they were viewed as a systemic security threat. When a system treats structural innovation as a form of ideological deviance, the safest thing for a genius to do was to keep quiet, escape to the West, or risk ending up neutralized by the state. You can't build an "alien spaceship" computing paradigm when the system's primary metric of success is total bureaucratic obedience.

[stasomatic]

My first PC was an Atari 800XL smuggled in from Krakow stuffed somewhere in my dad’s Volga’s chassis, circa ‘87, with cassette player and I joystick. I played The Revenge of Montezuma until I could play it just by sound on the hell settings. We did have some minis in my uni in Odessa, they had Fortran but I think we just played Pong on them.

I really wanted an MSX looking box though, that we played Karateka on in some precursors of Internet cafes, they looked the business, like high end Japanese hifi gear of the era.

[btilly]

Three more factors matter a lot, and get missed.

The first is corruption. When the Iron Curtain fell, every country behind it suffered from corruption. The Russian word for how it worked was блат, pronounced blat. When the official way of doing things doesn't work, the way that works is informal favor trading. I have a friend, who knows a friend, etc. This acts as grit in the economic system, and makes everyone less productive.

The second was the pressure to not stand out too much. One proverb is Инициатива наказуема, pronounced initsiativa nakazuema. It translates to, "Initiative is punishable."

Why? Well, imagine that you're a middle manager. It's a dog eat dog world. You know that everyone below you, wants your job. Everyone above you, knows that you want their job. You got your role by sucking up to the people above you. Those below you, got theirs by sucking up to you. You don't want your employees to be utterly incompetent - then you won't be able to look good. But you also don't want any of them to shine - then your boss might think that they should have your job. This encourages bland mediocracy. Everyone strives to be just good enough for their job, while sucking up well enough to keep it.

The result is a kind of learned incompetence. But a nation filled with this kind of incompetence, will be unable to sustain innovation.

The third is alcoholism. Russia is basically a very large, very dysfunctional, alcoholic family. It is hard to overstate how true that is. The most popular vodka at the end of the Soviet era came in 750 ml bottles, that did not have a resealable cap. Because no true Russian would leave a bottle half-full. Anyone who didn't drink, was odd. A group that got together without drinking might be suspected of plotting revolution. This is yet another drag on Russian society.

[rixed]

Sounds simple. Would you also have a story to explain why Europe never managed to develop an independent IT industry either?

[homarp]

the 8bit era had a few 'european' computers. but not scaled enough to survive the PC era, I guess.

arm is one offshoot of that era.

Erlang and Prolog (and Ada I guess) are also european-ish.

why? too many localisation to be able to scale?

[nivertech]

The Soviet computer industry had only two secrets:

1. how far behind the West it was, and

2. that there were no other secrets

[theamk]

When I first learned about ternary machines like SETUN [0] I was so excited! Forger bits, there are "trits", and instead of boring boolean logic you have +/0/- trits. As alien as it gets!

But then I read much more about the design, and it turns out that the reason machine was ternary is the designers had to minimize number of transistors, and leaned heavily into transformer-based logic - which naturally favors ternary values.

But for transistor/IC circuitry, there are no advantages in ternary - they key to reliability is margins, and margins require only two states. Any transistor-based ternary implementation would be forced to using a pair of bits and declare one of the four states invalid - a clear efficiency loss.

History confirmed it - even in MSU, once transistors became more available, they abandoned SETUN and started using those. Turns out at least that ternary branch was just a evolutionary dead end.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Setun

[shrubble]

Their semiconductor manufacturing was 10-15 years behind the Western technology. They just didn’t have the capability. Despite that they had good brains and delivered efficiently with what they had.

[falcor84]

That was my feeling when I first heard about Lisp Machines. It's unfortunate that I never got to see or use one in person.

[BoxOfRain]

There'd be other interesting implications as well, socialist systems were more open to the idea of cybernetics and with a proper computer industry the Soviets might have had more room to explore it.

Mind you I still think it would have likely been impossible for political reasons, there were many structural incentives to falsify economic data in the USSR due to the high degree of corruption and patronage among the nomenklatura. The whole point of cybernetics is to treat economic problems as systems problems and expose data transparently, and given the USSR was structurally dependent on falsifying this data suddenly having an accurate picture might have actually been destabilising kind of like how Glasnost turned out to be.

Another interesting 'Soviets had decent computers' counterfactual is that the Chernobyl disaster might have been prevented, since the Kurchartov Institute would have been better able to characterise the processes in the bottom of the fatally flawed RBMK in low power regimes before it was put into mass production. Again this might not have actually helped, the overconfidence the Soviet system had in its scientific and technical institutions was high and genuinely really interesting.