[diego_moita]

In the 80s Brazil went that same path. They made a law forbidding everyone from importing computers. The idea was to "develop a national computer industry".

They created a monstrosity. The Brazilian made computers were always one generation behind the foreign ones (AT 286 was a "new" thing when every country was going into 386) and would cost 3 times more. Computers smuggled from Paraguay were everywhere, even I smuggled some.

The IT industry in Brazil became a cartel dominated by few companies. They'd pirate everything from the Americans, even DOS and all BIOS and firmware. Their computers' mainboards were ugly, hacked and defect prone. But they would give buckets of money to the military controlling the government and the corrupt politicians in Congress. The 80s became known as the "lost decade" because of the low growth induced by this policy.

This dumb idea expired in 1992.

[m4rtink]

I though Brazil still has these weird tariffs on computers and high tech products in general - at least I've heard from some Brazilians that it's still making personal computing hardware far too expensive wioth little to no benefit to this day.

[diego_moita]

Yeah, they still have high tariffs. But back them it was just illegal to import computers. You'd need to request special authorization from the government to do so, and it would take months to get an authorization. And only a few reasons would be accepted (research, high-performance industrial automation, etc).

[giantg2]

Are phones an exception? I've heard Brazil is a very mobile-first market.

[tdeck]

What is Brazil's computer hardware industry like now? Are there any companies manufacturing in Brazil?

[diego_moita]

They're mostly assemblers of parts. They buy most parts from China and assemble the computers in the country.