There's the various Elbrus chips that are only really used in defense applications. The best stuff Russia can make domestically is on 90nm process tech:
Wow, the die shot! It looks like an eerie caricature of then-contemporary chip designs. I have seen blocky hand layouts, and modern (presumably) auto layouts that look like bacteria cultures. But I have never seen warped and slanted blocks.
I think it’s a mask diagram not a die shot, in any case these features are common for that era especially for the metal layers / ic traces look at die shots of a Z80 and it’s clones.
Ah, yes. What do I know... but this Russian CPU still looks much more "weird" than a Z80! The Z80 has 90 and 45 degree angles, this thing also has like 10 degree angles, and wavy structures, and big curves, and triangles.
Well OK, there is only one triangle - in the upper left corner. The other things I mostly see in the center and right of center. Especially in the blue lines - power and clock or so?
I could not find it on ddg/google right now, but I remember seeing some absolutely beautiful plant/vine-like trace routes done by the soviet auto-routing tools of past ages. I feel a bit sad that the 45degree aesthetic is the only one that survived today.
I also thought 45 degrees is used to reduce ESD, provide the best use of die space, and reduce stress on the metal with high current. Maybe all of that is a myth? Any other angle doesn't have the same benefits.
Any-angle routing may actually be better for use of space and reducing stress. I sometimes get more traces packed around a bend with any-angle. And most polymide PCBs are any-angle or at least super rounded with teardrops, having sharp transitions of any type would act as weak points.[1] ESD really doesn't make sense, maybe you meant EMI or EMC? There's nothing particularly special about 45 degrees other than the ease of modeling
In old integrated circuit manufacturing processes, with large minimum dimensions, it was possible to draw arbitrary curves without problems.
Some of the software tools were limited to straight lines or even to straight lines only at certain angles, just because the limitation simplified the algorithms, but if one really wanted, it was possible to draw anything on the masks.
On modern manufacturing processes, with extremely small minimum sizes, it has become more and more difficult to predict which will be the differences in geometry between what you draw on the mask and what will be made on the surface of the semiconductor wafer, after photolithography and etching of the layer that must be patterned.
In order to make the photolithography and etching processes more predictable, the design rules have become more and more restrictive, e.g. by allowing only vertical, horizontal and 45 degree straight lines, or only vertical and horizontal lines, or even on some layers only traces parallel to a certain direction.
Moreover there are a lot of extra constraints, e.g. the need to place dummy patterns around those that are useful, because the same pattern in a different neighborhood will be distorted in a different way, which could be hard to predict.
> These 1806VM2 are still being made by Angstrem, if you need to build a PDP-11 computer to run Tetris on, or repair a Buran shuttle you may have laying around.
PDP11's were pretty great machines. Using RSTS/E (resource sharing time sharing... Eeeee!) you could really stretch things out.
The process memory was limited to 32kb (maybe 64kb... can't recall) and the OS's executable system supported seamless overlays. Basically as needed the OS would swap in different code segments (min 4k?). With careful planning you could build some pretty big applications... so long as you could get descent separation. You *could* swap overlays over and over and over... but this would kill any sort of performance... best to swap in a "AR" overlay, and when the user switches to "GL" swap that overlay in.
The machine language was also pretty nice. Several addressing modes were program counter relative which was amazing (eg. JMP to 1500 words from current PC) . When I first learned that that windows loads an executable and then goes through and fixes up memory addresses so JMP instructions (et al) would work I could hardly believe it. If only the x86's had decent support for a PC relative addressing mode :)
And the Digital Equipment Corp documentation! Glorious. A wall of shelves, 10 feet long, 7 feet tall, filled with 3 inch binders explaining everything in detail! Shivers!!
Microsoft's online documentation is the closest thing in quality to the old DEC stuff.
Jumps have always been PC relative on x86. It's calls that can optionally not be. It's mainly the indirect calls that are troublesome.
DEC documentation was something else though, agreed. My KD11-A came with everything you'd expect to be documented these, plus full schematics, plus microcode listing in source and flow chart form.
PDP-11's (LSI-11's) were originally limited to 32k 16-bit words (64kb) but were exanded to 18bit addressing allowing up to 256Kb. The PC is only 16 bit though so 64k of code directly addressable at any one time (ignoring the reserved area for memory mapped hardware). The MMU was pretty simple so easy enough to access the extra memory without relying on the OS (simpler under RT-11 than RSTS/E).
I still have shelves of DEC documentation (and a few PDP-11's).
The West normally lacks understanding what hard work, innovation and intelligence is a universal value. During my years at Stanford I had the opportunity to learn about the North Korea nuclear program and how the West never imagine the advancement they produced with very limited resources and without Russian help. Couple of professors visited the nuclear facilities as part of the UN investigation and were shocked with the intelligence, and innovation of Korean engineers. The rest is history and we have now a North Korea with nuclear capabilities
If you want a world where nations aren’t scrambling to acquire nuclear weapons, then maybe we ought to reign in a hegemonic superpower which has been invading and bombing countries since the end of WW2.
It's simpler than that, really: ban all nuclear weapons and bomb the shit out of anyone who attempts to create them.
This two-tired world, where the rich guys and their cronies have nuclear weapons, while the second grade countries must submit to their wishes, will clearly leave many nations wanting to balance the scale. History has shown that all countries with security problems develop nuclear weapons as soon as they get to a suficient wealth level.
What nuclear weapons are fantastic at preventing are the regular border skirmishes that counties have fought since the invention of territory. It used to be that counties were constantly gaining or losing land to their neighbors and sometimes even ceasing to exist or appearing out of an existing country. Maps would be constantly in flux. These days situations like that are rare. The Russian annexation of Crimea and the breakup of Yugoslavia being the notable exceptions. All of which did not involve nuclear armed powers (at least on the losing side).
Banning nuclear weapons would be suicidal with how aggressive NATO nations are in the global south.
Having nuclear weapons is like having a nice sharp dagger on the US throat.
If you really want to make the world a saver place the US should give up its first strike policy.
That will calm down the escalation calculation China or Russia have to make.
IDK, I believe a first-strike policy is inherently destabilizing. Never quite understood the idea. You don't have to abolish nukes to cancel such a policy.
Russia and China are the only two great powers seeking to conquer and annex territory in the world today.
China just recently annexed territory the size of France in the South China Sea. They annexed Hong Kong. Next they want Taiwan. They eagerly want several of Japan's island territories. They very obviously won't stop there, as their military power increases dramatically over the next 10-20 years; they're just getting warmed up on territorial conquest in Asia.
Russia is dead set on destroying Ukraine as it exists today and will proceed to, at a minimum, annex to the Dnieper River. They already annexed Crimea and a large chunk of East Ukraine. They'll attempt to take all of the Black Sea territory of Ukraine, further impoverishing and cutting off the remaining chunk of broken Ukraine post annexation. Further it has its eyes on taking Moldova, either directly or by forced alliance. Taking Ukraine's Black Sea territory will specifically make Moldova easy to conquer; there is no scenario where they don't pursue that combo. It has begun the (likely longer term) process of annexing Belarus, Lukashenko has capitulated into Putin's arms. Nearly any territory in the region that is not in NATO is up for grabs for conquest as far as Russia is concerned. Russia realistically destroyed Georgia, annexing part of the nation, and it's likely to eventually get around to finishing the rest. It would be a big task for the weaker modern Russia, however they'd also really like to figure out how to sink their claws into Kazakhstan and reclaim some of that territory as part of the empire. For Russia ideally there would be some convenient chaos, civil war in Kazakhstan, and Russia would then use border security as an excuse to de facto invade and claim territory that they'd never give back.
Meanwhile, the US has spent most of the post WW2 era trying to maintain global border security, including in Europe, the Middle East, Africa, Latin America and Europe. The US was in Vietnam? It sure was, trying to protect the South from a conquering North; when the US left, the South promptly got conquered (and yet the US is the villain in that story? yeah right). The same fate awaited South Korea, except the US saved them from the conquering North. How much territory did the US annex in Iraq? Zero. How much territory did the US annex in Afghanistan? Zero. It didn't try to take those nations, their territory, or their natural resources.
When was the last time the US tried to conquer and annex Canada or Mexico? Canada sits right next to the world's primary superpower, with an almost entirely unguarded border. Check out Canada's tiny military spending some time. Ask India how their border context is going with China these days; everyone that shares a border with Russia or China is terrified of their territorial ambitions.
While the US has been a superpower during the post WW2 years, how many nations has it annexed? Right.
Oh, but that’s not “conquering”. That’s “liberating”, the same way the US sponsored puppet violent dictatorships in Latin America that “saved” those countries from becoming “communist dictatorships”.
>The US was in Vietnam? It sure was, trying to protect the South from a conquering North
Sorry but you are dead wrong about the Ukraine, and especially about Vietnam, the US feared the rise of Communism and by that loosing control over Vietnam.
You're pretty wrong about Vietnam. The US got involved to avoid the communists, the most legitimate entity in Vietnam, the one that fought the Japanese and French and which liberated the country from taking control. If the US doesn't intervene, there is never a South Vietnam.
What you described is roughly how things went down in Korea, so maybe you just confused the two.
US sponsored coups and wars, often in favour of downright terrible people (like Pinochet) weren't for "global border security", but for power, resource and against anything vaguely leftist.
The know how is hardly a secret. Most countries can build a nuclear weapon provided they want to, they are let to do it and they have the raw materials.
But you are right, innovation is not a monopoly of the West.
During the Soviet times USSR had many technological advances, their population was quite literate in sciences, schools were very good and USSR had many teams winning math and physics Olympics.
Having great schools resulted in a large number of scientists and researchers.
The situation repeats with China. They invested a lot in scientific education and it is starting to pay off. Meanwhile, in the West, higher education means discussing politics and being woke.
The purpose of education is the mental refinement of the individual, it scope is dealing with knowledge to that purpose. You deal with knowledge to provide a form of wisdom. Notion and ability go together through education. (Notion without ability would be a dead encyclopedia.)
Political science (say, the comparative advantages of an organizational, or administrative, or voting system vis-a-vis philosophical principles and quantitative methods etc.) is a discipline. It is surely part of education.
When individuals treat political discussions like "hooligans" could treat "Barcelona vs. Arsenal", that is a fault in mental refinement, hence also in education.
>Political science (say, the comparative advantages of an organizational, or administrative, or voting system vis-a-vis philosophical principles and quantitative methods etc.) is a discipline.
Studying politics doesn't mean doing politics. And studying politics is best done solely as a discipline, not instead of other disciplines.
Yes. You wrote «discussing politics»: the expression leaves interpretation of "discussing politics with a skewed bias towards that discipline" - still research, investigation, inquire, study, learning -, it is not necessarily read as "doing politics" ("party taken, now let us be active, or loud, or hooligans").
Now: in theory, if your students spent time being loud instead of studying, that should reflect on the marks, should not it? They finally should not pass if doing politics replaced studying. But it is reported of prestigious Athenaeums in USA, and it is also seen and told in Europe, that the "feedback" from the institutions is being lower and lower: even the worse will get the degree. There are horror stories directly told by professors. So, there is a confirmed crisis in education.
But you want your citizens to be fully developed, not """able to count and unable to read""".
Just look at the incredible amount of knowledge around working Titanium that came from Russia, even to do things that the West had decided were impossible.
ARM1 shipped in 1985, and it wasn't immediately obvious at the time that it was the way forward. Meanwhile, this LSI-11 clone dates to 1982. Cloning ARM three years in advance would have been a neat trick!
Precisely. Initial ARM work started in '83 and it wasn't exactly well published until the revealing of the Acorn Archimedes ('87), the BBC Co-processor ('86) was spotted rarely in the field (mostly due to its price).
But: nice to reflect on that back in the 80's designing a new CPU could be done with a very small team and modest funding in 2 years time going from drawing board to first silicon (assuming that kind of talent, of course).
ARM only properly started in '83, with first working silicon in '85, likely by then the predecessor to this project was already well underway. Besides, I think that they should get credit for making their own design rather than cloning someone else's.
That was the only CPU certified for military use in USSR. I know guy who worked on Navy Surface to surface missile, and they had to put 32 cores to achieve required performance. Even with low consumption, control module overheated and melted down in 10 minutes. Annoying for testing, but doesn't matter for real rocket. Flight time was much less.
OMG. Sweet memories. I do not really play games but I spent countless amount of hours back in USSR Academy of Science playing Tetris on that DVK-1. Tetris to me is a form of meditation. My fingers know how to play and my mind can just float aimlessly ;) This was a pleasant payback as that DVK-1 had drank a healthy dollop of my blood when suddenly resetting in the middle of me writing a program when I was just about to save it.
The PDP-11 ISA is one of the cleanest and most orthogonal there ever was, and served as the basis for the 68K family's design. This would have made for an incredibly fun micro.
When your country struggles to produce basic things like energy, and your scientists are routinely jailed based on a dictator's whims, the engineers become much better at squeezing the most performance out of minimum resources.
I work with a former soviet engineer who worked on submarine software. He is a diehard capitalist. The soviet system collapsed for important reasons.
Actually this and other achievements really impress me, and Russia's computer program of course collapsed with the economy and everything else in 1990, which showed the evils of unrestricted capitalism.
>The soviet system collapsed for important reasons.
It collapsed because the economy was state owned. If USSR did what China did, not only it wouldn't have collapsed, but it would have been actually a very strong country.
>You think the U.S. or Europe would have engaged in technology transfers to the USSR and allowed the USSR to export manufactured goods to them?
That's what I am trying to argue: they haven't collapsed because of lack of technology, they collapsed because a state owned economy cannot grow at the rate needed to compete.
If Perestroika have been started earlier and with a strong focus to transfer parts of economy to private owned businesses, they wouldn't have been outcompeted.
> they collapsed because a state owned economy cannot grow at the rate needed to compete.
Uhm, no. It is a myopic and a highly lopsided point of view. The collapse of the Soviet Union was a combination of a few compounding factors:
– Soviet Union has come out of the WWII having been slightly less than completely devastated. The entire European part of the USSR, that had been the centre of the manufactoring and farming before the war, was razed into the ground. Larger and smaller cities, towns, villages – every single thing.
– Accounts vary, but the general consensus is that at least 27 million people have perished in the war (in trenches / battles, in Nazi concentration camps, tortured, gassed or burned alive or executed). Again, by varying accounts, at least 50 million more people have come out of the war being physically or psychologically (usually both) traumatised. The killed and the injured have comprised the most productive part of the USSR workforce before the war – out of a population of 140 million people before the war.
– A few waves of internal political represssions and witch hunting that have followed the war and up until Stalin's death have added to the number of overall casualties.
– It has taken the USSR nearly 20 years to return to pre-war levels of the production output. The vast majority of the population have lacked basic necessities all the way into mid-1960's or longer. Having rebuilt the economy, the government has focused on providing the general populace with free (oftentimes shitty, though) accommodation, free health, free education, full time employment and pension. By the mid-1970's, the majority of the population had had a roof of sorts over their heads (also of varying quality); still, it was a roof, and it was free of charge.
– Not only did the US come out of the WWII unscathed, it has also turned out to be the main beneficiary of the war. In exchange for help, the USSR (and the UK as well) were shipping convoys loaded with the gold bullion back to North American shores over the Arctic Sea. Even though the Nazi U-boats did succeed in the sinking of quite a few of the convoy ships, by the end of the war the US had become immensely rich with no material damage to the local economy. It is important to point out that, without the US (Canadian / UK and the allied help overall) assistance – that was absolutely crucial to the USSR survival in the first 2-3 years of the war – the USSR would have not lasted past 1941-42. The US was providing the USSR with everything, starting from machinery, armaments, munitions – down to army uniforms and preserved food. US made Studebaker US6 trucks were the single most frequently utilised military vehicle in the Red Army due to their availability and sturdiness throughout the entire war. Disappointingly, due to the current heated political situation, many ex-Soviet/Russian citizens live in complete denial of the importance of the US help in the WWII.
– In the following post-war years, the US has succeeded where the Soviet government has failed. Namely, in winning a psychological war and, consequently, in tricking and convincing the Soviet government into a believing that a nuclear conflict was imminent and inevitable. Which has resulted in the economic production nearly in its entirety having been funneled into defence and arms race at the expense of domestic needs. In the hindsight, the Soviet government could have ignored the threat, but they did not. Which was a grave mistake.
– A lesser, but not insignificant, factor was the Soviet Union throwing money away at establishing and supporting nascent, Soviet friendly, regimes and proxy wars in the post-colonial world that has not resulted in anything else other than flushing vasts of money down the drain.
– Towards the end of 1980's, a huge internal budget deficit caused by preceding factors had resulted in a death spiral and a complete economic and – predictably – political collapse of the Soviet Union.
Centralized control always has an information problem. The people at the edges know what is going on but can’t communicate that up to the people in charge without overwhelming them. This is where market economies shine, the people near the edges make the decisions which avoids the communication bottleneck.
My best take on it is that the war machine coupled with the toxic paranoia of the senile Brezhnev government has caused the eventual demise of the USSR. The Khrushchev thaw spanning nearly a decade before that, in my personal, somewhat weakly substantiated view, was the last chance when the USSR could begin a gradual transition into opening up and becoming a Scandinavian like socialist state (I can have my own pipe dream, okay?). What followed instead was the economic stagnation focused on the preservation of the Soviet state, heavily handed suppressions of democratic movements in satellite states of the Eastern block as well as domestic policies targeting the dissent.
>Why did it do such a bad job in the later decades, when they had recovered from the war?
Because nobody cared to make it work. From bottom to the top. Some were just pretending they worked, some worked poorly, some work good but with no good direction.
When there's no competition and no personal incentive to improve, then why try to improve something?
> Because nobody cared to make it work. From bottom to the top. Some were just pretending they worked, some worked poorly, some work good but with no good direction.
They did care. The first two post-WWII decades were a time of a massive economic and social upheaval where everyone did care to regain peace and everything and everyone that had been lost in the war. People have united to rebuild the country from scratch. It started rapidly going downhill in late 1970's and onwards due to stagnation and growing indifference stemming out of it.
> In the following post-war years, the US has succeeded where the Soviet government has failed. Namely, in winning a psychological war and, consequently, in tricking and convincing the Soviet government into a believing that a nuclear conflict was imminent and inevitable. Which has resulted in the economic production nearly in its entirety having been funneled into defence and arms race at the expense of domestic needs. In the hindsight, the Soviet government could have ignored the threat, but they did not. Which was a grave mistake.
Good point, but that doesn't disprove what I've said. US could build tons of weapons because they had resources. And they had resources because the economy was flourishing. USSR economy was subpar.
>A lesser, but not insignificant, factor was the Soviet Union throwing money away at establishing and supporting nascent, Soviet friendly, regimes and proxy wars in the post-colonial world that has not resulted in anything else other than flushing vasts of money down the drain.
True, but US also threw money to support friendly regimes. Just that US could afford it because the economy was in a good state due to it not being owned by the state.
>The state run economy has actually done a very good job at recovering the country's economy in the first two post-WWII decades
It actually didn't. Germany recovered faster, Japan recovered faster and they've been hit very hard.
USSR worked until a point after which it couldn't compete with a market economy. China realized it and allowed people to run businesses.
The US simply had more free money to throw at whatever they wanted.
> Germany recovered faster, Japan recovered faster and they've been hit very hard. USSR worked until a point after which it couldn't compete with a market economy.
Ever heard of the Marshall plan that has aided the recovery of Western Europe? USSR did apply to participate in the US aid programme; however negotiations quickly fell apart after, due to vehement disagreements over the future of Germany. USSR has bailed shortly after (rightly or wrongly).
> China realized it and allowed people to run businesses.
You are not conflating post-WWII years with early 1990's, are you? They are somewhat 50 years apart from each other.
Subpar you say. I have a habit of giving the credit where it is due, whether it is the US, or USSR, or the Klingon kingdom – I simply could not care less who is the beneficiary of it.
By the time the USSR launched the Sputnik, the US – whilst very much likely having a superior economic production output – had been significantly scientifically lagging behind the USSR due to the historically high anti-intellectual stance permeating throughout the US society (which still exists today) – the infamous «shoot the tall poppy» syndrome. The first man made Soviet satellite launch has caused a locomotion in the US of such proportions that the whole reason why DARPA and NASA have come into existence is solely because of that; it was the US response to the satellite launch. It has also spurred the National Defense Education Act which was enacted in 1958 with the sole purpose of catching up with the USSR and that has poured billions of dollars to revamp the US education system. The US did catch up and overtake, yes; however it is still an open question whether it was due to the neglect of lowly domestic needs within the Soviet realm or the rot therein that has followed regressive government policies.
Russia outright refuses to integrate in the global market and is openly playing the antagonist for the western world (even though it's western itself, go figure). Ukraine had similar policies until recent, uh, events.
The economic reasons of collapse of Soviet Union are very popular in the West, yet to say that 1990 was the worst time for SU in purely economic terms is not true. Soviet Union was in a disastrous state in 1920's, in late 1940's after the war, yet it didn't collapse.
The collapse of Soviet Union was simply a dissolution of union treaty between soviet republics, that happened primarily as a result of a struggle for power between Union-level government (Gorbachev) and republican-level (Eltsin of Russia, Kravchuk of Ukraine, etc). After failed coup in August of 1991 Gorbachev effectively lost his support and the fate of SU was sealed.
Again, economic crisis in the 90's in many of the post-soviet states was much stronger yet none of them 'collapsed'. Regime changes often have political reasons, where economy plays a useful backdrop.
> When your country struggles to produce basic things like energy, and your scientists are routinely jailed based on a dictator's whims
The best I can guess is that you are referring to Korolev's work on the rocket-powered artillery during the WW2, when his entire crew was forced to work from a Siberian labour camp. So the gratituos jailing of engineers is off by 40 years from when this CPU was created.
The remark on struggling to produce energy is also a weird one. No idea where you got this from and how it relates to the CPU power profile.
I can relate to the need to crap on all things Soviet, but at least keep it factually correct and relevant.
Andrei Tupolew was also jailed during the Great Terror [1] (and some of his close colleagues were executed), all too common story under Stalin. They even had their own prison just for aircraft designers! But I guess you're right, that's off by 40 years in this case.
Edit: if you keep ignoring our requests to stop posting like this, we're going to end up banning you. Please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and fix this. Seriously not cool.
Apparently pretty far, I've found various sources for why funding was cut from "The west was going binary so that was the order of the day" to "The space race". What was interesting was the hardware description I could find wasn't vacuum tubes but rather ICs and allegedly some sort of logic based on "Ferrite cores and diode ladders" which was apparently a major thing as it was vastly cheaper than transistors (super expensive at the time) or vacuum tubes (expensive and unreliable). How much of this is true or just what's on the russian computing museum's website I don't know. But the concepts aren't dead:
We had a couple of БК-0010 computers in a club back in late 80th which were also based on 1801ВМx chipset. Those were quite popular home computers in USSR.
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[ 432 ms ] story [ 3210 ms ] threadhttps://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elbrus-2S%2B#Technology
They have some stuff done on TSMC 28nm too:
https://www.anandtech.com/show/15823/russias-elbrus-8cb-micr...
[1]: Some macbook trackpad, note the polymide/flex substrate and rounded tracks. This isn't fully any-angle like what TopoR does though https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Apple_MacBook_Pro,_m...
It is of Russian origin and commercial software!
In old integrated circuit manufacturing processes, with large minimum dimensions, it was possible to draw arbitrary curves without problems.
Some of the software tools were limited to straight lines or even to straight lines only at certain angles, just because the limitation simplified the algorithms, but if one really wanted, it was possible to draw anything on the masks.
On modern manufacturing processes, with extremely small minimum sizes, it has become more and more difficult to predict which will be the differences in geometry between what you draw on the mask and what will be made on the surface of the semiconductor wafer, after photolithography and etching of the layer that must be patterned.
In order to make the photolithography and etching processes more predictable, the design rules have become more and more restrictive, e.g. by allowing only vertical, horizontal and 45 degree straight lines, or only vertical and horizontal lines, or even on some layers only traces parallel to a certain direction.
Moreover there are a lot of extra constraints, e.g. the need to place dummy patterns around those that are useful, because the same pattern in a different neighborhood will be distorted in a different way, which could be hard to predict.
wow!
The process memory was limited to 32kb (maybe 64kb... can't recall) and the OS's executable system supported seamless overlays. Basically as needed the OS would swap in different code segments (min 4k?). With careful planning you could build some pretty big applications... so long as you could get descent separation. You *could* swap overlays over and over and over... but this would kill any sort of performance... best to swap in a "AR" overlay, and when the user switches to "GL" swap that overlay in.
The machine language was also pretty nice. Several addressing modes were program counter relative which was amazing (eg. JMP to 1500 words from current PC) . When I first learned that that windows loads an executable and then goes through and fixes up memory addresses so JMP instructions (et al) would work I could hardly believe it. If only the x86's had decent support for a PC relative addressing mode :)
And the Digital Equipment Corp documentation! Glorious. A wall of shelves, 10 feet long, 7 feet tall, filled with 3 inch binders explaining everything in detail! Shivers!!
Microsoft's online documentation is the closest thing in quality to the old DEC stuff.
DEC documentation was something else though, agreed. My KD11-A came with everything you'd expect to be documented these, plus full schematics, plus microcode listing in source and flow chart form.
I still have shelves of DEC documentation (and a few PDP-11's).
Source: https://www.renesas.com/us/en/products/space-harsh-environme...
https://www.theregister.com/2012/05/03/unsung_heroes_of_tech...
This two-tired world, where the rich guys and their cronies have nuclear weapons, while the second grade countries must submit to their wishes, will clearly leave many nations wanting to balance the scale. History has shown that all countries with security problems develop nuclear weapons as soon as they get to a suficient wealth level.
If you really want to make the world a saver place the US should give up its first strike policy. That will calm down the escalation calculation China or Russia have to make.
China just recently annexed territory the size of France in the South China Sea. They annexed Hong Kong. Next they want Taiwan. They eagerly want several of Japan's island territories. They very obviously won't stop there, as their military power increases dramatically over the next 10-20 years; they're just getting warmed up on territorial conquest in Asia.
Russia is dead set on destroying Ukraine as it exists today and will proceed to, at a minimum, annex to the Dnieper River. They already annexed Crimea and a large chunk of East Ukraine. They'll attempt to take all of the Black Sea territory of Ukraine, further impoverishing and cutting off the remaining chunk of broken Ukraine post annexation. Further it has its eyes on taking Moldova, either directly or by forced alliance. Taking Ukraine's Black Sea territory will specifically make Moldova easy to conquer; there is no scenario where they don't pursue that combo. It has begun the (likely longer term) process of annexing Belarus, Lukashenko has capitulated into Putin's arms. Nearly any territory in the region that is not in NATO is up for grabs for conquest as far as Russia is concerned. Russia realistically destroyed Georgia, annexing part of the nation, and it's likely to eventually get around to finishing the rest. It would be a big task for the weaker modern Russia, however they'd also really like to figure out how to sink their claws into Kazakhstan and reclaim some of that territory as part of the empire. For Russia ideally there would be some convenient chaos, civil war in Kazakhstan, and Russia would then use border security as an excuse to de facto invade and claim territory that they'd never give back.
Meanwhile, the US has spent most of the post WW2 era trying to maintain global border security, including in Europe, the Middle East, Africa, Latin America and Europe. The US was in Vietnam? It sure was, trying to protect the South from a conquering North; when the US left, the South promptly got conquered (and yet the US is the villain in that story? yeah right). The same fate awaited South Korea, except the US saved them from the conquering North. How much territory did the US annex in Iraq? Zero. How much territory did the US annex in Afghanistan? Zero. It didn't try to take those nations, their territory, or their natural resources.
When was the last time the US tried to conquer and annex Canada or Mexico? Canada sits right next to the world's primary superpower, with an almost entirely unguarded border. Check out Canada's tiny military spending some time. Ask India how their border context is going with China these days; everyone that shares a border with Russia or China is terrified of their territorial ambitions.
While the US has been a superpower during the post WW2 years, how many nations has it annexed? Right.
Well, I would respectfully disagree with the "conquer" part. Since the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, that sounds really hollow.
Sorry but you are dead wrong about the Ukraine, and especially about Vietnam, the US feared the rise of Communism and by that loosing control over Vietnam.
What you described is roughly how things went down in Korea, so maybe you just confused the two.
US sponsored coups and wars, often in favour of downright terrible people (like Pinochet) weren't for "global border security", but for power, resource and against anything vaguely leftist.
But you are right, innovation is not a monopoly of the West.
During the Soviet times USSR had many technological advances, their population was quite literate in sciences, schools were very good and USSR had many teams winning math and physics Olympics.
Having great schools resulted in a large number of scientists and researchers.
The situation repeats with China. They invested a lot in scientific education and it is starting to pay off. Meanwhile, in the West, higher education means discussing politics and being woke.
-- the full realm of human development should be cultivated, and
-- there is a crisis in some broad instances of higher education.
For example, with reference to the parent: you /should/ discuss politics: only, productively.
You do not want your society to be well trained in engineering but underdeveloped in other human qualities fundamental in civilization.
I would argue that the scope of education is to improve and spread knowledge.
Politics might be important for society but it is not within the scope of education. Unless you make education about politics and forget knowledge.
Why is knowledge of politics not knowledge?
It is. But is not the only knowledge needed by a country. Or the most important knowledge.
Political science (say, the comparative advantages of an organizational, or administrative, or voting system vis-a-vis philosophical principles and quantitative methods etc.) is a discipline. It is surely part of education.
When individuals treat political discussions like "hooligans" could treat "Barcelona vs. Arsenal", that is a fault in mental refinement, hence also in education.
Studying politics doesn't mean doing politics. And studying politics is best done solely as a discipline, not instead of other disciplines.
Now: in theory, if your students spent time being loud instead of studying, that should reflect on the marks, should not it? They finally should not pass if doing politics replaced studying. But it is reported of prestigious Athenaeums in USA, and it is also seen and told in Europe, that the "feedback" from the institutions is being lower and lower: even the worse will get the degree. There are horror stories directly told by professors. So, there is a confirmed crisis in education.
But you want your citizens to be fully developed, not """able to count and unable to read""".
"By 2002, Pakistan had admitted that North Korea had gained access to Pakistan's nuclear technology in the late 1990s."
https://foreignpolicy.com/2021/10/11/aq-khan-pakistan-north-...
But: nice to reflect on that back in the 80's designing a new CPU could be done with a very small team and modest funding in 2 years time going from drawing board to first silicon (assuming that kind of talent, of course).
https://youtu.be/8Q1vN51o-Dg
HN thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17965269
I work with a former soviet engineer who worked on submarine software. He is a diehard capitalist. The soviet system collapsed for important reasons.
I spun her into my best friend (at the time) and they were happy for many years (but divorced).
Seeing them, we are all the same. The language may differ, but human wants and needs are mostly identical.
We should be courteous and congenial to the needs and desires of others.
That's all that I would like to say.
I highly recommend that cruise.
https://m.imdb.com/title/tt4686844/?ref_=fn_al_tt_0
It collapsed because the economy was state owned. If USSR did what China did, not only it wouldn't have collapsed, but it would have been actually a very strong country.
We allowed China to do this to drive a wedge between China and the USSR. That option was not available to the U.S.S.R.
That's what I am trying to argue: they haven't collapsed because of lack of technology, they collapsed because a state owned economy cannot grow at the rate needed to compete.
If Perestroika have been started earlier and with a strong focus to transfer parts of economy to private owned businesses, they wouldn't have been outcompeted.
Uhm, no. It is a myopic and a highly lopsided point of view. The collapse of the Soviet Union was a combination of a few compounding factors:
– Soviet Union has come out of the WWII having been slightly less than completely devastated. The entire European part of the USSR, that had been the centre of the manufactoring and farming before the war, was razed into the ground. Larger and smaller cities, towns, villages – every single thing.
– Accounts vary, but the general consensus is that at least 27 million people have perished in the war (in trenches / battles, in Nazi concentration camps, tortured, gassed or burned alive or executed). Again, by varying accounts, at least 50 million more people have come out of the war being physically or psychologically (usually both) traumatised. The killed and the injured have comprised the most productive part of the USSR workforce before the war – out of a population of 140 million people before the war.
– A few waves of internal political represssions and witch hunting that have followed the war and up until Stalin's death have added to the number of overall casualties.
– It has taken the USSR nearly 20 years to return to pre-war levels of the production output. The vast majority of the population have lacked basic necessities all the way into mid-1960's or longer. Having rebuilt the economy, the government has focused on providing the general populace with free (oftentimes shitty, though) accommodation, free health, free education, full time employment and pension. By the mid-1970's, the majority of the population had had a roof of sorts over their heads (also of varying quality); still, it was a roof, and it was free of charge.
– Not only did the US come out of the WWII unscathed, it has also turned out to be the main beneficiary of the war. In exchange for help, the USSR (and the UK as well) were shipping convoys loaded with the gold bullion back to North American shores over the Arctic Sea. Even though the Nazi U-boats did succeed in the sinking of quite a few of the convoy ships, by the end of the war the US had become immensely rich with no material damage to the local economy. It is important to point out that, without the US (Canadian / UK and the allied help overall) assistance – that was absolutely crucial to the USSR survival in the first 2-3 years of the war – the USSR would have not lasted past 1941-42. The US was providing the USSR with everything, starting from machinery, armaments, munitions – down to army uniforms and preserved food. US made Studebaker US6 trucks were the single most frequently utilised military vehicle in the Red Army due to their availability and sturdiness throughout the entire war. Disappointingly, due to the current heated political situation, many ex-Soviet/Russian citizens live in complete denial of the importance of the US help in the WWII.
– In the following post-war years, the US has succeeded where the Soviet government has failed. Namely, in winning a psychological war and, consequently, in tricking and convincing the Soviet government into a believing that a nuclear conflict was imminent and inevitable. Which has resulted in the economic production nearly in its entirety having been funneled into defence and arms race at the expense of domestic needs. In the hindsight, the Soviet government could have ignored the threat, but they did not. Which was a grave mistake.
– A lesser, but not insignificant, factor was the Soviet Union throwing money away at establishing and supporting nascent, Soviet friendly, regimes and proxy wars in the post-colonial world that has not resulted in anything else other than flushing vasts of money down the drain.
– Towards the end of 1980's, a huge internal budget deficit caused by preceding factors had resulted in a death spiral and a complete economic and – predictably – political collapse of the Soviet Union.
The state run...
Why did it do such a bad job in the later decades, when they had recovered from the war?
My best take on it is that the war machine coupled with the toxic paranoia of the senile Brezhnev government has caused the eventual demise of the USSR. The Khrushchev thaw spanning nearly a decade before that, in my personal, somewhat weakly substantiated view, was the last chance when the USSR could begin a gradual transition into opening up and becoming a Scandinavian like socialist state (I can have my own pipe dream, okay?). What followed instead was the economic stagnation focused on the preservation of the Soviet state, heavily handed suppressions of democratic movements in satellite states of the Eastern block as well as domestic policies targeting the dissent.
Because nobody cared to make it work. From bottom to the top. Some were just pretending they worked, some worked poorly, some work good but with no good direction.
When there's no competition and no personal incentive to improve, then why try to improve something?
They did care. The first two post-WWII decades were a time of a massive economic and social upheaval where everyone did care to regain peace and everything and everyone that had been lost in the war. People have united to rebuild the country from scratch. It started rapidly going downhill in late 1970's and onwards due to stagnation and growing indifference stemming out of it.
Good point, but that doesn't disprove what I've said. US could build tons of weapons because they had resources. And they had resources because the economy was flourishing. USSR economy was subpar.
>A lesser, but not insignificant, factor was the Soviet Union throwing money away at establishing and supporting nascent, Soviet friendly, regimes and proxy wars in the post-colonial world that has not resulted in anything else other than flushing vasts of money down the drain.
True, but US also threw money to support friendly regimes. Just that US could afford it because the economy was in a good state due to it not being owned by the state.
>The state run economy has actually done a very good job at recovering the country's economy in the first two post-WWII decades
It actually didn't. Germany recovered faster, Japan recovered faster and they've been hit very hard. USSR worked until a point after which it couldn't compete with a market economy. China realized it and allowed people to run businesses.
> Germany recovered faster, Japan recovered faster and they've been hit very hard. USSR worked until a point after which it couldn't compete with a market economy.
Ever heard of the Marshall plan that has aided the recovery of Western Europe? USSR did apply to participate in the US aid programme; however negotiations quickly fell apart after, due to vehement disagreements over the future of Germany. USSR has bailed shortly after (rightly or wrongly).
> China realized it and allowed people to run businesses.
You are not conflating post-WWII years with early 1990's, are you? They are somewhat 50 years apart from each other.
Subpar you say. I have a habit of giving the credit where it is due, whether it is the US, or USSR, or the Klingon kingdom – I simply could not care less who is the beneficiary of it.
By the time the USSR launched the Sputnik, the US – whilst very much likely having a superior economic production output – had been significantly scientifically lagging behind the USSR due to the historically high anti-intellectual stance permeating throughout the US society (which still exists today) – the infamous «shoot the tall poppy» syndrome. The first man made Soviet satellite launch has caused a locomotion in the US of such proportions that the whole reason why DARPA and NASA have come into existence is solely because of that; it was the US response to the satellite launch. It has also spurred the National Defense Education Act which was enacted in 1958 with the sole purpose of catching up with the USSR and that has poured billions of dollars to revamp the US education system. The US did catch up and overtake, yes; however it is still an open question whether it was due to the neglect of lowly domestic needs within the Soviet realm or the rot therein that has followed regressive government policies.
It would not have been important technology, but that's not what the USSR lacked.
Worked great for China.
A country run by insecure manchildren cannot be strong
The collapse of Soviet Union was simply a dissolution of union treaty between soviet republics, that happened primarily as a result of a struggle for power between Union-level government (Gorbachev) and republican-level (Eltsin of Russia, Kravchuk of Ukraine, etc). After failed coup in August of 1991 Gorbachev effectively lost his support and the fate of SU was sealed.
Again, economic crisis in the 90's in many of the post-soviet states was much stronger yet none of them 'collapsed'. Regime changes often have political reasons, where economy plays a useful backdrop.
The best I can guess is that you are referring to Korolev's work on the rocket-powered artillery during the WW2, when his entire crew was forced to work from a Siberian labour camp. So the gratituos jailing of engineers is off by 40 years from when this CPU was created.
The remark on struggling to produce energy is also a weird one. No idea where you got this from and how it relates to the CPU power profile.
I can relate to the need to crap on all things Soviet, but at least keep it factually correct and relevant.
Sakharov, the father of Russian hydrogen bomb was exiled for 7 years. He lived under house arrest, sick when this CPU was made:
https://history.aip.org/exhibits/sakharov/from-exile.html
Sakharov was persecuted by the state because of his political views, not because of his underwhelming engineering track record.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrei_Tupolev#Sharashka
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https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27763551 (July 2021)
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https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17822100 (Aug 2018)
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balanced_ternary
https://hackaday.com/2014/10/07/hackaday-10th-anniversary-no...
https://www.anandtech.com/Show/Index/16858?cPage=3&all=False...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronika_BK