Flea markets in East Germany even now are fascinating for classic tech, classic tech books, and many other things. Even as simple as going to one at Mauerpark or the Karlshorst race track, you will see working examples of classic DDR tech that you can buy and explore. Just like people explore classic macs, it's as interesting to see.
Sounds like a dream. Maybe I'll go someday. Eastern bloc tech is unendingly fascinating to me. I think it's genuinely impressive what they accomplished with the US actively sabotaging their access to information and hardware. And even then, they largely copied Western interfaces. I suspect this was partly to facilitate cloned hardware, but i do also suspect they wanted their systems to be approachable by engineers from around the world, too, so diverging too much would have been detrimental.
I visited a university supercomputer centre in Berlin that had been a merger of East and West Berlin facilities in about 1999. In the lobby they had a PDP-11 right next to the Eastern Bloc clone with its Cyrillic writing.
> And here are we by our current problem: What are our directions for
our research? Formerly, we were behind double walls -- one we built ourselves
and the second by the West (eg. COCOM) -- but even this is crumbling.
Our catching-up of the last years came from a sense of emergency, and we
learnt our trade through it. Now we need security for our future research
which will give us the freedom to purchase new hard- and software, participate
in international conferences, connect to networks and
update our literature.
> Whether this comes through cooperative projects with other institutions,
through industrial research or however, is almos irrelevant to us --
we want, as far as possible, to determine our own future and not wait until
it comes to us from `above'.
This kind of article reminds me of about 20 or 15 years ago. Maybe at the early days of Wikipedia.
There was so much exploring to do, and sites weren't filled with AI slop either.
You'd easily go ... "Ah, lookie here, this is interesting.. Unix usage in East Germany".. after 4-5 hours you'd still be reading, maybe about Elektronika (PDP-11 compatible clonest in old Soviet), etc.
The start of the story touches on even older days: they got a tape with some binary data, and couldn't just ask AI "What's this?", they had to hunt for answers in books, in their library!
And then the amount of focused work they needed, which they probably had because they weren't doomscrolling:
> Since we had no machine with a `C' complier, we chose the same method: translation by hand into another language. In a finite time (about 3 months), we had a `C' compiler which produced PDP/11 assembler.
MUTOS 1835 was a UNIX port which we did under contract for an AT-compatible
from Robotron. Since this machine was never produced, the whole thing
must be seen as a flop."
Yeah, just about 20 EC 1835s were built (the "C" is the Russian "S"; they're ESER (ES EVM) machines, after all). But then again, there's MUTOS 1700 (for A 7100 and A 7150) and MUTOS 1834 (for EC 1834)... along with CP/M, CP/M-86 and DOS, of course. The 32-bit (386) follow-up to the 1835 was planned for 1993/94. Well, history had other plans. I remember my first programming lessons in my school's computer lab in 1991... on Amstrad 386DX/20 machines.
My mother once told me as she worked as a secretary in Communist Poland, she had access to MS DOS. I cant take her word as granted as she is not so technically literat but sometimes you see the spread of computers into the second world.
Humboldt University Berlin had officially licensed a UNIX System III as a research institute. They run it on a K1600 series Robotron system, which was a PDP-11 clone. I had a few sessions on it ca. 1985 as a 16-year old kid as a member of the Mathematical Student Society of Humboldt University.
I remember being challenged to learn about the file system. All I was told was, use the man command. I knew CP/M, or better the East-German clone SCP, but that OS didn't know directories. I had to learn the concept from the man pages. There were no UNIX books in libraries or book stores. But it was fun, I managed to write a simple compression program doing run-length encoding on that system.
15 comments
[ 4.6 ms ] story [ 32.6 ms ] threadI probably have some old school photos somewhere.
> Whether this comes through cooperative projects with other institutions, through industrial research or however, is almos irrelevant to us -- we want, as far as possible, to determine our own future and not wait until it comes to us from `above'.
What happened next?
There was so much exploring to do, and sites weren't filled with AI slop either.
You'd easily go ... "Ah, lookie here, this is interesting.. Unix usage in East Germany".. after 4-5 hours you'd still be reading, maybe about Elektronika (PDP-11 compatible clonest in old Soviet), etc.
Fun times!
And then the amount of focused work they needed, which they probably had because they weren't doomscrolling:
> Since we had no machine with a `C' complier, we chose the same method: translation by hand into another language. In a finite time (about 3 months), we had a `C' compiler which produced PDP/11 assembler.
MUTOS 1835 was a UNIX port which we did under contract for an AT-compatible from Robotron. Since this machine was never produced, the whole thing must be seen as a flop."
Yeah, just about 20 EC 1835s were built (the "C" is the Russian "S"; they're ESER (ES EVM) machines, after all). But then again, there's MUTOS 1700 (for A 7100 and A 7150) and MUTOS 1834 (for EC 1834)... along with CP/M, CP/M-86 and DOS, of course. The 32-bit (386) follow-up to the 1835 was planned for 1993/94. Well, history had other plans. I remember my first programming lessons in my school's computer lab in 1991... on Amstrad 386DX/20 machines.
1. ES EVM (EN) [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ES_EVM]
2. ESER/ES EVM (DE) [https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einheitliches_System_Elektroni...]
3. ES EVM (RU) [https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/ЕС_ЭВМ]
4. A 7100 (DE) [https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_7100]
5. A 7100 @ "Starring the Computer" [https://starringthecomputer.com/computer.html?c=630]
6. A 7150 (DE) [https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_7150]
7. EC 1834 (DE) [https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/EC_1834]
8. EC 1834 (EN) [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EC_1834]
9. EC 1835 (DE) [https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/EC_1835]
I remember being challenged to learn about the file system. All I was told was, use the man command. I knew CP/M, or better the East-German clone SCP, but that OS didn't know directories. I had to learn the concept from the man pages. There were no UNIX books in libraries or book stores. But it was fun, I managed to write a simple compression program doing run-length encoding on that system.