- 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.
I probably have some old school photos somewhere.
- That sounds a lot like the building at Takustraße 9, which is the main building of the computer science department of Freie Universität Berlin. When I studied there from 2011 to 2019 the both PDPs were still standing in front of the lecture hall. The Zuse Institut Berlin, which hosts a high performance computer is next door from it.
- > In the lobby they had a PDP-11 right next to the Eastern Bloc clone with its Cyrillic writing.
Those are still standing in the lobby of the Computer Science Department of FU Berlin (Takustraße 9)
You are probably referring to Zuse Institute Berlin which is the building right next to it.
- https://cpu-collection.de/?l0=co&l1=Eastern%20Bloc&l2=DEC%20...
quote:
There were several PDP-11 clones made in Zelenograd near Moscow. Both multi-chip and, later, single chip versions.
Most quantities were 1801VM1 and 1801VM2. Second was much faster (over 10 MHz clock frequency). Both did not have extended addressing and were limited to 64k bytes address space. Later 1801VM3 appeared, containing 22 address extension much like PDP-11/70, but slightly different so original DEC programs could work with only 18 bit (256 kbyte).
These three CPU were not copy of any real chip from DEC. But there was another 5 chip CPU clone of DEC Professional 350. This model was cloned incredibly close, and called "Electronica 85".
- The single chip ones were not originally supposed to be PDP-11 compatible - but there was a push to use PDP-11 ISA and Unibus/Qbus in that specific segment, so they reworked the microcode to implement PDP-11 instructions with minimal changes to the chip itself.
- 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.
- Getting William Gibson flashbacks.
- 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.
- > but i do also suspect they wanted their systems to be approachable by engineers from around the world
It was more about saving resources on software development. East German standard software was usually pirated copies of western standard software with the copyright strings patched to something else. Creating an entirely different evolutionary branch for hardware and software instead of copying doesn't make economic sense, especially when the goal is to catch up.
- You’ll also find a lot of this stuff at flea markets further east and south, maybe even more so than Berlin.
I visited Odessa in Ukraine circa 2019 and saw all kinds of interesting computing devices and cameras.
- I think you are spot on. Due to the inability to buy parts from the world over, you had to repair any personal machines you had whether it be computers to cars, therefore access and knowledge was essential. A replica of that ethos today would be MNT Research.
- 8 hour train journey, oh well, shut up and take my money...
- > "The Flop.
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]
- 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.
Fun times!
- I want some of those unbreakable beer glasses from the GDR
- The industrial process behind that recently got optimized. They could become commonplace.
- The brand you're looking for is "Superfest". It would be nice if Corning made unbreakable glasses, since they were essentially made of a precursor to gorilla glass
- There is a company that still makes them.
- > 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'.
What happened next?
- Is the load balancing algorithm equitable?
- Any idea whether we can still find its source code? It would be nice to be able to run it today, as we do with other historic Unix flavors.
- The best place to ask is probably https://www.robotrontechnik.de/, it's all in German, but this is where the veterans and hobbyists are lurking.
- 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.
- My grandfather-in-law still tells stories how he smuggled C64s into the GDR
- You didn't need to 'smuggle' them, just let your western relatives bring them over the border, which was entirely legal (sending via postal service would have worked too, but I wouldn't have risked that tbh because all parcels from West into East were opened and sometimes content "mysteriously" disappeared).
The C64 wasn't affected by the COCOM embargo, so 'export' was legal from West Germany, and import into East Germany anyway. East German citizens who had access to D-Mark (again: western relatives were the key here) could also simply walk into an 'Intershop' and buy a Commodore or Atari 8-bitter. Finally there was also the so-called GENEX catalogue, which was a delivery service run by East Germany where West German citizens could directly buy both Eastern and Western products for hard currency and had them directly delivered to their East German relatives (including C64s):
https://www.spiegel.de/geschichte/genex-kataloge-der-sonderb...
16-bit computers were affected by the western COCOM embargo though. It was technically illegal to export a PC or even an Amiga from West Germany into East Germany. So if you wanted to bring an Amiga over the border that would technically be smuggling - in the sense of smuggling them out of West Germany, since that was the illegal part - I bet nobody gave a shit though since quite a few Amigas found their way into East Germany, they were just prohibitively expensive on the 'private market' (around 20..30k (East-) Mark, which was the equivalent of a higher end car - like a Lada 1500 - or about 3..4 years of a typical wage).
