Officials weren't keen on these bespoke machines because there was a Comecon push to standardize on unified system based on IBM 360, with compatible peripherals manufactured in many Eastern bloc countries: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ES_EVM
K-202 was later developed into MERA 400, which was somewhat more successful. https://mera400-pl.translate.goog/Strona_g%C5%82%C3%B3wna?_x...
One of interesting things from modern perspective is that these machines didn't have synchronous clocks, but cycles were timed by RC delay circuits which were tuned differently for various groups of instructions. One notable operating system developed for it was CROOK, which was significantly more unixy compared to other contemporary mainframe based systems.
There's modern emulator for it https://github.com/jakubfi/em400, and they have excellent YouTube channel (in Polish though): https://www.youtube.com/@MERA400/videos
It was incredibly expensive to have dozens of research institutes work on esoteric architectures at their pleasure. The majority of the population worked their asses of in poverty to make thousands of tanks and dozens of submarines, not entertain some computer scientists.
I don't get it. Are you arguing that the majority of Poles enjoyed being forced to pay (indirectly) for military equipment, and that that particular pleasure or pride and its consequences hence can be used to browbeat everything and everyone else? "Comrade, stop whistling? Don't you know you cannot be happier than us, who have to work for planes and guns?"
> One of interesting things from modern perspective is that these machines didn't have synchronous clocks, but cycles were timed by RC delay circuits which were tuned differently for various groups of instructions.
Between this and the GA144 I wonder if clockless architectures aren't an under-explored area, since they seem to be able to achieve a lot of performance per watt and per gate if done right
> It’s believed that Karpiński paved the way for today’s common use of paging in computer memory systems.
So, I didn't know anything about the K-202, so this is very interesting to me.
However, are we sure that it influenced anything, given that only about 230 of them were ever made, and those were destroyed at the factory? How would knowledge of his team's innovations, let alone specific information, have leaked out to western computer designers from within Soviet Poland? If it did, was the mechanism... espionage, published research, what?
As an aside, it's really kind of nuts how much backing and investment the Communists have received from the West, including Wall Street, all the way to the Russian Revolution, and continuing to the present day.
More like both, there was a block address register (BAR) and when it was 0..63 that was selecting a core memory board. So that's sort of like segmentation but core could be paged out from and in to tape, disc, or drum. For example the OS (OPSYS) could be paged out to free up block 0 of core memory. So that's paging and even neater it was basically a page per program so independent programs could run concurrently, paging core in and out as needed. The paging was handled by controllers (disc, tape, drum) with very little involvement of the CPU (executive).
Small correction and historical note: Poland, like the other USSR-aligned countries such as Czechoslovakia and Hungary, while under the oppressive thumb of the Soviet regime and the regimes they installed in those countries, were not part of the Soviet Union. So they weren't Soviet, but they most certainly were communist, or rather, socialist people's republics.
> Thus in 1970, the Microcomputers Plant was established. Located in Warsaw, it employed Polish workers but used British components and financing – the required parts weren’t available in Poland and the communists weren’t at all eager to throw money at the project....
> Karpiński’s computer could be so small and resilient because it used Western components. Even though they were vital to the functioning of the K-202, they might have raised suspicion among the authorities of the Eastern Bloc, as they were elements imported from beyond the Iron Curtain and used in the sensitive field of information processing.
What the superior performance of his machine mainly due to the Western components he was using?
The article makes it seem he was treated very unfairly so as to favor his competitors (and maybe he was), but it seems entirely legitimate to me for the Communists to have favored a more secure supply chain, given the political situation at the time.
If supply chain was the issue, surely they could have worked to create a more local source for things; but it seems like a flavour of corruption to use slower and inferior machines instead of trying to leverage the best of both.
My feeling from the article was that he worked outside the box, and THAT was simply unacceptable to the authorities, no matter how good the underlying technology was.
> My feeling from the article was that he worked outside the box, and THAT was simply unacceptable to the authorities, no matter how good the underlying technology was.
USSR had a planning economy, so they decided ahead what good and in which quantity must be produced in a coming five years. And then comes some genius and makes a computer better than planned. What should they do?
Something alike was with Setun[1], there was no place for Setun in 5-years plan.
Moreover I suspect that what will be included into the next plan was a big politics. No low engineer could change that. Centralization is evil.
> What the superior performance of his machine mainly due to the Western components he was using?
No. The genius was in the design and how the components were used.
> It seems entirely legitimate to me for the Communists to have favored a more secure supply chain.
It mentions in the article that the bottleneck with getting components that were high quality was that the local government did not want to spend the money to develop their own secure supply chain.
He demonstrated a proof of concept. If they were concerned about national security, they could have made it a priority to get him equivalent components.
the article mentions one other Perceptron of its kind in the U.S., and that has another really interesting story (this one got downplayed by Marvin Minsky but the inventor died young in an accident): https://news.cornell.edu/stories/2019/09/professors-perceptr...
Really good story. I recommend reading the whole thing.
A couple things that I think add some useful context, having spent some of my life in other post-soviet countries:
- In Communist theory (at least as Marx and Lenin saw it) business competition was a destructive force and one of the "inherent contradictions" of capitalism. So if another project was deemed to be better, that was justification enough for shutting down other enterprises.
- Also, during this time under soviet communism, the most common measure of manufacturing was in kilograms output. Karpiński working on a small run of small computers would not have looked impressive to officials in the least.
- Importing western materials and parts was not expressly forbidden (though certainly not politically popular). But Poland (like a lot of Soviet countries) was undergoing a currency crunch. Possession of foreign currency was illegal and importing materials did not do favorable things for their "fake" exchange rates. The operation was probably contingent on generating more foreign dollars than they spent.
- Computers in general were viewed skeptically as Western excesses that either wasted time or stole jobs. So making boring calculating machines for accounting or scientific research could be seen as acceptable - but small, cheap, Western style micro-computers were another matter.
- The fact that Karpiński spent a lot of time in the West and knew people and understood English and was not a party member makes it shocking he even got to spin up the enterprise in the first place. Had he not won the UNESCO award, he probably wouldn't have even made it as far as he did.
- Getting banning from your vocation and getting a visa was unfortunately a very common method of getting dissapeared. He probably also lost housing privilege as well - hence moving out to the country and raising pigs.
To be fair, competition was very much allowed where soviet government needed it — in design bureaus and sometimes architecture. There was more than one firm that designed planes and helicopters for the military.
> - Importing western materials and parts was not expressly forbidden (though certainly not politically popular). But Poland (like a lot of Soviet countries) was undergoing a currency crunch. Possession of foreign currency was illegal and importing materials did not do favorable things for their "fake" exchange rates. The operation was probably contingent on generating more foreign dollars than they spent.
Poland was embargoed so it was tricky to obtain western components. Poles had to pay for them in hard currency, because Polish Zloty was not a convertible currency. There were two exchange rates, the official one at which hard currency was exchanged into zlotys and the the unofficial street rate used by illegal money changers. Those rates varied wildly. Poles who did earn hard currency would have currency accounts, but were forbidden from withdrawing actual dollars or german marks, instead they were given special tokens they could spend in the so-called internal export shops selling western food, clothes, household equipment, radios, TVs, and even toilet paper, because that was one of the things communism struggled with near its end. Those fake dollars had a lower exchange rate on the street.
Ownership of real foreign currency was forbidden as was possession of a passport. There were two types of passports, one for the countries of the Soviet block and the other for the whole world. You had to bring your passport to the local police station for safe keeping and interrogation. Passports would not be issued to all members of a household to prevent them from fleeing the country.
Economically, Poland was getting massively squeezed by the Soviet Union who ordered a lot of ships to be built in the Polish shipyards, but would only pay for them in "transferrable rubles", the currency which was not convertible and pretty much useless. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/305054272_The_Trans... The exchange rate vs. local currencies was controlled by Moscow. In order to deliver those ships to Russia, Poles had to purchase materials and equipment outside of the Eastern Block and pay for it in hard currency. Eastern European countries quickly developed a barter system, but non-Eastern European suppliers wanted to be paid in US dollars. Poland tried to sell its agricultural and industrial output, but could not compete with Western suppliers so the earning were meagre. This has led to lowering of living standards beyond which people had enough of communists and the party was over.
Readit News
K-202 was later developed into MERA 400, which was somewhat more successful. https://mera400-pl.translate.goog/Strona_g%C5%82%C3%B3wna?_x... One of interesting things from modern perspective is that these machines didn't have synchronous clocks, but cycles were timed by RC delay circuits which were tuned differently for various groups of instructions. One notable operating system developed for it was CROOK, which was significantly more unixy compared to other contemporary mainframe based systems. There's modern emulator for it https://github.com/jakubfi/em400, and they have excellent YouTube channel (in Polish though): https://www.youtube.com/@MERA400/videos
Between this and the GA144 I wonder if clockless architectures aren't an under-explored area, since they seem to be able to achieve a lot of performance per watt and per gate if done right
So, I didn't know anything about the K-202, so this is very interesting to me.
However, are we sure that it influenced anything, given that only about 230 of them were ever made, and those were destroyed at the factory? How would knowledge of his team's innovations, let alone specific information, have leaked out to western computer designers from within Soviet Poland? If it did, was the mechanism... espionage, published research, what?
>Thus in 1970, the Microcomputers Plant was established. Located in Warsaw, it employed Polish workers but used British components and financing.
The British were involved in every step.
See 3.1.1, 3.3.2, 3.4, 3.5, 5, & 5.2: http://www.zenker.poznan.pl/k-202/dokumentacja/k-202-reklama...
Small correction and historical note: Poland, like the other USSR-aligned countries such as Czechoslovakia and Hungary, while under the oppressive thumb of the Soviet regime and the regimes they installed in those countries, were not part of the Soviet Union. So they weren't Soviet, but they most certainly were communist, or rather, socialist people's republics.
> Karpiński’s computer could be so small and resilient because it used Western components. Even though they were vital to the functioning of the K-202, they might have raised suspicion among the authorities of the Eastern Bloc, as they were elements imported from beyond the Iron Curtain and used in the sensitive field of information processing.
What the superior performance of his machine mainly due to the Western components he was using?
The article makes it seem he was treated very unfairly so as to favor his competitors (and maybe he was), but it seems entirely legitimate to me for the Communists to have favored a more secure supply chain, given the political situation at the time.
My feeling from the article was that he worked outside the box, and THAT was simply unacceptable to the authorities, no matter how good the underlying technology was.
USSR had a planning economy, so they decided ahead what good and in which quantity must be produced in a coming five years. And then comes some genius and makes a computer better than planned. What should they do?
Something alike was with Setun[1], there was no place for Setun in 5-years plan.
Moreover I suspect that what will be included into the next plan was a big politics. No low engineer could change that. Centralization is evil.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Setun
No. The genius was in the design and how the components were used.
> It seems entirely legitimate to me for the Communists to have favored a more secure supply chain.
It mentions in the article that the bottleneck with getting components that were high quality was that the local government did not want to spend the money to develop their own secure supply chain.
He demonstrated a proof of concept. If they were concerned about national security, they could have made it a priority to get him equivalent components.
This is a cautionary tale. The same thing has happened to our nation, America, with the attendant decline across the board over the past 20-30 years.
A couple things that I think add some useful context, having spent some of my life in other post-soviet countries:
- In Communist theory (at least as Marx and Lenin saw it) business competition was a destructive force and one of the "inherent contradictions" of capitalism. So if another project was deemed to be better, that was justification enough for shutting down other enterprises.
- Also, during this time under soviet communism, the most common measure of manufacturing was in kilograms output. Karpiński working on a small run of small computers would not have looked impressive to officials in the least.
- Importing western materials and parts was not expressly forbidden (though certainly not politically popular). But Poland (like a lot of Soviet countries) was undergoing a currency crunch. Possession of foreign currency was illegal and importing materials did not do favorable things for their "fake" exchange rates. The operation was probably contingent on generating more foreign dollars than they spent.
- Computers in general were viewed skeptically as Western excesses that either wasted time or stole jobs. So making boring calculating machines for accounting or scientific research could be seen as acceptable - but small, cheap, Western style micro-computers were another matter.
- The fact that Karpiński spent a lot of time in the West and knew people and understood English and was not a party member makes it shocking he even got to spin up the enterprise in the first place. Had he not won the UNESCO award, he probably wouldn't have even made it as far as he did.
- Getting banning from your vocation and getting a visa was unfortunately a very common method of getting dissapeared. He probably also lost housing privilege as well - hence moving out to the country and raising pigs.
Poland was embargoed so it was tricky to obtain western components. Poles had to pay for them in hard currency, because Polish Zloty was not a convertible currency. There were two exchange rates, the official one at which hard currency was exchanged into zlotys and the the unofficial street rate used by illegal money changers. Those rates varied wildly. Poles who did earn hard currency would have currency accounts, but were forbidden from withdrawing actual dollars or german marks, instead they were given special tokens they could spend in the so-called internal export shops selling western food, clothes, household equipment, radios, TVs, and even toilet paper, because that was one of the things communism struggled with near its end. Those fake dollars had a lower exchange rate on the street.
Ownership of real foreign currency was forbidden as was possession of a passport. There were two types of passports, one for the countries of the Soviet block and the other for the whole world. You had to bring your passport to the local police station for safe keeping and interrogation. Passports would not be issued to all members of a household to prevent them from fleeing the country.
Economically, Poland was getting massively squeezed by the Soviet Union who ordered a lot of ships to be built in the Polish shipyards, but would only pay for them in "transferrable rubles", the currency which was not convertible and pretty much useless. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/305054272_The_Trans... The exchange rate vs. local currencies was controlled by Moscow. In order to deliver those ships to Russia, Poles had to purchase materials and equipment outside of the Eastern Block and pay for it in hard currency. Eastern European countries quickly developed a barter system, but non-Eastern European suppliers wanted to be paid in US dollars. Poland tried to sell its agricultural and industrial output, but could not compete with Western suppliers so the earning were meagre. This has led to lowering of living standards beyond which people had enough of communists and the party was over.
Dead Comment
https://spectrum.ieee.org/yugoslavia-diy-microcomputer
https://jacobin.com/2020/08/computer-yugoslavia-galaksija-vo...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galaksija_(computer)