HN Theater @HNTheaterMonth

Asianometry also has a video "Why the Soviet Computer Failed" [0].

If the Soviet Union had excellent higher education, why was/is Communism and then corruption/organized crime an issue? At what point do phds, engineers, etc take responsibility for the society in which they live? When do the smart people say "we have met the enemy and he is us?" [1]

  0. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dnHdqPBrtH8
  1. https://library.osu.edu/site/40stories/2020/01/05/we-have-met-the-enemy/

From the video description:

In 1986, the Soviet Union had slightly more than 10,000 computers. The Americans had 1.3 million.

At the time of Stalin's death, the Soviet Union was the world's third most proficient computing power. But by the 1960s, the US-Soviet computing gap was already years long. Twenty years later, the gap was undeniable and basically permanent.

Why did this happen? The Soviet state believed in science and industrial modernization. Support for research & development and the hard sciences were plentiful. They had the country’s finest minds.

Goodness gracious, they launched Sputnik! They landed on Venus! How did it come to this?

⬐ TedDoesntTalk

See also their theft of computing intellectual property

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_computing_technology_...

Radar theft: https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1985/09/24/s...

Entire books were written on the subject. Here’s one: https://www.csmonitor.com/1984/1126/112610.html

Reminds me of China today.

“ Mueller, operating since 1974, is said by US officials to have set up some 41 dummy firms in Europe and Africa solely for the purpose of facilitating the diversion of sensitive US high tech.

He is the technobandit said to be behind the now-famous attempted VAX computer diversion last year from South Africa to the Soviet Union via West Germany and Sweden.

The diversion trail, as outlined by the authors, demonstrates the lengths to which determined smugglers may go to attempt to avoid detection.

According to the authors, the sensitive computers were transferred from one of Mueller's South African firms, Microelectronics Research Institute (MRI) to another of his South African firms, Optronix. The computers were then resold to a Swiss firm, Integrated Time AG. The Swiss firm was a subsidiary of Mueller's German firm, Deutsche Integrated Time. In the meantime, the computers had been loaded on a ship bound for Sweden and the Soviet Union.

The VAX computers in question had originally been legally licensed for export by the US government to MRI in South Africa, but under the condition that they not be resold or transhipped elsewhere.”

⬐ jqpabc123

Short answer --- politics.

The same reason the Soviet Union failed to develop a competitive economy.

The same reason Russia has failed to develop an effective military.

A dictatorship is only as effective as it's leader allows it to be. If the leader/dictator only accepts answers that fit his/her narrow viewpoint, the overall results may not be a reflection of reality but rather a distortion of it.

⬐ Normille

Started watching this the other night and gave up after a few minutes. It's yet another so-called YouTube documentary that consists of nothing more than the summary of a Wikipedia article overlaid on a poor quality slide-show of publicly available photos. Often poorly compressed and a hodge-podge of different aspect ratios.

If you're interested in this subject, do yourself a favour and find a 'proper' article to read.

⬐ 8bitsrule

Soviet general believed that 'reliable electronic general computers in the the near future were impossible.'

Sounds as though somehow their intelligence was relying too much on the limitations of Zuse's Z4, and oblivious to ENIAC and Univac1.

Reminds me of the (ex-military) school superintendant who told me in the early 80s that he'd been to a conference in Arizona where the experts told him that the world wouldn't be needing many programmers in the future.

⬐ timonoko

Did they mention "metric" chips and circuit boards? Soviets were using 2.5 mm pitch instead of 2.54 mm. So parts were not interchangeable and there was no much international demand for non-standard components. In 1970s Soviet SN7400's were very cheap (in Finland at least) but you had to twist them legs sideways, which was annoying and potentially harmful.