Jacek Karpińśki, the computer genius the communists couldn't stand (2017)

strange believe that if not the communists Poland would be a global superpower

I think it's fair to consider Poland the birthplace of the modern computer: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bomba_(cryptography)

Maybe not a global superpower, but it is very easy to me to imagine a Poland not destroyed by Nazi then communist rule being an innovation center of the world.

I don’t think anyone believes Poland would be a global superpower. But a half millennium ago it was the largest state in Europe by area. Since then, the country has been attacked and dismembered more than pretty much any other European state, including Germany, Russia, and France.

It’s not a stretch to think that Poland would be on equal terms with Spain or Italy had these things not occurred. But of course then you have to dig into the history of colonialism, of which Poland was a colonized state and not a colonizing one, and places like the UK, France, or Germany don’t like considering the fact that abundant resources from colonies might have played a role in their industrialization.

Yes. I love my Polish friends, but some of them have this strange mania of exageration and rewriting history as if Poland would be glorious empire if not from the subhuman soviets(russians actually), or because the envy of the evil germans.

Communism certainly didn't help.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K-202

Think more CIA than FBI. He reported back to SB what he learned about foreign technology, and that was in the '60s before the events around the K-202.

I mean, every modern computer and phone depends on foreign components from other countries. We still attribute the invention and success of a product to the top level designer (like Apple), even though most of the components come from Asia.

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.

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

Others include Marek Holynski https://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marek_Ho%C5%82y%C5%84ski (co-inventor of OpenGL, told by the visiting Russian commie inspector to focus his 3d research on "serious" things like CNC machining), Stefan Kudelski https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stefan_Kudelski (Nagra audio and video recorders), Staniskaw Ulam https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanis%C5%82aw_Ulam (Manhattan Project, Monte Carlo methods), Casimir Pulaski https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casimir_Pulaski, Tadeusz Kosciuszko https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tadeusz_Ko%C5%9Bciuszko and many more...

I don't know the names, but I recall there was a large Polish contribution to Allied codebreaking in WWII.

What about Wojciech Zaremba of OpenAI? MAybe not at the level of the above yet, but crucial person in one of the hottest companies in the world.

Yeah you could add many more major names like Banach or my favourite (and imo most underappreciated) Jan Czochralski.

Jan Łukasiewicz and his (Reverse) Polish Notation.

Here's a long, if incomplete, list of some others: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_Polish_science_and...

France.

Italy.

USA.

Did do his most important work in Poland but wouldn't be notable globally if not for his time in the Vatican.

France.

USA and Switzerland.

USA (for generations). And strangely now Serbia.

The Wikipedia page says it was actually segmented memory rather than paging as it is defined today.

From the article,

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.

Soviet Poland

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.

Yeah. Paging was much earlier according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memory_paging . If anything he was influenced by the British he worked with.

Not particularly surprising, IMHO.

A group that worked against one occupier is likely to work against the next as well.

That was a huge issue in the Soviet invasion of German-occupied Poland. As I recall, on more than one occasion, the Soviets held back while the Germans slaughtered the Polish resistance before moving in to take over various cities.

Interesting fact from the article...

That was the case in many countries. In France for example a huge part of the resistance was way too sympathetic with Stalin's ideas (and btw didn't join the resistance up until 1941 and Hitler's operation Barbarossa, when Hitler betrayed Stalin) so one of the very first thing the government did in France right after WWII was to disarm the resistance as much as they could. Most people don't read about that but it's well documented.

These (back then) superpowers were paranoid and rightfully so: the cold war started right after WWII and both blocks were very careful not to have ennemies from within.

It's less interesting when you learn that this is a common pattern. See: Old Bolsheviks, Sturmabteilung, Ba'ath party purge and others. At some point the instruments of a successful power grab must be disposed of to consolidate power.

Under Stalin starting an unsanctioned poetry club in college could send you straight to Gulag. Every aspect of social life had to be subordinate to the authorities. I'm surprised you're surprised.

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.

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.

Any nation that becomes captive to ideological selection for its key sectors will naturally tend to selecting subpar individuals in position of power.

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.

Lets not gloss over this:

The manufacturer of Odra, the Elwro company, was, however, better connected with the regime than Karpiński. Instead of improving its product to catch up with the competition Elwro began to subvert Karpiński’s position in any way they could, not shying away from slander.

Government of Edward Gierek had no problem with buying foreign licenses for products which required western components so it was not a problem.

Apple built iPhones in China, but the country of manufacture is almost irrelevant to that accomplishment.

- 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.

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.

Steve Wozniak is a quasi household name, but calling someone "the Polish Wozniak" doesn't quite work.

If so, likely distantly. Stefan Karpinski is American-born (ca 1978) and there’s no indication that Jacek Karpiński had any close relatives in the US.

If he stayed in America he could've been so wealthy and famous. His skills must have decayed when he was on the countryside too.