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

HayBale
36 replies
1d22h

Not that I want to be Debbie downer but as always in case of Polish (which I am also are) overexaggerated and having that strange believe that if not the communists Poland would be a global superpower.

Its enough to go the wiki (both about the computer and the inventor) to see that the situation was not that clear. The performance was greatly overstated, it depended on the import of the component from the west etc.

Moreover the guy was cooperating with the Polish version of the FBI so it's not like it was a story of lonely genius vs the governament....

legitster
23 replies
1d22h

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.

HayBale
19 replies
1d22h

Prewar Poland was a military dictatorship(mild but was) in the permanent state of crisis, on a brink of a civil war with all of its minorities. And it is a wild take to blame communists for the nazi atrocities.

But communist solved most of the problems that prewar Poland would have problem of solving. Yeah Polish tech was amazing especially if you consider the resources

ein0p
18 replies
1d18h

Communists also happen to be the sole reason why Polish people still exist, because a certain Austrian painter was going to eradicate them all after he was done with the Jews.

ein0p
8 replies
1d18h

And I’m not arguing with that, Stalin also did massive purges of his own officers, leaving the red army severely deficient right before the war, but as horrible as this is, this is not total genocide, which is what awaited Poland had the USSR not won the war.

6d6b73
7 replies
1d6h

German genocide of other nations consisted of exterminating weak people and forced labor for the strong. They integrated people with "Aryan features" into their society and we're slowly getting rid of the rest.

Soviets exterminated scientist, priests, doctors and officers - the very people who could fight back. They integrated poor and weak. Their idea was to melt the remaining people into one nation. This is a form of ethnic cleansing.

Both Nazi and Soviets had the same goal - to take over the world by killing the people they didn't like and integrating people they needed. They just had difference of opinion in show to achieve their goals. Fortunately they didn't succeed, unfortunately it still resulted in millions killed by both sides.

ein0p
4 replies
1d2h

Jesus freaking Christ, read the German plans for Slavs - it's all public information. They were going to starve and work them all until they are dead, and then populate the lands with Germans. Poles are Slavs. To draw moral equivalence between Soviets and Hitler is idiotic. If it wasn't for the Soviets, you'd be writing this in German, or (depending on your ethnicity) you wouldn't exist at all.

6d6b73
2 replies
22h49m

If Russians were so worried about Slavs being exterminated why were they sending supplies and resources to Nazis until the day German invasion?

Oh now I get it.. Poles and other eastern European nations should be thankful to Russians for killing millions of them and enslaving the rest instead of just exterminating everyone. Got it.

ein0p
1 replies
20h48m

USSR did not “kill millions of Slavs” in Eastern Europe. You’re severely confused. Hitler, however, did. Fully extrapolating this line of propaganda into the future, 30-40 years from now people will believe that an amateur Austrian painter wanted European unity, but bloody dictator Stalin unfortunately got in the way. And I think that’s exactly the narrative which will dominate in the future based on the current trends.

6d6b73
0 replies
16h44m

What's more likely to happen in 30-40 years is what you're trying to do - make people forget that there were two equally evil empires - Nazis and Soviets. You want people to remember only Nazis.

The Soviets killed millions - there is no way to deny it. Holodomor alone resulted in 3-5 mln deaths. At least one million were murdered in Russia alone. In total, up to 60 mln people are estimated to have died at the hands of the Soviets. Millions more were forced out of their homes, raped and maimed.

There is only one difference between Germans and Japanese on the one hand and Russians on the other. Germans and Japanese admitted to these atrocities and apologized for them. Since the end of WW2, they have not attacked anyone else.

Russians, on the other hand, are still trying to whitewash the crimes committed by the Soviets, and they keep invading other countries. We can only hope they will either grow up and join the civilized world this century or the Russian Federation collapses.

6d6b73
0 replies
22h45m

The question is not if the Nazis were the bad guys, but if the Russians were bad. I think the answer is pretty simple. If anyone has any doubts they should ask millions of starved Ukrainians, thousands of killed Polish officers, hundreds of thousands of killed eastern Europeans and millions of people sent to gulags. Oh wait, you can't...wonder why? Probably because Soviets were really such a nice group of people.

6d6b73
7 replies
1d18h

Communists partitioned Poland in 1939 together with Germans. War would take a different direction if they didn't join Nazis. They were not really the good guys.

ein0p
6 replies
1d18h

Actually no, the war would take the exact same direction because Hitler did not consider Slavs to be human. It would have just got to the USSR a couple of years before it was even remotely ready for the war, and, ironically, would probably cause it to lose the war, which, let me remind you, would lead to full eradication of Poles and Poland. To accuse the USSR of “joining Nazis” would require you to be completely unaware of the historical context, and forget that Poland itself “joined Nazis” in a non-aggression pact in 1934 (5 years before Molotov-Ribbentrop pact), and occupied parts of Czechoslovakia in 1938. By that logic a lot of other countries in Europe (including Britain) “joined Nazis” by signing agreements with them and partitioning other states such as Czechoslovakia.

6d6b73
5 replies
1d16h

The war would take a different direction because it would take slightly longer for Germans to conquer the rest of Poland. That few weeks could help France and Germany to decide to actually join the war and attack Germany instead of just sitting there for months waiting for Germans to attack. The non-agression pact between Poland and Nazi Germany was signed to normalize relations between the country, and not to partition another country. Ribbentrop-Molotov act on the other hand had a secret protocol where they decided to divide Poland, Romania, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, and Finland into their spheres of influence. Yes, Poland did take part of Czechoslovakia after 1938, but it was a tiny sliver of land with polish ethnic majority. It was a bad move but nothing that can be compared to Soviet invasion in 1939.

ein0p
4 replies
1d16h

They wouldn’t have to “conquer” it. They’d just march straight through and end up in Ukrainian SSR and Belarus. My point is, the USSR was hardly unique in signing “intersting” pacts in late 30s, and its desire to surround itself with at least some semblance of buffer states is quite understandable given that there are, famously, no natural geographical obstacles between it and invading European hordes. And regardless of anything else, Poland would be fucked far worse if it wasn’t for Stalin. That’s a tough pill to swallow, sure, but you don’t have to take my word for it. The Nazis did document their plans.

6d6b73
3 replies
1d6h

In september there were about 300k soldiers in the parts that soviets later occupied. If you don't think that would slow Germans down you're wrong. But more importantly during the occupation Soviets killed thousands of people in Katyn and other places, and sent close to 2 mln to gulags. They stole art, books and removed machines from factories. They raped women. And they kept doing all these dispicable acts even after the war ended. There is not much difference between ethnic cleansing that Germans did, and the one did by Russians.

Poland didn't need Stalin and his murderers. Soviet Union, and mostly Russia is responsible for millions of deaths before, during and after the wars. Even 80+ years later Russians still think that killing people is a way to save them just look at what's going on in Ukraine.

Just because Soviets pushed back Germans doesn't absolve them from all the crimes they committed. Not to mention that they cooperated with Nazi before 1941. They even widened their economic cooperation in January 1941. They didn't care that Poles were being exterminated in the Nazi occupied parts. Why would they- they were doing their part to exterminate them at the same time.

ein0p
2 replies
1d2h

Poland also cooperated with Nazis before 1941. So did much of the rest of Europe and Britain. And no, it wouldn't have slowed Germans down, just like it did not slow them down in 1939. In general, European countries did not put up much of a fight, and some (Romania and Finland, for example) explicitly and willingly fought on Hitler's side. As to the crimes, name me an Axis or Allied country that did not commit horrific war crimes in that war. I'll wait.

6d6b73
1 replies
16h38m

You're confusing cooperation like normal countries do with actively supporting murderous regime. Soviets actively supported Nazis during the WW2.

As far as Allied country that did not commit horrific war crimes:

- France

- Poland

- Czechoslovakia

- Belgium

- Luxembourg

- Netherlands

- Norway

- Greece

- Yugoslavia

- Ethiopia

- Philippines

- Canada

- Australia

- New Zealand

- India

- South Africa

- Brazil

- Mexico

- Mongolia

ein0p
0 replies
9h56m

United States did actually support Hitler up to a point. USSR boycotted the Olympics in 1936 - United States participated. IBM sold stuff to Hitler, as did Ford and General Motors. Henry Ford was a big fan of Hitler, and his views on the Jews. The US-Nazi Germany trade did not fully cease until 1941, about the same time when Soviet trade with Nazi Germany ceased because Germany broke the pact and attacked. In fact, as far as I can tell, all European countries without any exceptions traded with Hitler all the way until at least 1939, or in some cases even later. Some nominally "neutral" countries, such as the Netherlands, Norway, Switzerland and some others, traded with Nazi Germany throughout the war. Your point is?

BalinKing
1 replies
1d22h

According to that link, The Martians were Hungarian :-P

legitster
0 replies
1d22h

Oops. Updated to be less wrong.

linearrust
0 replies
1d21h

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

"The first machine was built by the Poles and was a hand operated multiple enigma machine."

There were polish contributors to the general idea of computation. But computation is not the same thing as modern computer. No serious person can view the bomba as a 'modern computer'. It took the discovery of the transistor to give birth to the modern computer.

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.

Poland doesn't that the population, resources, etc for that. Whatever great innovators poland would have possibly had in your alternate universe would have been siphoned off by germany, russia, britain, france, US, etc. There is a reason why so many renowned poles pre-ww2 made their contributions outside of poland.

keiferski
4 replies
1d12h

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.

qwytw
3 replies
1d9h

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

To be fair the country become entirely dysfunctional (mainly due to internal reasons) long before it was dismembered. By the 1700s while technically retaining most of its territory it basically became just a "playground" for Russia, Swedish and German armies to fight each other in... and the country's elite had very little interest or desire to prevent that (or rather it was a very low priority for them and their weren't willing to sacrifice their economic and political status for it).

Italy

I'm not sure Italy had many advantages in that regard. It was already dismembered to begin with and for several hundreds of years it was just a prize for major European powers to fight over (in many ways it was in even worse position than Poland). On the other hand even at its peak Poland was extremely economically and socially underdeveloped compared to most of Italy which seems like a much bigger reason.

Germany > resources from colonies might have played a role in their industrialization.

I'm not sure that's true in this case. Yes Germans were doing a lot of "colonizing" in Eastern Europe but I'm not sure German states in Germany "proper" necessarily benefited that much from it. And to be fair historically Poland only has itself to "blame" for being outmatched by a minor state like Prussia which began as a Polish vassal but somehow managed to turn itself into a global(ish) superpower over a few centuries.

keiferski
2 replies
1d7h

I’m not super interested in arguing about the finer details. The point remains that Poland was colonized, destroyed, and occupied from roughly the late 19th century until the 1990s, and so anyone blaming the lack of development there on occupying forces is in a large sense correct. The fact that Poland today, unoccupied, is rapidly approaching the development level of leading EU countries further emphasizes the point.

qwytw
1 replies
7h14m

rapidly approaching the development level of leading EU countries further emphasizes the point.

Well same applies to pretty much all of Central/Eastern Europe, and my point is that events prior to the 1900s didn't necessarily have a huge impact on the current situation (look at Finland). It's not like the Russian Empire in the 1800s was particularly more oppressive towards the overwhelming majority of the population or mismanaged the country to higher degree than the Polish nobility that preceded them (of course only in relative terms).

Napoleon winning/not losing as bad might have changed significantly everything but Poland's problems in the 1600s and the 1700s were primarily caused by internal issues.

Being independent alone is often not enough (e.g Portugal/Spain were left completely behind the rest of Western Europe economically and even socially until the mid to late 20th century).

keiferski
0 replies
2h24m

It's not like the Russian Empire in the 1800s was particularly more oppressive towards the overwhelming majority of the population or mismanaged the country to higher degree than the Polish nobility that preceded them

The Russian Empire literally tried to eradicate the Polish language.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russification#Lithuania_and_Po...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Polish_sentiment#Before_t...

You're also not mentioning the fact that the mismangement of the 19th century was in large part due to foreign actors.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberum_veto#Zenith

You don't seem to know much of what you're talking about, so like I said, I'm not interested in having this conversation.

elzbardico
2 replies
1d20h

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.

chrisco255
0 replies
1d15h

I can believe it. Communism destroyed multiple countries. Look at the difference between North Korea and South Korea. Only capitalist reforms to communist countries improved things for places like China, which was every bit as worse off as Poland before they opened up trade and market based reforms in the 70s.

6d6b73
0 replies
1d5h

I believe there is a simple reason for that - if you're sandwiched between two genocidal maniacs and every decade of not being subjugated by at least one of them is a success, you take pride in every small accomplishment. If you add to that the fact that even these small accomplishments are often not only not recognized but often usurped by others as their own - it can make you little too protective of your history.

piombisallow
0 replies
1d22h

Communism certainly didn't help.

mzs
0 replies
1d20h

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.

chrisco255
0 replies
1d15h

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.

garaetjjte
27 replies
1d19h

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

jojobas
25 replies
1d17h

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.

drekipus
21 replies
1d16h

Sounds like the problems of acrappy economic theory

jojobas
15 replies
1d14h

The theory might or might not have worked if the leadership wasn't hell-bent on converting the entire world into their ideology by military force.

Which it kind of had to do lest their citizens noticed they live in abject poverty compared to other countries.

lolinder
7 replies
1d13h

So in other words the crappy economic theory drove the militarism, lest the population recognize the fallout of the theory for what it was?

jojobas
3 replies
1d13h

It's not obvious that the militarism wasn't primary to the theory. World revolution won't make itself.

Koshkin
2 replies
1d3h

Well, to be fair, the idea was abandoned back in the 1930s.

broken-kebab
1 replies
1d2h

The idea that was abandoned in 30s, was of the world revolution happening so soon that it should be prioritized over trade, and diplomacy with capitalist countries. It was replaced with flexible strategy of long-term struggle for world domination which USSR faithfully followed until its demise

Koshkin
0 replies
1d

The USSR was not the only country vying for domination.

psalminen
2 replies
1d11h

Sounds like most economic theories that are implemented around the globe today to me.

jojobas
1 replies
1d10h

There are shades of grey, and then there's jet black.

Koshkin
0 replies
1d3h

Apple calls it "space black."

throwuxiytayq
6 replies
1d11h

The article presents a beautiful, self-contained, anecdotal but representative example of why communism never worked, doesn’t work, won’t work, and wouldn’t work in your imaginary parallel spider-man universe scenario.

mordae
4 replies
1d11h

It's not really about communism, though.

You'd have to be blind not to see parallels under capitalism. Employees cannot profit from inventions and improvements, so they don't engage in them. Improving efficiency means budget cuts and animosity from under performers.

This might not be true for smallest companies, but those don't really drive the economy.

jojobas
2 replies
1d9h

Except employees do in fact benefit from innovations and improvements, and most inventions and innovations of the past 100 years come from capitalist, not socialist, countries. To the contrary, soviet orgs paid set awards for "rationalizing suggestions", and without the market value control 99% of them were of course bullshit.

yetihehe
1 replies
1d8h

To the contrary, soviet orgs paid set awards for "rationalizing suggestions"

Yes, but very often someone did that rationalizing suggestion and the manager got the reward. Most people suggesting improvements stopped after one small improvement when treated like that, so whole idea was doomed to fail by poor execution.

broken-kebab
0 replies
1d1h

Bad manager problem does not explain persistent technological lagging of USSR. There were good managers too, after all. The central reason is that any significant innovation implementation is a sort of travel to terra incognita. It's hard, and risky. So it requires someone who expects to get a reward big enough to pay for all the pain. Socialist/communist approach is not compatible with it on fundamental level as big rewards means inequality. Plenty of Soviet engineers proposed ineteresting ideas, and many of them were socialistically rewarded for them (e.g. "gramota" with Lenin's face, and maybe a small bonus), but very few people wanted to risk implementing those ideas. It was always better to rely on a low-risk approach: blueprints stolen from the West.

broken-kebab
0 replies
1d2h

We can say with certainty that capitalist economy has a feature of an invention/idea implementation of which is funded, and pursued by motivated people with the goal of becoming rich (often known as 'startups'). Sometimes they succeed, and give a push to economy, or science. No equivalent exists in communist model.

jojobas
0 replies
1d9h

Is there a way to read what I wrote without getting that I'm not a fan of communism at all? There shouldn't be. I have enough family anecdotes of how bad it could be. Also I hope you meant to say "...except in your imaginary..." cause in this one it definitely didn't.

lupusreal
4 replies
1d10h

Not the theory, a crappy economic reality. If the economy were sound the computer researchers should have been able to fund their own research by commercializing it, instead of expecting handouts funded by the working class's hard labor.

rapidaneurism
3 replies
1d9h

My understanding of planned economies is that credit, investment, and profits are controlled by the state.

In any way starting a commercial enterprise would surely mark them as capitalist class traitors, wouldn't it?

defrost
2 replies
1d9h

Not in the case of the planned economies of China nor the USSR (post Stalin, IIRC) nor Russia (if, indeed, there's still a plan there).

jojobas
1 replies
1d8h

There was no starting any private enterprise in USSR until Perestroika (1988ish). Best you could do is to suggest doing something to the government and if you knew the right people you could be allowed to, given some resources etc.

Think starting a project within a large company, except you can't quit and start on your own.

broken-kebab
0 replies
1d2h

To be more precise, private enterprise was a crime in USSR until perestroika with punishments ranging up to death. But some people still risked

tgv
2 replies
1d12h

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?"

yetihehe
1 replies
1d11h

No, he wrote about motivation of ruling class, not rest of Poles.

jojobas
0 replies
1d10h

Of course, and then you have to remember that the ones calling the shots were not even Polish, and the situation was common for the whole Eastern Bloc. The Polish government was appointed from Moscow. Stalin went so far as to send one of his top brass, Rokossovsky, to be Polish minister of Defense.

vanderZwan
0 replies
1d9h

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

sieszpak
16 replies
1d22h

Many Poles have distinguished themselves in various fields of science and life. I recognize Madame Curie, Copernicus, Ulam, Pope John Paul II, Chopin, Polanski, and perhaps Wozniak. I had a Polish professor at Mellon University who talked a bit about it, and there was a lot.

surfingdino
3 replies
1d21h

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...

pinewurst
1 replies
1d17h

Ulam was Jewish and there’s a difference. My grandfather was from the same area, Galicia and generation and he’d be damned if he’d self-identify as a Pole.

lo_zamoyski
0 replies
1d17h

Your grandfather may harbor antipathy toward Poles, but he doesn't speak for Ulam. Ulam, like a number of Poles with Jewish roots, viewed himself as a Pole. Tarski is another example. Jan Brzechwa. Those in the Lvov-Warsaw school of mathematics, like Hugo Steinhaus. Etc.

lo_zamoyski
0 replies
1d17h

CNC machining isn't serious?

jsrcout
3 replies
1d21h

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

jjtheblunt
0 replies
1d21h

marian rejewski

msikora
2 replies
1d19h

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.

fear91
0 replies
1d19h

Jakub Pachocki from OpenAI is polish too.

NiteOwl066
1 replies
1d21h

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

virgulino
0 replies
1d19h

Jan Łukasiewicz and his (Reverse) Polish Notation.

Affric
0 replies
1d16h

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.

karaterobot
9 replies
1d22h

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?

mepian
2 replies
1d21h

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

mzs
1 replies
1d20h

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).

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...

Affric
0 replies
1d16h

Thanks.

Ryszard Zenker has done us all a great service with that document.

boomboomsubban
2 replies
1d21h

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.

donw
1 replies
1d18h

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.

eru
0 replies
1d15h

Really goes to show that the virtue of greed can prevail over the vice of discrimination.

lo_zamoyski
1 replies
1d17h

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.

mordae
0 replies
1d10h

Hmm, but we still got paid a visit in 1968 and had Russian nukes ready in case capitalists crossed the border.

brigadier132
8 replies
1d20h

After World War II, the communist regime in Poland considered members of the resistance a threat to its existence, convinced that people who had risked their lives to free Poland of its Nazi oppressors could also act to undermine the new Soviet regime

Interesting fact from the article...

toast0
1 replies
1d20h

Not particularly surprising, IMHO.

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

qwytw
0 replies
1d9h

The fact that that "next" occupier was also the initial co-occupier and massacred over 20,000 people from the same poll/social class the same resistance group was mainly composed from (army officers/intelligentsia/landowners/>=middle class in general and their associates) at very beginning of the war kind of left very few options.

Also the whole thing about letting them be massacred by the nazis during Warsaw Uprising without moving a finger...

Any type of "reconciliation" was pretty much inconceivable (not something the soviets were ever interested in the first place anyway).

dhosek
1 replies
1d14h

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.

qwytw
0 replies
1d9h

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katyn_massacre

I don't think there was any going back from this...

The core of the Polish Home Army was made up of people belonging to the same social groups and their relatives or associates.

By 43-44 there were even a few cases of a limited truce or even some minor cooperation between the Germans and the Polish resistance since the Soviets turned on them immediately after entering (former) Polish territory in the east.

TacticalCoder
1 replies
1d20h

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.

aaplok
0 replies
1d19h

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)

It's more subtle than that. Communist resistance certainly existed before 1941. Many of the veterans from the Spanish civil war for example engaged quite early, without waiting for Stalin's instructions. Repression against communists increased overnight when Hitler invaded the USSR, which led to more active resistance. But it's not like they just had been sitting quietly enjoying life under Pétain up to then.

After the war communist resistants, particularly those who came back from deportation, were seen with suspicion by the party's leadership, and the party ended up at the hands of people who hadn't been as active in the resistance, but were considered to be more loyal to Stalin. Which suited the Gaullists just fine and gave them the opportunity to push the narrative that only they had been the true resistants from the first hour.

topspin
0 replies
1d13h

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.

jojobas
0 replies
1d14h

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.

tivert
7 replies
1d22h

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.

cloudsec9
4 replies
1d21h

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.

ordu
3 replies
1d20h

> 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

naveen99
0 replies
1d6h

Centralization is also fragile, a single point of failure, which fails without fail. even quantum mechanics doesn’t make a decision in advance.

mordae
0 replies
1d10h

Centralization is evil.

This.

It doesn't matter what the official regime is, as long as the decisions are made by a disconnected committee with no way for the periphery to steer, it's always shit.

aleph_minus_one
0 replies
1d8h

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?

They should do what most management textbooks tell you: adjust the planning to include this innovation in the plan.

novia
0 replies
1d21h

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.

limit499karma
0 replies
1d4h

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.

M95D
4 replies
1d22h

The TLDR version is this:

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 were elements imported from beyond the Iron Curtain and used in the sensitive field of information processing.
atrus
1 replies
1d22h

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.
dhosek
0 replies
1d14h

I think this, more than anything else was the key factor.

skirge
0 replies
1d22h

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

axus
0 replies
1d21h

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

legitster
2 replies
1d21h

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.

surfingdino
0 replies
1d20h

- 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.

Muromec
0 replies
1d20h

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.

mepian
1 replies
1d20h

The tired cliche of comparing the subject to Bill Gates and Steve Jobs (celebrities from the later microcomputer era, one of which is not even a hardware guy) made me cringe, why not compare him instead to Ken Olsen and Wesley Clark, the men who actually built first minicomputers in the West, or to someone like Andy Bechtolsheim? I guess the target audience of the article doesn't know anyone but Gates and Jobs.

scj
0 replies
1d17h

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

bdjsiqoocwk
1 replies
1d20h

I wonder if related to the karpinski from the Julia language.

dhosek
0 replies
1d14h

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.

abc_lisper
1 replies
1d22h

He really loved his country, even if the government basically destroyed his career.

tester457
0 replies
1d20h

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.

trwired
0 replies
1d20h

I don't have anything to add on the subject of the article, but just want to mention I really like the site it's published on. Alongside przekroj.org (which recently started dipping its toes into publishing also in English) it is one of my favorite places on the web. No clickbait, no quantity over quality, just (mostly) interesting, well researched content. I wish there were more places like these around the internet.

tailrecursion
0 replies
1d16h

The K-202 could conduct a million operations per second – many more than the PCs that became popular a decade later.

That the K-202 was faster than the personal computers that came later is not unusual, because those later computers were based on microprocessors. Early microprocessors such as the 8008 and 8080 were not speed demons compared to LSI TTL designs of that time. The article mentions the [Data General] Super Nova as being similar in speed to the K-202.

Another interesting computer is the Datapoint 2200, another TTL design. The manufacturer went to Intel and TI to realize their CPU design on a single chip, which resulted in the 8008, a microprocessor with an almost identical instruction set and which ran slower than the original 2200.

pharrington
0 replies
1d10h

For those who were astonished by the claims that the K-202 could "conduct a million operations per second" - it did 1 million memory reads/writes per second. It wasn't doing a megaflop.

novia
0 replies
1d22h

I wish he had chosen to go with the Americans who recognized his genius. Having loyalty to his home country set him back. He could have returned to Poland after the fall of communism, potentially with millions of dollars to invest locally.

initramfs
0 replies
1d20h

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...

KingOfCoders
0 replies
1d12h

"K-202 was a 16-bit minicomputer, created by a team led by Polish scientist Jacek Karpiński between 1970–1973 in cooperation with British companies Data-Loop and M.B. Metals."