
Unix in East Germany (1990) - mdip
https://groups.google.com/forum/m/#!topic/comp.unix.wizards/QX_dxElrVNs
======
krylon
This is so fascinating. By the time I understood why and how Germany was two
separate states, the wall was long gone.

It is weird,actually,because I am glad I did not have to live through those
times, but I _do_ get a wave of something nostalgia-like, as I read this.

~~~
k__
Same here.

My father and his family came from the east (they got thrown out one day) and
my mother from the west. I was only 4 years old when the wall fell and didn't
have any interest in the topic until I was 13 or something.

~~~
teilo
Man, you guys make me feel old.

~~~
lizknope
I was 14 in 1989 when my Dad and I were watching TV and they switched over to
show East and West Germans breaking through the wall and hugging each other.

I remember watching for hours because I knew I was watching history being
made.

~~~
krylon
Me too. I did not understand fully what was going on, but I remember the
excitement and optimism that hung in the air.

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Sniffnoy
Non-mobile link:
[https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/comp.unix.wizards/QX...](https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/comp.unix.wizards/QX_dxElrVNs)

~~~
jwilk
Plain HTML version:

[https://groups.google.com/forum/?_escaped_fragment_=topic%2F...](https://groups.google.com/forum/?_escaped_fragment_=topic%2Fcomp.unix.wizards%2FQX_dxElrVNs)

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maze-le
>> We should have been working on the development of a 386 for the past year,
but so far it has not been possible for us to turn up even one such machine.

I guess that has been true for everything.

~~~
stormking
No. Basic needs like food, clothing etc. were fully covered. Any kind of
electronics (e.g. a color TV) were hard to acquire. You had to wait 10 years
to be able to buy a new car. And housing was a big problem. Women in the GDR
typically became pregnant at a very young age (18-21) because a family with a
child had the right to get its own apartment.

~~~
jlg23
> Women in the GDR typically became pregnant at a very young age (18-21)
> because a family with a child had the right to get its own apartment.

This is one way to look at it. The other way: free, guaranteed child care
(probably mandatory for most as well) for every kid just a few months old. You
could easily have a kid and study or work - that was the norm, not the
exception.

Disclaimer: I'm the kid of a woman who got her PhD in medicine in east
Germany. "Feminism" was a concept I only learned about when the wall fell. In
the east, as far as I can see, it was a woman's duty to be productive for
society, not about a "right to work while raising kids".

~~~
maxxxxx
In terms of women's participation in the workforce the communist states were
far ahead of the West. Not sure how that came about.

~~~
dragonwriter
> In terms of women's participation in the workforce the communist states were
> far ahead of the West. Not sure how that came about.

The liberation of women of all social classes in capitalism from the
subservient role as an “instrument of production” in “bourgeois marriage”
and/or coerced into a system of “prostitution both public and private” was
called out as a natural consequence of Communism in the Communist Manifesto.

So, it's quite easy to see why it would be something Communist states would
want to demonstrate success at, and when the State directs work, it's not hard
to control relative penetration in the workforce to suit the goals of the
leadership.

~~~
claudiawerner
Not only that, but feminist Marxism had already taken off by that point, and
it's been a present (albeit relatively quiet) topic of discussion ever since
Engels. I'm honestly surprised people (especially on HN) don't know about the
ideological roots of the liberation of women in Marxism (or Communism
generally). Liberation is a fundamental principle; the comment you're replying
to makes it seem as though women in the workforce is antithetical to
Communism, or something.

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senozhatsky
That's a really interesting read. Accodring to some reports the Russians had
access to 2.9 or 4.2 BSD source code in 1980-1982(?)
[http://gunkies.org/wiki/DEMOS](http://gunkies.org/wiki/DEMOS) not sure if
they had have to do "translation by hand into another language".

A bit unrelated: Wow, I can barely tell what I've been up to 2 years ago; how
do people remember things that happened some 30-40 years ago...

-ss

~~~
juiyout
I believe there was a study on how people with different age perceive passing
of time differently. I guess, for those people, 30-40 years ago might seem
like yesterday. Another wager is that you might be younger than those people.

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pavlov
Trivia: the university mentioned in this story was in Karl-Marx-Stadt, a city
which had this name in 1953-1990 but is today known as Chemnitz.

~~~
Annatar
Trivia is always the best, most salient part of every story, which ironically
makes it not trivial at all.

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the-dude
Google thinks I need to login to read this.

edit: which is funny, Google won't let me in, East Germany wouldn't let you
out.

~~~
bcaa7f3a8bbc
Better alternative link:

[http://article.olduse.net/4737%40ethz.UUCP](http://article.olduse.net/4737%40ethz.UUCP)

 _Yes, I have an Usenet archive in my harddrive so I can search for the
message, get its original Message-ID, and present you a link to Joey Hess 's
historical Usenet exhibition. Google Groups was originally Deja News, the most
complete Usenet history archive at the time. But Google acquired it ~2000, and
converted it into to Google's private forum service, instead of a museum that
preserves the history. Not only the original raw archive was not available to
the public anymore, but they also REMOVED the original message querying and
indexing._

 _In Google Groups, you can read historical posts, but cannot find any
technical trace of the original history - the whole thing is not indexed in
the original way, I didn 't even find a option to show the message header,
making it utterly useless for archeology, instead, now the best Usenet archive
we have is saved from some old tapes from one or two universities, and far
from complete._ This is really bad.

 _And apparently Google Groups as Google 's private forum, is also already
irrelevant. A lose-lose._

~~~
wazoox
Did you build your archive from Usenet, or through spidering DejaNews/Google
groups?

~~~
bcaa7f3a8bbc
> _instead, now the best Usenet archive we have is saved from some old tapes
> from one or two universities,_

The archive is online, I just downloaded a copy.

The first major Usenet archive was dumped from the old tape of the University
of Toronto's Department of Zoology, it covered the posts their server received
from late 80s to 1991. You can download it from here.
[https://archive.org/details/utzoo-wiseman-usenet-
archive](https://archive.org/details/utzoo-wiseman-usenet-archive). It's ~2
GiB in compressed gzip, ~20 GiB in raw. Another is The Internet Archive's
"Usenet Historical Collection", contains post made in the 90s, donated by an
anonymous user, around ~200 GiB.
[https://archive.org/details/usenethistorical&tab=collection](https://archive.org/details/usenethistorical&tab=collection)

The UTZoo's archive is very handy to have. There are a million posts to read
and no spam and low-effort posting at all (by modern standards, even many
flame wars seem to be high-quality). The downside is no external resources is
accessible, and nobody is going to reply you. Feels like trapping inside the
fake 3D Hologram of the Usenet golden age, created by a supercomputer in the
abandoned space station, as in the plot of Otomo Katsuhiro's Memories.

Unfortunately, the original archive from DejaNews/Google Groups, the most
authoritative and complete source is inaccessible by the public. _Google, a
Search Company, Has Made Its Internet Archive Impossible to
Search[http://motherboard.vice.com/read/google-a-search-company-
has...](http://motherboard.vice.com/read/google-a-search-company-has-made-its-
internet-archive-impossible-to-search) _

~~~
wahern
I can't understand why Google just doesn't release its archives. To what end
are they keeping it private? How is it a significant competitive advantage for
_anything_ they do?

Google keeping the archive locked up was what (many years ago) made it clear
to me that it stopped being the company of "don't be evil". In fact, locking
up the archive is about as gratuitously evil as you can get short of actual
violence and theft.

~~~
scruffyherder
Because they are building a profile of you to sell your information to
advertisers and anyone else interested. If they just GAVE data away, how could
they market what you are looking for?

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_glass
Funny my father did computer science and economics at that time at that
university. He told me about the US computers that had special keys to make
them look different, like an exchanged dollar sign. Now that appears to me
just as line noise.

