Motorola had some investment in the region. 6800 class CPU fab. Maybe made under licence. I remember my dad touring Poland, Hungary discussing vlsi conference stuff with people there in the 80s.
The UK maths/compsci circuit had good links with Poland's because of Marian Rejewski and cryptography history. Well.. good and not good, he didn't always get recognition for what he'd done.
UK was involved in (in)famous story of production of K-202. The story that to these days is a highly controversial topic due to various groups blaming different people (from Jacek Karpiński to communist government) for it's failure tho it was pretty impressive and innovative architecture at the moment it was presented to the world, tho prolonged problems with production deleyed it's arrival so much it was no longer able to keep up with western rivals especially integrated CPUs as K-202 was a TTL based architecture.
As someone who missed that era, a question about cp/m.
Most machines had some sort of basic rom, why was that not the preferred command processor, basic is not that great, but it provides for a much richer command environment than cp/m or dos. What was the advantage of cp/m?
I am approaching from the context of the unix shell, an operating environment rich enough to program in. I don't know what scripting was available on cp/m but dos scripting with batch files was a miserly unpleasant thing in comparison. But then I think about how all those early home computers had a BASIC rom, why did that not evolve into a BASIC shell? it would have been a much nicer environment than cp/m.
CP/M software was (somewhat) portable. That was its killer feature. A program coded in 8080 assembly that closely adhered to the CP/M API, would run on any 8080 machine that could run CP/M. Anyone with the hardware skill could build a CP/M compatible computer, no coding required beyond a bootloader and tweaking the CP/M BIOS (low level driver code). There were dozens of manufacturers of CP/M machines. On the other hand, there was no standard BASIC common across all those machines, besides MS BASIC, sort of.
On proprietary systems, BASIC shells were a thing. Both DOS and ProDOS on the Apple II hooked into the ROM BASIC interpreter.
Just to add a little detail, MS BASIC’s capabilities varied pretty widely across versions and machines, and it wasn’t helped that Commodore had gotten a sweet heart deal on MS BASIC in 1977 that included no royalties and as such they never upgraded the version of MS BASIC - as that would involve giving the now much bigger and more apt Microsoft another whack at the terms.
cp/m had tools for using floppy disks (and so did ms-dos) being able to save your work to a floppy is basically a necessity. There were "encode your data/programs onto a cassette" and some paper tape, but those were incredibly inconvenient.
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To use floppy disks you needed to format them, have some notion of a filesystem, be able to DIR and COPY files, and programs like word processors needed a way (a standard way, a single way, etc.) to talk to the disk to open and save files. That's what cp/m did.
cp/m from the user perspective (command line) was something of a knockoff of Digital/DEC command lines similar to RSTS or RSX-11 (probably RT-11 too? never used it)--PIP ftw! These are somewhat similar to MSDOS command lines. Unlike unix "everything is a file", these operating systems had the notion that "everything's a device" (like MSDOS things with colons, CON: AUX: LPT(?): etc., and sometimes "we'll provide the baling wire so different devices can talk to each other but it's not guaranteed", COPY A:FILE LPR:
PIP (peripheral interchange program) was the workhorse that actually did it all underneath, PIP A:FILE.DOC LPR:/COPY to extend the example above. I think that they actually may have put DEST: before SOURCE: and maybe DEST:=SRC:, and maybe the /COPY had to be on the dest, i don't remember, but for this purpose it's "eh"
basic does not offer anything like that. It could have, but for whatever reason, nobody thought to add those features, they were probably thinking more along the lines of "we're in ROM, why would we need a floppy? feature!"
The CP/M machines I've used (z80) weren't so personal. They typically ran off the shelf software. I recall using dBase II on a Xerox machine.
The machines that came with BASIC could be personal (Atari) or business focused (TRS-80) and did make for a good default prompt. Often the storage subsystem needed a DOS-like part not included with Basic which may only have supported cassette data storage out of the box.
A surprising number of these BASIC interpreters were ports of Microsoft BASIC so there was more consistency than you might think. That's how they made most of their money prior to buying the Quick and Dirty Operating System (QDOS) and turning around to sell it as PC-DOS 1.0.
Even the Atari BASIC cartridge/ROM was supposed to be MS BASIC[0] but it didn't fit in the 8K ROM leaving any room for additional interfacing with the machine. MS BASIC was still offered separately.
I'm glad for the Atari version. Although it was less powerful, it was enough taking less space and running faster. An Integer Basic like on the Apple would have been great to have too.
CP/M was essentially THE compatibility standard for business software before DOS. If you wanted to run a professional text editor or database before the PC and MS-DOS era, it pretty much had to be CP/M.
UNIX was of course much more powerful, but didn't run on cheap 8-bit computers. And some home computers also offered CP/M compatibility as an add-on (for instance here: the Amstrad CPC booting into CP/M: https://floooh.github.io/tiny8bit/cpc.html?file=cpc/6128sp_4...)
And the whole reason why Commodore added a second CPU to the Commodore 128 was CP/M compatibility, that's how powerful the "lure of CP/M" was at the time.
CP/M is essentially a small command processor ("CCP") which loads whatever command you type, and even the simplest CP/M 2.2 had a lot of useful commands. PIP, directory listings, editor, assembler and debugger.
So CP/M was a lot nicer than BASIC, and if you didn't like it you could just ... run MBASIC.COM and get BASIC.
Most BASIC distributions did't save state and it didn't have an online help, meaning it wasn't on the system. So, if a user was going to have to look up commands then they were more likely do so through another program, necessitating have BASIC not in the ROM but on the filesystem. This way a user could still use BASIC and load/edit the program from a file on a floppy.
BASIC was a very slow and limited programming language.
CP/M was a disk operating system.
If you wrote programs in BASIC you could only save them painfully slowly on cassette tape, and maybe if you were lucky you could get them to load back in again. You couldn't really write useful programs in it because it had no concept of functions and a very vague idea of subroutines, and there wasn't really an editor or debugger. You couldn't load or save data files except as raw binary copies of what was in memory. Latterly some home computers like the Commodore 64 got crude disk drives, which were only a little faster and about as reliable as tape, and still couldn't really work the way we use files now.
By comparison, CP/M was more like MS-DOS in that it was a thin command interpreter that would load and run programs in memory, which could then be used to do useful stuff. In the Olden Days I used a CP/M machine to write firmware for Z80-based machine controller boards. On one floppy I had the editor, assembler, debugger, and a few other tools, and on the other floppy I had the assembly source code and object code output. Although the computer with its whopping 64kB of RAM and 256kB per floppy disk could only run one program at a time, it only took a few seconds to load the editor and the working file, and run a SUBMIT job (similar to an MS-DOS batch file) to assemble and link the code.
Pretty much all serious development was done in assembler then although there were some daft old gits who still held onto PL/I, and you could get Turbo Pascal for CP/M. There was even talk of buying a C compiler, like that C stuff they use on big Unix systems, and using a thumping great Tandon 386 with Xenix on it as a shared development machine, with 2MB of RAM and a 40MB hard disk! I left the company before they brought this in though.
BASIC is an interesting enough language, but it was inherently too limited to evolve into much without an underlying OS. CP/M required the machine running it to have a BIOS ROM with a boot loader and the machine-specific code in it to handle the hardware, which would be about half the work of the BASIC ROM.
If you want to see an interesting contrast in 80s home computers see what you can find about the Jupiter Ace, which was a Z80-based computer that ran Forth instead of BASIC. Forth would have been a far better starting point for a general-purpose OS, being essentially compiled into bytecode (really just a list of addresses of words) and run by a very simple "interpreter" that loops over the bytecode. Later on Sun would use Forth as part of OpenBoot, where it made its way into PowerPC-based Apple machines.
So, back in the day Poland must have had quite a few people working in hi-tech. Which leaves me wondering, has the country been able to retain its corps of specialists, and what is Poland’s most hi-tech product today?
In Warsaw Pact countries were assigned specialized roles by USSR. Poland was supposed to make tanks, radars, radio, agricultural machines (including planes), etc. And we had pretty good industry in these domains. But in each case - for example tanks - there were always some parts you couldn't make in one country to prevent uprisings. So for example for tanks we took some crucial parts from Czechoslovakia.
USSR was able to do whatever it wanted of course.
So, to this day we make good military RF-related tech (see WB-Electronics and Radwar for example). But when we tried a space program in 60s ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meteor_(rocket) ) - USSR made us stop pretty quickly.
Back to the subject - East Germany and USSR was supposed to do integrated circuits, so our industry wasn't very good in that regard. We made some, but nothing modern. Polish-made computers were mostly using foreign ICs with the exception of a Polish-made clone of 8080 used in a series of computers by Elwro.
I work with Poles all the time. There definetly is a huge market for IT type work in Poland. Lots of contracting in the rest of Europe since Poles are still quite cheap but in the EU.
Communist Poland was a producer of acceptable quality peripheral computer hardware, but meh central processing unit parts due to outdated semiconductor production lines and shortages of needed materials and money needed for research and production (central planing sucks at delivering that) and complicated procedures of obtaining governmental permission to import semiconductors from the West (as you needed to use US dollars to pay for them and only government was allowed to perform international transactions using foreign currencies). And even when you get the permit you could have been denied access by western producers if parts you were looking at were covered by western sanctions.
As for designers of hardware – K-202 and later MERA-404 were the most advanced TTL architectures that originated under communist regime in Poland. As for CMOS single chip CPUs whole eastern bloc only managed to copy 8 bit western designs, most notably by teams from Ukraine and Bulgaria (that was also a main Floppy Discs producer in the bloc BTW, other than that cassette tapes and reel to reel tapes were the most common storage media).
As for retaining specialists specialized in deign - they weren't too numerous to begin with. In later years of communist era regimes designed mostly to switch from attempts of developing of own designs to reverse engineering and copying western designs which involved a lot of industrial espionage and smuggling of components and software which even further limited size of group of people who were designing own solutions. Tho Poland continued to produce own designs based on own components as well as parts from the West and Soviet Union well into the 1980s. By the time communist ended a lot of them were well into their 40s and 50s with the biggest group that was about to turn 60. Poland by that time had no manufacturing capabilities to produce modern components in high quantities essential for survival of such businesses. Younger generation was more interested in developing software for western minicomputers like PC, Commodore and Atari products. So there was quite a gap in generations and their main focus.
As for today there is some research on quantum computing and photonics being done in academia. As for manufacturing of more innovative hardware and software most specialists emigrate to Germany, Scandinavia, the UK and the US. Poland is not too friendly for such business (lower level of economic freedom, overcomplicated taxation system etc) compared to these countries especially as risky ones as innovative high tech.
Not first hand info, but I hear there's a good high level of tech competence there now. Also, apparently a decent manufacturing capability, with good quality control and low wages (compared to much of Europe). Which apparently is setting them up as an EU-local competitor to China.
A couple of my computer science professors at university were Polish. They’d both done their PhDs in Poland in the 70s/80s. Like many other bright Poles, when communism ended, they took the opportunity to depart for greener pastures (and being Australia, sunnier too).
The local gaming industry attracts talent from the region and has a few globally successful products - even if companies themselves are incorporated in Cyprus.
But that only gained momentum relatively recently - there was no carryover from the communist era.
There are also payment systems - there's a lot of experimentation going on in that field. All the more interesting because the population is particularly price-conscious and intolerant to friction in payment processing.
The rest is largely outsourcing. We have a few large domestic IT companies doing projects for the government.
Lastly Poland is where around 3% of the world's li-ion batteries are manufactured. Not a lot in absolute terms, but it's, weirdly enough, half the manufacturing capacity of the US and in the EU second only to Hungary.
That's about it. Academia mostly gave up and resorted to pumping out masters' degrees. There is still a significant amount of brain-drain in IT, but it's countered with generous tax incentives.
Not a trace of it remaining, now we're doing brain dead software outsourcing. Last artifact remaining - Elwro - was subject of hostile takeover by Siemens during the awful filthy corrupted 90s.
Coincidentally I saw this video on youtube yesterday about how the attempt to keep up with the west regarding semiconductors ruined the economy of East Germany.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cxrkC-pMH_s
I can't see anything under your link, but I'm very interested in the video :)
I would be surprised though if this would have been the singular event that ruined the East German economy (if there was one main reason then it was the central planning and micromanagement of the entire ecomony which was mostly based on made up numbers and wishful thinking instead of reality), if anything, the focus on microelectronics was an unintended long term investment into the post-GDR future ;)
(Dresden and Jena are still high-tech hotspots, and without having access to computers and then catching the "computer virus" as East German teenager I wouldn't have become a programmer later)
PS: it's a good video, but focuses a bit too much on the political background ... which may of course be interesting as introduction for people without 'first hand' East German experience ;).
The video doesn't mention the most interesting unsolved mystery: how the Z80 was actually cloned. There are a couple of contradicting stories around (with the two extreme ends being (1) the Stasi stole the masks directly from Zilog or another Z80 vendor - which makes a good James Bond story, and (2) somebody just literally walked into a West German electronics store, bought a handful of Z80s, smuggled them back over the border, and the rest was reverse engineered via traditional decapping - which is a much more boring story, but also much more likely.
The only fact that helps to clear up some of the myths is that the East German Z80 is not a 1:1 clone of an original Zilog Z80 because it differs slightly in undocumented behaviour, but it could probably be 1:1 clone of a non-Zilog Z80 clone (such as Hitachi's).
Brazil had a restricted market for computers in the 80s. They too had to work with obsolete machines, but I don't think that was the main mistake.
The mistake was to not popularise computers and educate people about them (as the British did). They were too expensive and weren't as used as they could have been.
It doesn't sound as bad to me as I guess it does to you. There's a lot of variability in how words sound to people, especially across geographical ranges.
I use the word 'jerk' when one user is being rude to another in a gratuitous-supercilious way, which is not quite the same thing as 'personal attack' although they obviously overlap.
It was running CP/M and was an effect of sanctions and components shortages.With comical results like power outlet made out of regular wall mounted outlet.
The UK maths/compsci circuit had good links with Poland's because of Marian Rejewski and cryptography history. Well.. good and not good, he didn't always get recognition for what he'd done.