- Joined
- Jan 28, 2018
I have some eastern bloc machines, the most interesting one is an east german KC 85/2. There was a very narrow window after the eastern bloc collapsed where local flea markets in west germany had these showing up here and there, probably by people who wanted to start a new life in the "free world" bringing them over. A lot of the western IC stuff was reverse engineered in east germany, and there were also covert tech trade deals with west german companies like Siemens. An intersting artefact of this: Commodore kept redesigning the C64 in the 80s and there were tons of different board revisions and sometimes they needed bodges which were usually done in and around Braunschweig, sometimes as a work-from-home kind of deal for housewives; the passive components in these bodges are sometimes quite interestingly capacitors etc. made in east germany and I have a few of those boards here. One thing about Commodore's manufacturing: They threw nothing away.
There's still one electronics distributor in germany who sells surplus of east-germany made stuff, last time I checked ~4ish (?) years ago they still had GDR-made optocouplers. Until recently you also could find the odd tiny webshop in east germany here and there who somehow inexplicably sat on a considerable stock of soviet made Z80 and 8080 clones. They had their own numbering and naming scheme for everything including 74xx series logic and it's all very confusing.
The eastern bloc stuff has one very common thread compared to western world stuff: Horrible quality and poor reliabilty and temperature tolerances. The west was clearly ahead in that race. It's funny tho how in russia basically every other town had it's own flavor of western speccy rip-off.
There's still one electronics distributor in germany who sells surplus of east-germany made stuff, last time I checked ~4ish (?) years ago they still had GDR-made optocouplers. Until recently you also could find the odd tiny webshop in east germany here and there who somehow inexplicably sat on a considerable stock of soviet made Z80 and 8080 clones. They had their own numbering and naming scheme for everything including 74xx series logic and it's all very confusing.
The eastern bloc stuff has one very common thread compared to western world stuff: Horrible quality and poor reliabilty and temperature tolerances. The west was clearly ahead in that race. It's funny tho how in russia basically every other town had it's own flavor of western speccy rip-off.
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