/tech/ - Technology

>>15997
The Soviets lacked behind the US in computing, because the US was much richer and could afford more research, development and production resources for their information technology industry. New technology is trial and error, and if you can afford more errors, you get more tries to get it right.

Anybody that tells you about planned economies lacking incentives, is an ideologue. That's an argument that says unless capitalist can exploit workers to get rich you can't have nice things. That has never been true. The rise of human society as a sophisticated civilization that could improve it's material conditions, was despite of rulers of class societies, no matter how much they insist it's because of them.

The funny thing is the soviets had the more efficient computing industry, they spend less resources for the given amount of computational power that they had, than the US. The Soviet economy was 40% the size of the US economy, if you take that into account, the Soviet system, despite it's flaws, beats capitalism in efficiency.

The video also tries to make a argument that capitalism is better at distribution, and i won't even bother with a refutation, 21 century capitalism hasn't even solved feeding hungry people and allocating houses to homeless people. The Soviets had that figured out in the 1940s.

You can make an argument that the Soviets privileged the military sector over the civilian sector and because the soviet military liked secrecy a lot, they missed out on synergies of open civilian technology development. But that is not a valid systemic complaint about the Soviet system because that was the result of the cold-war. The soviet Union had the smaller economy and because of that their military had to be a bigger drain on the economy to compete. If the US follows through with it's cold war against China (who has the much stronger economy), you will see the reverse situation, whereby the US military will start to monopolize all the talent and economic resources to compete, and the US civilian industry will start lagging behind as a result, just like what happened in the Soviet Union.

The video assumes everyone in the west used the same computers DARPA and banks did during the post war boom. In reality the boom of mini computers like the PDP in the 70s came about because even industries flush with capital could not give every department computer access to an IBM mainframe thus even the PDP-8 was better then doing it by electro-mechanical devices they had prior.
Thus US manufacturing and steel making played no role in computer developed in the USA till the 70s when the minis entered the scene.

>>16000
the more cutting edge research was being done by companies like IBM and AT&T, and the biggest demand was from industrialists from the start who invested a fuckton into it
banks also never really used computers until the mini/microcomputer boom

>>16002
Banks were the only ones that really needed to jump into computers during the post war boom so they could track transactions and Wall Street were the first ones to buy IBM mainframes after WWII after the Military Industrial Complex. Manufacturing and heavy industry relied on electro-mechanical devices till minis arrived. For example General Motors engineers had to rely on electro mechanical calculators as GM couldn't afford a IBM mainframe for its engineers till the end of the 60's.

>>16003
this is a complete meme understanding of history

>>16004
Electro-Mechanical devices lasted far longer and had far more performance then contemporary computer history wants to admit. From elevator control to programmable computers, EM lasted right up into the 1970s due to them being cheaper the solid state computers. Meanwhile banks wanted the brand new computers due to wanted higher throughput for transactions from checks and credit cards.

there's a bunch of "muh incentives" nonsense. else it's reasonably accurate

>>16041
It focuses too much on IBM mainframes and ignores minis and embedded systems. Not getting the idea of the Strela being a low cost machine even if it failed at that since he seems to not get the concept of new low spec machines. He gushes about the IBM 360 ignoring by the time the 360 came out the PDP-8 out sold the 360 by a huge margin by being good enough and dirt cheap. IBM was big and scary because its customers had deep pockets giving IBM massive profit margins not because it had a big market share.

>>16043
oh yeah you're right. there's tons of weird soviet Z80 clones. then you have yugoslavia with their Galaksija

Keeping up to date silicon fab is over for the west
China owns the high end fabs all of it now
https://gizmodo.com/intel-loses-500-million-dollars-price-hike-inflation-1849349160

>>16075
China’s semiconductor industry is still driven by western capital

>>16076
Not so much now zoom zoom

>>16077
I just realized, do you even know what capital is?

Bump or is there another thread on Soviet computing that this one could be merged into?