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
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.
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?"
> 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
> 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?
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.
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).
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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...
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.
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.
> - 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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
>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.
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.
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.
"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."
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.
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.
The Poles have a long history of being a leading European nation in many areas. These "jokes" arose in the wake of Polish immigration to the US and the conquering of Poland by Nazi Germany and then the Soviets.
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.
> 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
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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....
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
"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.
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.
Man you really should have read the article to understand that the main competitor to the K-202 had ties to the Communist government and was able to get production shut down.
There was also some concern over the number of western parts inside of the K-202, so a modern equivalent would be closer to the U.S. banning of Huawei hardware in U.S. cell networks, where the hardware is cheaper and superior, but we ban it because we want to protect our own domestic hardware suppliers, and avoid letting too many Chinese-made parts into our country's critical digital infrastructure.
> Man you really should have read the article to understand that the main competitor to the K-202 had ties to the Communist government and was able to get production shut down.
What do you think regulatory capture is? The exact same behavior, and we have it all over our society. The parallels to OpenAI are obvious. And if you look... sure enough, the board has multiple people connected directly to the bowels of federal government.
Granted, I don't think OpenAI is 1/10000th as interesting as microcomputers were, but it's still nauseating to see people take aforementioned bleating seriously.
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
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.
Sounds like the problems of acrappy economic theory
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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?"
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> 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
> 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?
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.
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.
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The Wikipedia page says it was actually segmented memory rather than paging as it is defined today.
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...
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> 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.
Hmm, but we still got paid a visit in 1968 and had Russian nukes ready in case capitalists crossed the border.
Yeah. Paging was much earlier according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memory_paging . If anything he was influenced by the British he worked with.
> 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.
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.
> 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
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> 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.
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.
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...
Jacek Karpiński featured prominently when the excellent History of Computing podcast covered Polish Innovations In Computing back in 2020: https://thehistoryofcomputing.net/polish-innovations-in-comp...
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.
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.
> - 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.
[dead]
This is an interesting contrast with the story of the Yugoslavian Galaksija.
https://spectrum.ieee.org/yugoslavia-diy-microcomputer
https://jacobin.com/2020/08/computer-yugoslavia-galaksija-vo...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galaksija_(computer)
A manual for the K-202: http://www.zenker.poznan.pl/k-202/dokumentacja/k-202-reklama...
> 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.
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.
I wonder if related to the karpinski from the Julia language.
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.
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.
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.
I think this, more than anything else was the key factor.
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Government of Edward Gierek had no problem with buying foreign licenses for products which required western components so it was not a problem.
Apple built iPhones in China, but the country of manufacture is almost irrelevant to that accomplishment.
He really loved his country, even if the government basically destroyed his career.
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.
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.
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.
"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."
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.
Here's a long, if incomplete, list of some others: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_Polish_science_and...
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wojciech_Zaremba
Jakub Pachocki from OpenAI is polish too.
Jan Łukasiewicz and his (Reverse) Polish Notation.
I don't know the names, but I recall there was a large Polish contribution to Allied codebreaking in WWII.
Rejewski, Zygalski, Rozycki https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marian_Rejewski
Polish mathematician had the Polish "bomba" in... 1938 (which is actually right before WWII):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bomba_(cryptography)
marian rejewski
Yeah you could add many more major names like Banach or my favourite (and imo most underappreciated) Jan Czochralski.
Don’t forget a father of a modern oil refinery:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignacy_%C5%81ukasiewicz
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...
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.
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CNC machining isn't serious?
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.
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This actually really bothers me.
The Poles have a long history of being a leading European nation in many areas. These "jokes" arose in the wake of Polish immigration to the US and the conquering of Poland by Nazi Germany and then the Soviets.
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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.
Steve Wozniak is a quasi household name, but calling someone "the Polish Wozniak" doesn't quite work.
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> 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...
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.
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.
Not particularly surprising, IMHO.
A group that worked against one occupier is likely to work against the next as well.
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).
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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....
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.
> 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.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
According to that link, The Martians were Hungarian :-P
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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
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> 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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K-202
Communism certainly didn't help.
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.
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Man you really should have read the article to understand that the main competitor to the K-202 had ties to the Communist government and was able to get production shut down.
There was also some concern over the number of western parts inside of the K-202, so a modern equivalent would be closer to the U.S. banning of Huawei hardware in U.S. cell networks, where the hardware is cheaper and superior, but we ban it because we want to protect our own domestic hardware suppliers, and avoid letting too many Chinese-made parts into our country's critical digital infrastructure.
> Man you really should have read the article to understand that the main competitor to the K-202 had ties to the Communist government and was able to get production shut down.
What do you think regulatory capture is? The exact same behavior, and we have it all over our society. The parallels to OpenAI are obvious. And if you look... sure enough, the board has multiple people connected directly to the bowels of federal government.
Granted, I don't think OpenAI is 1/10000th as interesting as microcomputers were, but it's still nauseating to see people take aforementioned bleating seriously.
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