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Comment by legitster

2 years ago

> 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.

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

> 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.