Comment by garaetjjte
2 years ago
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
Not the theory, a crappy economic reality. If the economy were sound the computer researchers should have been able to fund their own research by commercializing it, instead of expecting handouts funded by the working class's hard labor.
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The theory might or might not have worked if the leadership wasn't hell-bent on converting the entire world into their ideology by military force.
Which it kind of had to do lest their citizens noticed they live in abject poverty compared to other countries.
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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?"
No, he wrote about motivation of ruling class, not rest of Poles.
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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