lancelot wrote:A lot of it was Soviet policy of putting industries in the other Soviet Republics or even Warsaw Pact satellites.
The Soviet Union could have made personal computers in large numbers. Even East Germany produced more personal computers back then.
As it stands to a large degree what you saw instead was the equivalent then to a workstation today. The Electronika BK had a single chip PDP-11.
Several Warsaw Pact satellites and Soviet republics made personal computers. But with the lack of an internal market and multiple languages in use in the Warsaw Pact the economies of scale weren't there.
I think this was a big mistake on the part of the Soviet Union. As the largest market in terms of electric, TV, and language standards they could have easily set the standard and then made small modifications for the other countries in the Warsaw Pact.
I suspect we might see the same thing play out today. In fact until Russia can import or make machine tools for advanced fabrication it will make more sense to have dumb terminals connect to a central processing facility to reduce the expense in mass semiconductors.
This is actually the route we are headed here in the west. "Cloud Computing" which is just a fancier term for central computing and mainframe (unless you talk about FLUX network and its cryptocurrency backed around its form of Nodes acting as servers) because now prices on components are getting so damn high and people cant keep up to the demands from video game makers as an example. So everything is going into a shitty service based structure which is absolutely abysmal by any measure IMO. I mean, for workplaces, central computing using terminals to do day to day task is rather easy and cheap honestly. I know I set up a few of them where I just used Sandybridge rack servers as they were dirt cheap, and using hypervisor in order to create environment's for people to terminal into and use on a day to day basis. Works well and does what is intended - documents, internet, email, excel and presentations, chats, porn, etc. But for home use, hell no. I refuse to pay into all these services like Netflix, Amazon Prime, Disney+, Nvidia Now, Xbox Gamepass, etc. I want to own my games and hardware.
GarryB wrote:They also need to look to the future and perhaps look at some way of reducing production costs and improved design to actually move forward and also overcome some of the limitations of existing technology... for instance they already have 3D printing technology using different metals at the same time... imagine simply 3D printing what you want including the electronics... complex 3D chips with massive parallel designs... clock speeds seem to have hit the speed limit of about 4 Ghz, and instead of trying for faster they have been going for extra processor cores on each chip, but of course that creates bottlenecks that will limit how fast the processors can practically operate...
In the 1980s the Commodore Amiga computer was one of the best available because it had specialised chips... so instead of southbridge and northbridge I/O chips and memory/graphics controller chips respectively there was a dedicated chip design for each role inside the computer to take the work strain off the CPU, so despite the pitiful slow clock speed of the 68000 motorolla chip, it could outperform 486 computers running at much higher clock speeds because the design was fixed and the variables of what hardware you were using was not as potentially variable as it could be with a PC.
A modern equivalent to removable modules or upgradable modules could be designed and built with future growth potential... make it a 128 bit computer motherboard with space for multiple chips to be installed for each role and you can scale the number of chips depending on the role the computer was to be used for... so a gaming computer might have 4 to 6 multicore graphics processing chips sharing its own dedicated memory slots, just as an example... the IBM clone design was successful because it used a standard that allowed backwards compatibility and you could upgrade components and reuse older computers for less demanding jobs or spend a bit more and upgrade them with state of the art components to be as good as any brand new store bought machine.
In comparison go to any university and look in their recycling stations or rubbish collection areas and see all the Apples that are now obsolete and got thrown out this year... because you can't upgrade their hardware and the current software requires higher hardware specs.
I remember a few years ago there was a sdelanounas article regarding 3D printing and future. One such future mentioned was the Moscow university of technology was looking at making circuit boards and SoC's using 3D printing tech. This can become a reality if Russia really pushes it. They can also look at 3D chip design as well.
As for your comment on Commodore Amiga - I loved those systems. At school we had an Amiga 4000. Solid piece of technology.
Yes, Russia could do dual processing technology or specialized chip designs where it offloads the processors tasks and each chip can be used for specific tasks. Mind you, those style of computing where a total bitch to program for. See the Tom and Jerry on the Atari Jaguar or the Sega Saturn as examples - Developers just wouldnt and couldn't put the time and effort into developing and getting the dual processing structures to actually work. Now days, things are a lot better but it is because it is all offloaded onto 1 CPU that does the tasks split among the various cores and threads. But in reality, co processors does a far better job as its far more efficient - see Elbrus 2SM+ with its DSP cores.
For average consumers though, this is where it could work out. Get the companies heavily involved with each other with the company who is making the chips (in this case, MCST) and let Baikal and rest concentrate on mobile market.
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