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Very interesting article.

I'm quite surprised that they appear to use a customised Linux distribution rather than build their own from scratch properly. If you look at the East Germany in the 1980s, the various "VEB" state industries were even chucking out 8086 and VAX clones with every component built in the Eastern Block and even cloned UNIX operating systems!

Couple of links to show the scale of their industry back then:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VEB_Robotron

http://translate.google.com/translate?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.rob...




I always found it surprising that certain people and governments from the East condemn the West for everything and anything, while embracing the technologies which were invented and developed in that same West.


The Nazis invented rocketry.

Are you saying that the moon missions were a hypocritical endorsement of the values of national socialism?

Mechanical tools and politics are generally orthogonal.


The Saturn V rockets used in the moon missions were largely designed by von Braun and Arthur Rudolph, who were both Nazis to some degree or another.


Well in the case of East Germany at least, most engineering standards were already established so it made no sense to change them.

The problem that they had was ultimately the political and social system that produced the manifestation of the designs. The underlying designs were sound.

I'm slightly inclined to agree with the principles of Marxism-Leninism but it suffered from one of the many things that the human race is good at doing: Good specification, bad implementation.


I doubt that these people know anything about technology. The governments generally hire some companies to do the obscure technology "magic" thing. As for people, most of them have probably never learned a thing about the technologies they use.




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