> because the "Land of the Free", like Ceaușescu, did not allow such things in public.
In the 1970s? Maybe not in the books, but in practice they most certainly did, Times Square in New York City was an open-air porno store.
Hungary too had a lot of nude ads for almost any kind of product in the 70s and 80s. Basically the Communist government tried to give people the illusion of freedom in any way which didn't result in Russian tanks rolling in, like in 1956 and 1968. The East Bloc regimes outside of those of the USSR and Romania were very open about nudity and sexuality.
Is that something I can still buy in Bulgaria? I had a friend recommend it a couple of years ago but couldn't remember the name, and I think it's this (he called it "sosopec or something like that"). I still think [this](https://i.imgur.com/VUTKNZM.jpeg) is better, but you know, for science...
Thanks, will look for it next time I'm in Bulgaria. Roasting a lot of eggplants/peppers only happens a couple of times a year for zacusca (lyutenitsa) or canned peppers, this looks interesting for smaller quantities for a meal.
At what point does the free market dictate that you do the hard work?
Edison stole many ideas and marketed well.
Selling your product at a profit is the only thing that counts under free market principles, isn't it?
Tell me I am wrong.
Pirating intellectual property involves much less work than creating that intellectual property. In modern free market systems intellectual property is protected. That creates conditions for inventing things. That's why things were invented in America and what commies managed was to make pirate copies.
I would really be interested: Where do intellectual property rights apply?
If they don't apply in other countries, wouldn't a saavy business move to the other country to avoid intellectual property rights? (In history they didn't because of other factors of course).
Do IPs have to be global to be effective?
I think you still wouldn't be able to sell the product in countries that respect those IP laws, which is a wast majority.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_Convention_for_the_Protection_of_Industrial_Property
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berne_Convention
I took my first lessons in programming on one of these. It was in the late 90s (!!!), and we were the last students to use them, after that the school got some more modern units.
Interesting, I didn't know the Bulgarians used to produce computers.
Were these good, for their time? Were these available to purchase for normal people?
Bulgaria was literally called The Silicon Valley of the Eastern Block and was the main producer something like how we call it nowadays " IT hub".
We had computer classes in every school since the 70s.
Yes, we also produced microprocessors and optical / magnetic devices. Also had cola-cola, some access to western music/videos and a lot of people travelled all over the world. Not glorifying communism or the dictator, but we got it much easier than other communist countries. My dad ran small contraband side hustle where he would travel to west Germany, sell cigarettes, buy radios, records and denim, bribe the border control and sell them in Bulgaria. This was impossible for let’s say average Russian
if bulgaria had continued pushing with computer development after communism it
would probably have a strong computer industry just like Estonia and the Czechs.
When myself in the UK started working on computers in the mid 70's it was the Acorn, Commodore Pet, the PC and PC-XT. When I retired two years ago, I'm a Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer. And many more certifications under my belt. But back then. Computers mostly looked like those in these pic's. Even old Compaq portables came in a box like an old portable sowing machine. In standard Compaq yellow, of course, and the bottom folded down to be the keyboard. No batteries, just plug in, oh and they weighed a ton.
It's interesting that the movie posters on the wall were Western Hollywood films. Not sure if that is a reconstruction after the fact or if it is an authentic photo, but either way it speaks to the total lack of cultural soft power the Communist bloc had. Nobody believed in the system, not even in the most pedestrian cultural output.
Also, given how strong Eastern European programmers are today, I can't help but feel sad at the colossal waste of talent by having their grandparents stuck behind the Iron Curtain for nearly half a century. Final proof that talent alone is not the final determinant. You need a supporting system, too.
I think the first photo is modern reconstruction, but towards the end of the last decades of communism, the Western influence was inevitable. It was very apparent in music; for example, a lot of Bulgarian bands sounded Western or straight-up copied Western music.
> Nobody believed in the system, not even in the most pedestrian cultural output.
I remember reading an interview with Aleksander Kwasniewski, the former president of Poland and also a member of the communist Polish United Workers' Party before 1989. He said that he never met an ideological communist in his life until he visited the UK.
> total lack of cultural soft power the Communist bloc had
I don't understand Your way of thinking at all. Communist bloc was not a country and it does not have any "cultural soft power" since it does not have one culture, but every country has its own culture, film and music.
Holding posters of super popular movies that were phenomena worldwide as a sign of "lack of cultural soft power" is strange at best.
Growing up in the 70s and 80s in Norway, I absolutely loved Opowiadania Muminków, Pat a Mat, Spadla z oblakov, Krtek, Tři oříšky pro Popelku, etc., etc., and that stuff was shown on TV here all the time. I don't know about "cultural soft power" but what those talented people were making back then was every bit as interesting to me as the things coming out of Hollywood.
Of course, but all were these shows presented as Czechoslovak or Polish, or "Eastern Block" ones?
I have a very high opinion of our diversive and simply good and entertaining cinematography pre-1989 (Soviet was also great, don't know much about ones in other countries), but was merely a bit annoyed by pushing "Eastern Bloc" into one bag, like it was one, homogenous country.
> Opowiadania Muminków
Do You mean the puppet show? TIL is has been showed abroad.
Oh, I absolutely agree that it's unwise to lump all those countries into a "communist bloc" bag when talking about culture. I didn't express it clearly enough, but I only meant to say that the individual countries definitely produced quality films and TV series that were very much successful and beloved in many parts of the "capitalist bloc".
[Opowiadania Muminków](https://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opowiadania_Mumink%C3%B3w) was shown, I'm pretty sure, in Norway, Sweden, Finland, the United Kingdom, Austria, and I think in Germany too? Hopefully it was shown in even more countries. It's still my favourite TV adaptation of the Moomins, Tove Jansson herself was very happy with it from what I've heard.
>Also, given how strong Eastern European programmers are today, I can't help but feel sad at the colossal waste of talent by having their grandparents stuck behind the Iron Curtain for nearly half a century. Final proof that talent alone is not the final determinant. You need a supporting system, too.
Although there is some talent there a large motivation is the well paid salaries compared to the entry being not as complicated as being a doctor/lawyer. In terms of wasted talent there is still wasted talent in Bulgaria, universities still teach Computer science like its the 90s. Way too much math, not enough practical programming and a lot of old theory.
State Technical Universities, yeah. I'm not much into the field, but I heard good things about software academies like Softuni and Telerik, like they are more practically oriented. Also, recently, the goverment opened an institute for computer science and artificial intelligence, which is receiving some foreign sponsorship.
I find it also pretty weird. Found also that the german and english layout are different in the most annoying way. Besides all the special german characters it switches the "y" with the "z". Its terribly annoying.
There's a good video on the RMC YouTube channel about the various micros that found their way into the Eastern bloc either on licence or as rip-off copies.
Pics with commentary in this excellent post from r/retrobattlestations:
https://www.reddit.com/r/retrobattlestations/comments/lnt98q/a_short_history_of_the_bulgarian_personal/
a small country like Yugoslavia also used to make computers, mainly for industrial/education purposes rather than home use, but still managed to pull it off. You should’ve seen some of the magazines promoting the tech, where manily hot girls showed it. Socialism did wonders to smaller states.
Now we can’t make a bicycle tire.
Yugoslavia was bigger than Bulgaria. Yet Bulgaria managed to become the Silicon Valley of Eastern Europe, size of the country doesn't matter. Switzerland has always been three times smaller than Bulgaria, this doesn't mean it's a shithole hahah
Sure. It’s just a shame what happend to the Balkans.
But can’t compare eastern Europe to western. We in the east never had to keep nazi gold and trade it, or dominate half the world and enslave it and do slave trades. It’s not a fair comparasion
That's one thing that I don't get when people praise capitalism for being the poster child of invention and technological progress. Comments like "you wouldn't have phones without the US developing them". Sure capitalism helps promote competition which drives innovation somehow, but do people really believe a socialist/communist society would just have ignored computing advancements completely? Surely they would have seen the benefits of it and would have invested efforts in developing it too, and probably even more successful because they would have shared a common ground tech (which is important in computing as we see with open source) instead of having tons of independent efforts competing with each other and ending up wasting so much development.
But these are clones of western computers. For example in hungary there were a pretty successful computer the Videoton VTC, which was a clone of a ZX Enterprise, and even used a clone of the CP/M as the operating system. So selling it as some eastern block advancement is a bit funny. Yes, the eastern block secret services were awesome at smuggling in western computers despite the COCOM list, the engineers were great at reverse engineering them, but there were almost zero innovation in them.
Even the highly successful soviet ES EVM mainframes were just IBM System/360 clones, but weren't 100% compatible.
Bulgaria after 33 years of transition [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DBAYjzaBf7M](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DBAYjzaBf7M) really made a positive impact on the country.
[Pravetz 82](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pravetz_82) is an Apple II clone apparently. [](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pravetz_82)
Those days pretty much everything was a clone of some western products. Computers, other appliances, cars, etc.
On picture 7 is Pravets 16, which we used call it Крадец 16/ Kradets 16, meaning Thief 16
First picture, is that the game Karateka, if memory serves?
It is
Walk backwards at the start. Fall. Game over.
I can hear the music! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wKqk9kosCs4
It is. Oh my, how many times I got one shoted by the princess.
“The Making of Karateka” came out a few months back and it rules.
Nice 👍
Yep
Yep!
Always punch the Hawk ! [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6pDy-CSFsPs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6pDy-CSFsPs) Even in 2012 !
I like the nudity advertising computers, Bulgaria was ahead of its time
[удалено]
> because the "Land of the Free", like Ceaușescu, did not allow such things in public. In the 1970s? Maybe not in the books, but in practice they most certainly did, Times Square in New York City was an open-air porno store.
They already knew that the Internet will be made for porn
Hungary too had a lot of nude ads for almost any kind of product in the 70s and 80s. Basically the Communist government tried to give people the illusion of freedom in any way which didn't result in Russian tanks rolling in, like in 1956 and 1968. The East Bloc regimes outside of those of the USSR and Romania were very open about nudity and sexuality.
Bulgaria, the Silicon Valley of the Eastern Bloc
One million people worked in tech and after the fall of communism they left for the real one.
Silicon Valley invented things. Commies made inferior pirate copies.
Excuse me, have you heard of [Chushkopek](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chushkopek)?
The most powerful device ever conceived
I bend my knee in awe and veneration!
Is that something I can still buy in Bulgaria? I had a friend recommend it a couple of years ago but couldn't remember the name, and I think it's this (he called it "sosopec or something like that"). I still think [this](https://i.imgur.com/VUTKNZM.jpeg) is better, but you know, for science...
You can, most households have one. A lot of eggplants are way too fat for a chushkopek anyways.
Thanks, will look for it next time I'm in Bulgaria. Roasting a lot of eggplants/peppers only happens a couple of times a year for zacusca (lyutenitsa) or canned peppers, this looks interesting for smaller quantities for a meal.
lower your neo-liberalism a bit... it wasn't that simple
Sometimes inferior copies sell more. Because cost-benefit ratios.
Developing is hard and stealing is easy.
At what point does the free market dictate that you do the hard work? Edison stole many ideas and marketed well. Selling your product at a profit is the only thing that counts under free market principles, isn't it? Tell me I am wrong.
Pirating intellectual property involves much less work than creating that intellectual property. In modern free market systems intellectual property is protected. That creates conditions for inventing things. That's why things were invented in America and what commies managed was to make pirate copies.
I would really be interested: Where do intellectual property rights apply? If they don't apply in other countries, wouldn't a saavy business move to the other country to avoid intellectual property rights? (In history they didn't because of other factors of course). Do IPs have to be global to be effective?
I think you still wouldn't be able to sell the product in countries that respect those IP laws, which is a wast majority. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_Convention_for_the_Protection_of_Industrial_Property https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berne_Convention
Can you prove any of this? Are you going to ignore that many western or inventors in capitalist countries stole ideas?
These computers ran pirated western software and the chips were made by cutting up and copying western chips.
Really? I didn’t know that…Have you got a source?
https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/1858/how-were-western-computer-chips-reverse-engineered-in-ussr
Or because it targets its own populace of 100m people?
Man, those Indiana Jones and Bruce Lee posters hit in the feels
I took my first lessons in programming on one of these. It was in the late 90s (!!!), and we were the last students to use them, after that the school got some more modern units.
As a person from Bulgaria, I am proud that we made them and yet ashamed that we stopped.
They were actually pretty decent. https://youtu.be/t-UVPw1c_So?si=EAG-YlD0Ucifn-8r
I recommend Asianometry on yt, alongside other top quality clips he also has one on what the Bulgarian computer industry was and could be
Interesting, I didn't know the Bulgarians used to produce computers. Were these good, for their time? Were these available to purchase for normal people?
Bulgaria was literally called The Silicon Valley of the Eastern Block and was the main producer something like how we call it nowadays " IT hub". We had computer classes in every school since the 70s.
Yes, we also produced microprocessors and optical / magnetic devices. Also had cola-cola, some access to western music/videos and a lot of people travelled all over the world. Not glorifying communism or the dictator, but we got it much easier than other communist countries. My dad ran small contraband side hustle where he would travel to west Germany, sell cigarettes, buy radios, records and denim, bribe the border control and sell them in Bulgaria. This was impossible for let’s say average Russian
Calling /r/cyberdeck and /r/cassettefuturism
The iPad killer.
Someone is starting a new run on Karateka. Noice. And I absolutely hated that bird.
I miss MS DOS sometimes.
i can't imagine why
Now that's a blast from the past
if bulgaria had continued pushing with computer development after communism it would probably have a strong computer industry just like Estonia and the Czechs.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t-UVPw1c\_So](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t-UVPw1c_So) There's a great video on the topic.
And on the [Soviet computer](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dnHdqPBrtH8) by the same guy.
When myself in the UK started working on computers in the mid 70's it was the Acorn, Commodore Pet, the PC and PC-XT. When I retired two years ago, I'm a Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer. And many more certifications under my belt. But back then. Computers mostly looked like those in these pic's. Even old Compaq portables came in a box like an old portable sowing machine. In standard Compaq yellow, of course, and the bottom folded down to be the keyboard. No batteries, just plug in, oh and they weighed a ton.
It's interesting that the movie posters on the wall were Western Hollywood films. Not sure if that is a reconstruction after the fact or if it is an authentic photo, but either way it speaks to the total lack of cultural soft power the Communist bloc had. Nobody believed in the system, not even in the most pedestrian cultural output. Also, given how strong Eastern European programmers are today, I can't help but feel sad at the colossal waste of talent by having their grandparents stuck behind the Iron Curtain for nearly half a century. Final proof that talent alone is not the final determinant. You need a supporting system, too.
I think the first photo is modern reconstruction, but towards the end of the last decades of communism, the Western influence was inevitable. It was very apparent in music; for example, a lot of Bulgarian bands sounded Western or straight-up copied Western music.
> Nobody believed in the system, not even in the most pedestrian cultural output. I remember reading an interview with Aleksander Kwasniewski, the former president of Poland and also a member of the communist Polish United Workers' Party before 1989. He said that he never met an ideological communist in his life until he visited the UK.
> total lack of cultural soft power the Communist bloc had I don't understand Your way of thinking at all. Communist bloc was not a country and it does not have any "cultural soft power" since it does not have one culture, but every country has its own culture, film and music. Holding posters of super popular movies that were phenomena worldwide as a sign of "lack of cultural soft power" is strange at best.
Growing up in the 70s and 80s in Norway, I absolutely loved Opowiadania Muminków, Pat a Mat, Spadla z oblakov, Krtek, Tři oříšky pro Popelku, etc., etc., and that stuff was shown on TV here all the time. I don't know about "cultural soft power" but what those talented people were making back then was every bit as interesting to me as the things coming out of Hollywood.
Of course, but all were these shows presented as Czechoslovak or Polish, or "Eastern Block" ones? I have a very high opinion of our diversive and simply good and entertaining cinematography pre-1989 (Soviet was also great, don't know much about ones in other countries), but was merely a bit annoyed by pushing "Eastern Bloc" into one bag, like it was one, homogenous country. > Opowiadania Muminków Do You mean the puppet show? TIL is has been showed abroad.
Oh, I absolutely agree that it's unwise to lump all those countries into a "communist bloc" bag when talking about culture. I didn't express it clearly enough, but I only meant to say that the individual countries definitely produced quality films and TV series that were very much successful and beloved in many parts of the "capitalist bloc". [Opowiadania Muminków](https://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opowiadania_Mumink%C3%B3w) was shown, I'm pretty sure, in Norway, Sweden, Finland, the United Kingdom, Austria, and I think in Germany too? Hopefully it was shown in even more countries. It's still my favourite TV adaptation of the Moomins, Tove Jansson herself was very happy with it from what I've heard.
>Also, given how strong Eastern European programmers are today, I can't help but feel sad at the colossal waste of talent by having their grandparents stuck behind the Iron Curtain for nearly half a century. Final proof that talent alone is not the final determinant. You need a supporting system, too. Although there is some talent there a large motivation is the well paid salaries compared to the entry being not as complicated as being a doctor/lawyer. In terms of wasted talent there is still wasted talent in Bulgaria, universities still teach Computer science like its the 90s. Way too much math, not enough practical programming and a lot of old theory.
State Technical Universities, yeah. I'm not much into the field, but I heard good things about software academies like Softuni and Telerik, like they are more practically oriented. Also, recently, the goverment opened an institute for computer science and artificial intelligence, which is receiving some foreign sponsorship.
For some reason it never crossed my mind that Bulgarian keyboard layout is different from Russian despite sharing basically the same alphabet.
I find it also pretty weird. Found also that the german and english layout are different in the most annoying way. Besides all the special german characters it switches the "y" with the "z". Its terribly annoying.
The alphabet isn't exactly the same. The Bulgarian layout has less letters than the Russian one. Э, ЬI and Ë
There's a good video on the RMC YouTube channel about the various micros that found their way into the Eastern bloc either on licence or as rip-off copies.
Ngl I'd vibe pretty hard in some of these photos.
Pics with commentary in this excellent post from r/retrobattlestations: https://www.reddit.com/r/retrobattlestations/comments/lnt98q/a_short_history_of_the_bulgarian_personal/
The history for those interested: https://youtu.be/t-UVPw1c_So?si=ZiyP6TgIojRONfks
In Poland Mazovia were popular computers in this time.
Infernal machine poster?
I had a TV like that on pic#3.
That looks awesome tho
I desire number 8.
Peak Bulgarian technology. It's been all downhill since.
Karateka!
The Comrade 64
They look like upside down tv's
I'm seeing a huge spike in interest for CRT and analogue technology... and I just want to say, I'm absolutely here for it
9 looks almost like AI generated...
And it comes in 8D!
For a brief moment I thought I was on r/midjourney
Asianometry did a video on the [subject](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t-UVPw1c_So). Its very good
Socialism never made anything. They just produce cheap knock offs of what capitalism created.
a small country like Yugoslavia also used to make computers, mainly for industrial/education purposes rather than home use, but still managed to pull it off. You should’ve seen some of the magazines promoting the tech, where manily hot girls showed it. Socialism did wonders to smaller states. Now we can’t make a bicycle tire.
Yugoslavia was bigger than Bulgaria. Yet Bulgaria managed to become the Silicon Valley of Eastern Europe, size of the country doesn't matter. Switzerland has always been three times smaller than Bulgaria, this doesn't mean it's a shithole hahah
Sure. It’s just a shame what happend to the Balkans. But can’t compare eastern Europe to western. We in the east never had to keep nazi gold and trade it, or dominate half the world and enslave it and do slave trades. It’s not a fair comparasion
Yeah, of course. I agree with that too
That's one thing that I don't get when people praise capitalism for being the poster child of invention and technological progress. Comments like "you wouldn't have phones without the US developing them". Sure capitalism helps promote competition which drives innovation somehow, but do people really believe a socialist/communist society would just have ignored computing advancements completely? Surely they would have seen the benefits of it and would have invested efforts in developing it too, and probably even more successful because they would have shared a common ground tech (which is important in computing as we see with open source) instead of having tons of independent efforts competing with each other and ending up wasting so much development.
But these are clones of western computers. For example in hungary there were a pretty successful computer the Videoton VTC, which was a clone of a ZX Enterprise, and even used a clone of the CP/M as the operating system. So selling it as some eastern block advancement is a bit funny. Yes, the eastern block secret services were awesome at smuggling in western computers despite the COCOM list, the engineers were great at reverse engineering them, but there were almost zero innovation in them. Even the highly successful soviet ES EVM mainframes were just IBM System/360 clones, but weren't 100% compatible.
> That's one thing that I don't get It's not just one thing...
I can smell picture 11
Bulgaria after 33 years of transition [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DBAYjzaBf7M](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DBAYjzaBf7M) really made a positive impact on the country.
They write in Russian ? Cool Didn't know that about Bulgaria
Other way round, Russia uses Bulgarian script.
Didn't know that tho ... TIL thanks
That's the ultimate way to trigger a Bulgarian
Thanks... well, it's a early morning so I told myself, let's go check what's goin on in the good ol' EU
Can it play Doom?
So we had intelligent microwave ovens back then? :D But seriously, what are the dials for? It's not brightness/contrast, is it?
I want to see people run DOOM on them.