From: utzoo!decvax!cca!Allan@sri-unix
Newsgroups: net.space
Title: Radio Shack 8080's escaping in Soviet diplomatic pouches...
Article-I.D.: sri-unix.1876
Posted: Thu Jun 24 17:46:47 1982
Received: Mon Jun 28 01:44:02 1982

It's interesting that a group of people ostensibly informed about
computer technology should spend so much time discussing locking the
barn door after the horse has escaped.

The Soviets have had substantial IC production capability for many
years.  In 1979 CDC, in supplying information in support of an export
licence application (to sell machines to the USSR) revealed that they
had done a "strip job" on Soviet electronic equipment obtained in
Eastern Europe. 

There were several "reverse-engineered" IC's found; the CDC experts
paid careful attention to soviet-manufactured 8080s and 16K dynamic
RAMs.  The DRAM seemed to have been a copy made by a photographic
process {generating masks from photographs of carefully scraped
layers}.  The 8080 was a new design -- it had an 8085-type bus, but
an 8080 type clock generator {i.e. no clock generator}.

I believe it is the case that 8085s have been in production in CHINA
since 1981.

There is every reason to believe that anything you can buy in Radio
Shack, the Soviets can make.

Of course, possibly due to their notoriously inefficient central
planning, they lack the infrastructure to do so CHEAPLY.  This is
slightly less important for military applications.

There is absolutely no reason to believe that theoretical computer
science is similiarly backward.  However, it's a good bet that their
trained manpower is miniscule compared to the U.S., computers are more
like rarities there.

I hope to find a reference to that CDC study within a few days; in the
meantime:
	"Database Management Systems Development in the USSR"
		- A.G. Dale; ACM Computing Surveys V11#3 9/79
	"The Soviet Bloc's Unified System of Computers"
		- N.C. Davis, S.E. Goodman; ACM Computing Surv. V10#2 6/78
	"Computing in China 1980"
		- H.D. Huskey; IEEE Computer V14#10 10/81

-Allan
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