Allan@sri-unix (06/25/82)
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
-------pdh@sri-unix (06/25/82)
Think not just of Radio Shack when you talk about what technology the Soviets can make or obtain. Right now, today, ANYONE can go out and buy, say, a SUN Workstation and a disk, which would give the user lots of power (68000 10MHz), very high level graphics (1K x 1K, and FAST), network capability (3Mbit ether), and all of this in a very portable box! I'll wager that about 10 or 15 of these toy, all linking and talking on their network, could do justice to 95% of the applications on a shuttle. All it would take is a little beefing up of the durability of the system and (her's the catch) the right software, and poof... all the power you could ask for for about $300K.... Granted, it's probably more than a notion to get 15 SUN stations out of the country, but you can bet that it's possible, if difficult. Again, as I said in an earlier message, though, it's the software in this case that counts... Peter