alt.hn

5/29/2026 at 3:21:42 PM

Unix in East Germany (GDR) (1990)

 https://groups.google.com/g/comp.unix.wizards/c/QX_dxElrVNs

by downbad_

6/1/2026 at 12:45:05 AM

I visited a university supercomputer centre in Berlin that had been a merger of East and West Berlin facilities in about 1999. In the lobby they had a PDP-11 right next to the Eastern Bloc clone with its Cyrillic writing.

I probably have some old school photos somewhere.

by shermozle

6/1/2026 at 11:24:52 AM

That sounds a lot like the building at Takustraße 9, which is the main building of the computer science department of Freie Universität Berlin. When I studied there from 2011 to 2019 the both PDPs were still standing in front of the lecture hall. The Zuse Institut Berlin, which hosts a high performance computer is next door from it.

by grundrausch3n

6/1/2026 at 11:25:54 AM

> In the lobby they had a PDP-11 right next to the Eastern Bloc clone with its Cyrillic writing.

Those are still standing in the lobby of the Computer Science Department of FU Berlin (Takustraße 9)

You are probably referring to Zuse Institute Berlin which is the building right next to it.

by pantalaimon

6/1/2026 at 2:59:26 AM

https://cpu-collection.de/?l0=co&l1=Eastern%20Bloc&l2=DEC%20...

quote:

There were several PDP-11 clones made in Zelenograd near Moscow. Both multi-chip and, later, single chip versions.

Most quantities were 1801VM1 and 1801VM2. Second was much faster (over 10 MHz clock frequency). Both did not have extended addressing and were limited to 64k bytes address space. Later 1801VM3 appeared, containing 22 address extension much like PDP-11/70, but slightly different so original DEC programs could work with only 18 bit (256 kbyte).

These three CPU were not copy of any real chip from DEC. But there was another 5 chip CPU clone of DEC Professional 350. This model was cloned incredibly close, and called "Electronica 85".

by fsckboy

6/1/2026 at 10:50:06 AM

The single chip ones were not originally supposed to be PDP-11 compatible - but there was a push to use PDP-11 ISA and Unibus/Qbus in that specific segment, so they reworked the microcode to implement PDP-11 instructions with minimal changes to the chip itself.

by p_l

5/29/2026 at 7:47:52 PM

Flea markets in East Germany even now are fascinating for classic tech, classic tech books, and many other things. Even as simple as going to one at Mauerpark or the Karlshorst race track, you will see working examples of classic DDR tech that you can buy and explore. Just like people explore classic macs, it's as interesting to see.

by ktallett

6/1/2026 at 5:56:57 AM

Getting William Gibson flashbacks.

by celsius1414

6/1/2026 at 12:46:27 AM

Sounds like a dream. Maybe I'll go someday. Eastern bloc tech is unendingly fascinating to me. I think it's genuinely impressive what they accomplished with the US actively sabotaging their access to information and hardware. And even then, they largely copied Western interfaces. I suspect this was partly to facilitate cloned hardware, but i do also suspect they wanted their systems to be approachable by engineers from around the world, too, so diverging too much would have been detrimental.

by queenkjuul

6/1/2026 at 9:12:58 AM

You’ll also find a lot of this stuff at flea markets further east and south, maybe even more so than Berlin.

I visited Odessa in Ukraine circa 2019 and saw all kinds of interesting computing devices and cameras.

by keiferski

6/1/2026 at 9:57:16 AM

> but i do also suspect they wanted their systems to be approachable by engineers from around the world

It was more about saving resources on software development. East German standard software was usually pirated copies of western standard software with the copyright strings patched to something else. Creating an entirely different evolutionary branch for hardware and software instead of copying doesn't make economic sense, especially when the goal is to catch up.

by flohofwoe

6/1/2026 at 6:24:56 PM

> with the US actively sabotaging their access to information and hardware

More like they didn't see the need and didn't invest in early computing and so lagged behind. Something the US very nearly almost did as post-war a lot of people didn't see the point. Software engineers (though they weren't called that) were seen as unimportant secretaries who just typed letters into the computer. Grace Hopper's Navy computing unit famously had to raid other offices at night for resources.

> I suspect this was partly to facilitate cloned hardware, but i do also suspect they wanted their systems to be approachable by engineers from around the world, too, so diverging too much would have been detrimental.

Computing advanced so quickly it showed the Soviet-style communist system for the lumbering boondoggle it was. By the time the central committee deigned to allocate resources for computing they were a generation behind and that only got worse. They stole western design and software because they didn't have the economic leeway to do it themselves.

You need to remember: by the 60s/70s the western economies were taking off in says Warsaw countries were never able to match. They simply did less and did it less efficiently across almost all sectors of the economy. No one had to cheat them or restrict them. They shot themselves in the foot repeatedly.

There were no startups. You had to petition the central government for permission to build more computers. They would assign you a quota. You built that many computers. In the mean time 12 new startups were founded in the US and two of them came up with new chip designs and shipped them to customers. Doesn't take a genius to understand why the soviet sphere was a compete non-entity in computing.

by xenadu02

6/1/2026 at 7:02:22 AM

I think you are spot on. Due to the inability to buy parts from the world over, you had to repair any personal machines you had whether it be computers to cars, therefore access and knowledge was essential. A replica of that ethos today would be MNT Research.

by ktallett

6/1/2026 at 8:06:31 AM

8 hour train journey, oh well, shut up and take my money...

by ErroneousBosh

6/1/2026 at 8:20:38 AM

> "The Flop.

MUTOS 1835 was a UNIX port which we did under contract for an AT-compatible from Robotron. Since this machine was never produced, the whole thing must be seen as a flop."

Yeah, just about 20 EC 1835s were built (the "C" is the Russian "S"; they're ESER (ES EVM) machines, after all). But then again, there's MUTOS 1700 (for A 7100 and A 7150) and MUTOS 1834 (for EC 1834)... along with CP/M, CP/M-86 and DOS, of course. The 32-bit (386) follow-up to the 1835 was planned for 1993/94. Well, history had other plans. I remember my first programming lessons in my school's computer lab in 1991... on Amstrad 386DX/20 machines.

1. ES EVM (EN) [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ES_EVM]

2. ESER/ES EVM (DE) [https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einheitliches_System_Elektroni...]

3. ES EVM (RU) [https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/ЕС_ЭВМ]

4. A 7100 (DE) [https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_7100]

5. A 7100 @ "Starring the Computer" [https://starringthecomputer.com/computer.html?c=630]

6. A 7150 (DE) [https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_7150]

7. EC 1834 (DE) [https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/EC_1834]

8. EC 1834 (EN) [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EC_1834]

9. EC 1835 (DE) [https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/EC_1835]

by spankibalt

6/1/2026 at 8:02:31 PM

Humboldt University Berlin had officially licensed a UNIX System III as a research institute. They run it on a K1600 series Robotron system, which was a PDP-11 clone. I had a few sessions on it ca. 1985 as a 16-year old kid as a member of the Mathematical Student Society of Humboldt University.

I remember being challenged to learn about the file system. All I was told was, use the man command. I knew CP/M, or better the East-German clone SCP, but that OS didn't know directories. I had to learn the concept from the man pages. There were no UNIX books in libraries or book stores. But it was fun, I managed to write a simple compression program doing run-length encoding on that system.

by kune

6/1/2026 at 1:18:28 AM

I want some of those unbreakable beer glasses from the GDR

by t1234s

6/1/2026 at 12:50:36 PM

The brand you're looking for is "Superfest". It would be nice if Corning made unbreakable glasses, since they were essentially made of a precursor to gorilla glass

by voidUpdate

6/1/2026 at 6:58:32 AM

There is a company that still makes them.

by dopesoap

6/1/2026 at 6:46:49 AM

This kind of article reminds me of about 20 or 15 years ago. Maybe at the early days of Wikipedia.

There was so much exploring to do, and sites weren't filled with AI slop either.

You'd easily go ... "Ah, lookie here, this is interesting.. Unix usage in East Germany".. after 4-5 hours you'd still be reading, maybe about Elektronika (PDP-11 compatible clonest in old Soviet), etc.

Fun times!

by sgt

6/1/2026 at 3:23:54 AM

> And here are we by our current problem: What are our directions for our research? Formerly, we were behind double walls -- one we built ourselves and the second by the West (eg. COCOM) -- but even this is crumbling. Our catching-up of the last years came from a sense of emergency, and we learnt our trade through it. Now we need security for our future research which will give us the freedom to purchase new hard- and software, participate in international conferences, connect to networks and update our literature.

> Whether this comes through cooperative projects with other institutions, through industrial research or however, is almos irrelevant to us -- we want, as far as possible, to determine our own future and not wait until it comes to us from `above'.

What happened next?

by mmooss

6/1/2026 at 1:52:14 PM

Is the load balancing algorithm equitable?

by christkv

6/1/2026 at 6:32:09 AM

Any idea whether we can still find its source code? It would be nice to be able to run it today, as we do with other historic Unix flavors.

by pelasaco

6/1/2026 at 10:00:54 AM

The best place to ask is probably https://www.robotrontechnik.de/, it's all in German, but this is where the veterans and hobbyists are lurking.

by flohofwoe

6/1/2026 at 8:22:28 AM

My mother once told me as she worked as a secretary in Communist Poland, she had access to MS DOS. I cant take her word as granted as she is not so technically literat but sometimes you see the spread of computers into the second world.

by snowpid

6/1/2026 at 9:28:06 AM

My grandfather-in-law still tells stories how he smuggled C64s into the GDR

by plastic-enjoyer

6/1/2026 at 10:07:01 AM

You didn't need to 'smuggle' them, just let your western relatives bring them over the border, which was entirely legal (sending via postal service would have worked too, but I wouldn't have risked that tbh because all parcels from West into East were opened and sometimes content "mysteriously" disappeared).

The C64 wasn't affected by the COCOM embargo, so 'export' was legal from West Germany, and import into East Germany anyway. East German citizens who had access to D-Mark (again: western relatives were the key here) could also simply walk into an 'Intershop' and buy a Commodore or Atari 8-bitter. Finally there was also the so-called GENEX catalogue, which was a delivery service run by East Germany where West German citizens could directly buy both Eastern and Western products for hard currency and had them directly delivered to their East German relatives (including C64s):

https://www.spiegel.de/geschichte/genex-kataloge-der-sonderb...

16-bit computers were affected by the western COCOM embargo though. It was technically illegal to export a PC or even an Amiga from West Germany into East Germany. So if you wanted to bring an Amiga over the border that would technically be smuggling - in the sense of smuggling them out of West Germany, since that was the illegal part - I bet nobody gave a shit though since quite a few Amigas found their way into East Germany, they were just prohibitively expensive on the 'private market' (around 20..30k (East-) Mark, which was the equivalent of a higher end car - like a Lada 1500 - or about 3..4 years of a typical wage).

by flohofwoe