Straight from the CCCP: the Robotron 1715
You know, the USSR gets a lot of bad press in the Western world, what with its gulag archipelagos and the ruthless oppression of half of Europe and Asia for over half a century. Granted, that all seems pretty bad, but now look at this, the pride and joy of East German Computing circa 1984: The Robotron 1715, a "Worker's PC" based around a Zilog Z80 clone processor running at 2.5Mhz.
Retro Thing explains:
It ran what seems to have been an iron curtain variant of the CP/M OS popular in the west until it was obliterated by the MS-DOS juggernaut in the mid 1980s. The display offered 16x24 or 28x80 green text, and I'm willing to bet it had no graphic or sound capabilities. The machine was initially offered with 64 KB RAM, which was later upgraded to 256 KB.
Now consider: in an alternate history where the Soviet Union stamped unimpeded through Western Europe, we all would be using computers like this. There would be no LOLCats or Rick Rolling. Instead, we would all unite in Marxist harmony, exerting our treasured, state-distributed Robotrons in pursuit of Comrade Pajitnov's Great Five Year Plan 2.0. Isn't a lifetime of Soviet oppression worth living in a society where computers are named after one of the most bitching video games of all time? Added perk: all the Victory Gin you can drink!
Robotron 1715 [Made in the GTR]
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Hey it looks like my old Packard Bell! Probably a lot faster and more features though.
Actually, that thing had awesome games on it.
There was the three cups game, a racing game, one with a plane... no Tetris though.
Yeah, imagine an alternate reality wherein all our computers would be built in a communist country!
LOL, that would be sooo weird! Soo completely different from this one, where everything's labelled "MADE IN THE PEOPLE'S REPUBLIC OF CHINA".
Reality ... it's very often stranger than fiction.
Okay, so I do remember when the saying "Your papers, Comrade" was our way here in the good old US of A to make fun of the communist control of their populace...
Now we are going to have to have a Federal drivers license ("Papers") and the Ruskies can go wherever they please, unencumbered with the very paperwork that we railed for so long to rid them of...
Yes, you voted them in - TWICE - so you have gotten just what you wanted, Happy now???
/ Duh!
// Sheeple
Better that than this...
Okay, so I do remember when the saying "Your papers, Comrade" was our way here in the good old US of A to make fun of the communist control of their populace...
Now we are going to have to have a Federal drivers license ("Papers") and the Ruskies can go wherever they please, unencumbered with the very paperwork that we railed for so long to rid them of...
Yes, you voted them in - TWICE - so you have gotten just what you wanted, Happy now???
/ Duh!
// Sheeple
I know, "Straight from the CCCP" sounds way catchier, but as you write, Robotron was actually a company - actually a "Kombinat" - from East Germany with headquarters in Dresden. So why do you still claim it is from the Soviet Union?
reminds me of the old joke about the CCCP marketing committee trying to figure out why their computers wouldn't sell.
one comrade has an epiphany, deciding their slogans just weren't catchy enough, says, "EUREKA, I'VE GOT IT!!! Soviet microchips - the world's largest!!!"
Things weren't much better here, actually. Doesn't look all that different from early IBM PC's, really. As for the green screen, they were still widely in use in college labs across the US at the time.
Google "1983 personal computer" and see the beauty.
The US University I attended in those times (10,000 students) gave me 25K of disk storage - on their mainframe - for my thesis. Grudgingly upgraded to 50K. They had no decent printer (apart from golfball teletypes) to print it on. (There was a Diablo 6xx golfball with broken linespacing in a 3rd floor hallway.) Pioneering times, those.