Doug and the Zuses (was:Re: KEITH, WE HARDLY KNEW YOU w

From: Hans Franke <franke_at_sbs.de>
Date: Wed Oct 28 14:06:26 1998

>> Oh, did they pull of the DDR 1 Meg chip from display ?
>> I belive this is the most funny Display _and_ a thing
>> to think about with its implications.

> They still had that display, but I don't remember falling over due to its
> implications. Maybe the sign was in (East) German. What did I miss? (A
> museum of eastern european technology would be pretty cool.)

I might be proved wrong, but I belive this chip had
a vital role to turn down the wall. In 1985 the Eastern
German government decided that they had to pull up with
a 1 Meg chip to show that their system is able to do
all the same fine things than the west, all of us might
temember that the 1 Meg thing was kind of journalists
pussy when talking about the future back then. They
already cloned the 80286.

For the next years they poured all resources within
electronic and process development into this project.
It was almost like the idea of building a a PDP-8
from scratch that has been around :) Of course, they
already had a technology to produce 64k and prototype
256k, but without any help from outside it's kind of
uncomfortable.

Short before the wall came down, they finished, but
at what cost: the whole development was sucked up
into this single project - anything els was almost
like stopped even production of actual components
suffered.

So this project added a lot to the economoc problems
witch eventualy lead to the end of their system

You know - people without video games and home
computers tend to think about dangerous things (<g>).

I'm not telling that this development has been
the mayor reason, but it added stress to an already
stressed system.

Gruss
Hans

P.S.: There are only parts of the Z23 on display
      in Bonn - basicly only the drumm and drumm
      controll (AFAIR)

--
Ich denke, also bin ich, also gut
HRK
Received on Wed Oct 28 1998 - 14:06:26 GMT

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