Unix in East Germany (GDR) (1990)

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.

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.

> "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]

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!

I want some of those unbreakable beer glasses from the GDR

Is the load balancing algorithm equitable?

> 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?

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.

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.