I even know one guy who worked at computer reverse engineering institute back then. Also I have found memoirs of some random guy who worked as IT specialist for Stb (Czech equivalent of Stasi).
However, this article is really good introduction to Blugarian sci-fi which I didn't known before (unlike Polish and Soviet).
That's on top of a population of just under 9 million and a working age population of 6 million [1], so 5% of the workforce was involved in the production of computer hardware alone.
It seems there was a very large bet on the computer industry from the communist party. Jumping around wikipedia [2] it also seems that pretty much all the computers were clones of western computers and several years behind the west in terms of technology.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_computer_hardware_i...
[1] https://www.populationpyramid.net/bulgaria/1985/
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_computer_hardware_i...
It's a shame as MSU was working on some really interesting stuff including the weird Setun ternary computer.
My father bought me Pravetz 8C (An Apple ][ /e, or was it /c) clone with 128KB RAM! (pr#8 hi-res mode) + floppy. It was more expensive than buying a good russian car back then, and I'm thankful for what he did for me!
We had few magazines, books to learn from, and were typing like crazy hex codes to get TETRIS, or someother game on.
For a long time, I thought it was the "Merchant" that made Karateka, only later to understand that was one of the earliest cracking groups (some of them later turned into demo groups), and that's how we got most of the software in.
Years before communism fell, our biggest hard-drive maker, started making their "own" games - which were complete rip offs of other western games, and "cyrilized" to the bone (like "Karateka" again).
Another friend of mine's mom was working in a company, back then durign communism and all they did was byte-code replace english into russian in lots of DOS apps - like PC Tools. Hence the weird abbreviation, as often russian would not fit. Really, it was direct hex-editing!
All, in all, I'm somehow thankful to the regime (ahem...) for giving me "free" of a lot, here in the US, is paid. Especially the programming clubs, courses, etc. Obviously that whole scheme did not scale :) but it was good times (while I was kid).
"Reagan - enemy number one of the Tutrakan village system!"
- http://project.cyberpunk.ru/idb/cyberpunk_manifesto.html
- https://www.amazon.com/Chemical-Illusions-Anthology-Cyberpun...
It's so old, it was not even easy to verify it's still up there.
The bit about the experts seems downright allegorical for the suppression of "bourgeois pseudoscience" like cybernetics itself before they could rationalize it in the prevailing dogma for the party.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cybernetics_in_the_Soviet_Un...
