Looks Mondo 2000 ish.
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It’s a title to get people interested and sell books, sure. But the guy (he’s a journalist) writes for a living, so I find it hard to fault him for that.
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Truth.
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As a non-aligned country, they probably got most of their tech from the US or Britain, rather than the Soviet Union.
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ICL actually sold computers in Prague and, in an alternative reality where I passed the interview, I might have been out there in the 1970s. I remember being told about a British businessman who travelled frequently to Moscow on business, and had one of those really big Russian multiband transistor radios.
The large circuit board had been replaced by a much smaller Japanese one squeezed into the corner of a double sided board covered in integrated circuits. Going to Russia the board was full of Western microprocessors; going back, it was full of dummies. At the time a military CPU was around the $1000 mark, $4000 or so at today’s prices, so ten of them made for quite a profitable little trip given what the Russians would allow him as a markup.
And then there were the two AMD execs who lost out in some kind of internal turf war and defected to East Germany, where they set up an x86 production line in, I think, Dresden.
Soviet electronics were distinctly not consumer oriented and production quality wasn’t very high. It was said that the engineers working on a number of military products would select the transistors that were good enough from each batch, and then reserve the very best ones for their home hi-fi experiments. So long as the local Party bosses/KGB reps got a nice set of new amplifiers from time to time, everybody was happy.
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It was always Rule 34 time. I remember in the '90s any major Italian magazine, including the most serious ones (Panorama, Espresso, Epoca etc, the local equivalents of Time), featured barely-dressed women on the cover every other week, with one excuse or another. It took some serious political effort to rein them in.
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Or Prince of Persia. Y’know, it’s a trap.
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Is the political effort to rein them in a veiled allusion to the efforts to get rid of Berlusconi?
Mind you, it was the 1990s when even serious German magazines had covers with women wearing no clothes at all.
Ha, no, not at all. It was just the culture at the time. At some point someone (likely on the left) raised some sort of stink about it and the various publications somehow toned it down (sexualized advertising is one of the few topics where Vatican and progressive sensibilities do occasionally align; and “you don’t want to make the Holy Father sad”, as they say in Rome).
To this day, Italian mores are still profoundly sexist in ways that the American or British public would find quite obscene, in particularly on TV.
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That is pretty impressive. Imagine where we might be now if Steve had lived on and applied those ideas to big data, etc.
1949 Indian Arrow. The 'pocket computer" is a ZX Spectrum. 8D
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It’s an Indian.
I can remember my horror when I first saw a weather “girl” on a French TV news program who would wear white t-shirts with no bras. On television. On a real news program.
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Ségolene Royal being photographed on a beach in a bikini. British reaction: Serious politicians don’t do that. French reaction: Et alors?
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So it is. Well spotted.
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