History of computer hardware in Eastern Bloc countries

The history of computing hardware in the Eastern Bloc is somewhat different from that of the Western world. As a result of the CoCom embargo, computers could not be imported on a large scale from Western Bloc.

Eastern Bloc manufacturers created copies of Western designs based on intelligence gathering and reverse engineering.^[1] This redevelopment led to some incompatibilities with International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) and IEEE standards, such as spacing integrated circuit pins at 1⁄10 of a 25 mm length (colloquially a "metric inch") instead of a standard inch of 25.4 mm.^[2] This made Soviet chips unsellable on the world market outside the Comecon, and made test machinery more expensive.^[3]

^ "Home Computers Behind The Iron Curtain". Hackaday. 15 December 2014. Archived from the original on 8 November 2017. Retrieved 7 November 2017.
^ Deza, Michel (28 May 2009), Encyclopedia of Distances, Google eBooks, p. 497, ISBN 9783642002342, archived from the original on 2017-11-04
^ Fred Langa, "An Editor's View" sidebar to "Computing in the U.S.S.R.", April 1991 BYTE Magazine, page 129

[hackaday-1] "Home Computers Behind The Iron Curtain". Hackaday. 15 December 2014. Archived from the original on 8 November 2017. Retrieved 7 November 2017.

[Deza2009-2] Deza, Michel (28 May 2009), Encyclopedia of Distances, Google eBooks, p. 497, ISBN 9783642002342, archived from the original on 2017-11-04

[3] Fred Langa, "An Editor's View" sidebar to "Computing in the U.S.S.R.", April 1991 BYTE Magazine, page 129

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