Transcription

Today, I'm finally doing it. The video you guys have all been waiting for. Bulgarian computers. No, really. In 1989, little Bulgaria alone exported more computers than all the other countries in the Eastern Bloc put together. And Bulgaria was the only country in all of the Comic Con countries making hard drive disk memories. Bulgaria's electronics industry was an export force to be reckoned with. Over 11% of all Bulgarian workers were employed in the production of computers and electronics. And they produced some of the first electronic calculators and personal computers in the world. Many became iconic brands in Southeastern Europe. Bulgaria wanted to be like Japan. I think they got pretty close. In this video, we're going to take a look at the unlikely rise and fall of the Bulgarian computer industry. But first, let me talk about the Asianometry Patreon. Early access members get to see new videos and selected references for those videos first. Early access helps a lot and I appreciate every pledge. Thanks and on with the show. This might be the first time I have ever mentioned the country of Bulgaria. Bulgaria is a middle-sized country in Southeastern Europe bordering Romania, Serbia, and Turkey. Area-wise, it is about the same size as the American state of Tennessee and today about 6.9 million people live there. Bulgaria as we know it today, the third Bulgarian state, was established in 1878. As is so often the case in the world, Bulgaria started out in this time as a relatively poor, largely agricultural economy. During WWII, Bulgaria chose to fight on the side of the Axis. They chose poorly. The Soviet Union marched into Bulgaria. And the Bulgarian Communist Party then overthrew the Tsarist government, abolished the monarchy, and established the People's Republic of Bulgaria. The party worked to rebuild the damage caused by WWII, modeling their economic policies after the Soviet Union's. The Soviets helped out by offering loans and raw materials, and also by buying Bulgarian finished goods at generous terms. After Stalin's death in 1953, Todor Zhivkov assumed leadership of the Bulgarian Communist Party, ruling it for 35 years. His relatively moderate rule gave the People's Republic of Bulgaria unprecedented political and economic stability until its end in 1989. The Bulgarian Communist Party's economic policy focused on producing machinery and tools for heavy industry like mining, energy, and metallurgy. Zhivkov had long admired the Japanese economy and wanted his country's economy to follow its path of development. To him, Japan's top two industries were heavy industry and electronics. In his memoirs, he wrote, "...that's what I've been dreaming about for years. Those who have interacted with me know that electronics was my weakness. I saw it as our future." In the 1950s, Bulgarian scientists began studying the major tendencies of Soviet cybernetics and the computer's economic potential. The Soviet Union and other countries then started building their own computers. The Soviet MESUM computer first fired up in 1951. East Germany's ZRA-1, built by the GDR's Carl Zeiss company, completed their build a few years after that at the end of 1956. Similar first-generation computers were being built in Czechoslovakia and Romania, completed in 1957, Hungary's in 1958, and Poland's in 1959. Where was Bulgaria's computer? Catch-up efforts were complicated by the West's export restrictions. The Coordinating Committee for Multilateral Export Controls, or COCOM. Instituted in 1950, COCOM prevented Bulgaria and other allies of the Soviet Union from purchasing high-technology tools that could have helped along its industrialization. In 1956, a Bulgarian professor and mathematician named Lyubomir Ilyaev participated in a conference in Moscow. The conference, titled The Path of Development of Soviet Mathematical Engineering, discussed the mathematical foundations of computing, technology, cybernetics, and mathematical modeling. The Soviet delegation to the talk recommended that all the socialist countries establish computing centers of their own. They noted that some countries, like the GDR and Czechoslovakia, were not only receiving equipment from the Soviet Union, but also building their own. Professor Ilyaev brought this message back to his employer, the Mathematical Institute within the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences. The government received the message well and over the next two years worked to raise funds and recruit staff. In 1961, the Council of Ministers approved the creation of a new computing center within the institute as well as a new name, the Mathematical Institute with Computing Institute. At the start of 1962, Professor Ilyaev's team of students began work on the Vitosha, Bulgaria's first digital computer. Completed in 1963, Vitosha was modeled after one of Romania's CIFA computers. It was about 4 meters long and 2 meters tall. It had about 1,500 vacuum tubes and a magnetic drum memory capable of storing about 4,096 words. Each word being 40 bits long. During operations, it consumed about 12 kilowatts of power or about the same as 15 small microwave machines. You fed in data and programs using a tape punch. And after processing the data at about 2,000 operations per second, the results were output using an electrical typewriter at about 15 characters per second. Upon its completion, Vitosha was demonstrated at an international exhibition in Moscow called Bulgaria Builds Socialism. There, it solved math equations, presented graphical information, and spelled out messages. Sadly, Vitosha no longer exists. After it returned to Bulgaria, a burst hot water pipe in the room above it leaked water onto the computer, corroding it and ruining its parts. The machine was later taken apart for scrap. Nevertheless, Vitosha was the talk of the show and spurred more political support for additional work in Bulgaria in the computer fields. At the Moscow exhibition, the Bulgarian government agreed to import a computer from the Soviet Union to use. A Minsk-2. Professor Ilyov did not approve of this, believing that Bulgaria should use its own domestically produced computers. The team at the Computing Institute thought about producing an even larger Vitosha-style computer with 10,000 vacuum tubes. But as Ilyov feared, the arrival of the Minsk-2 in 1964 dissuaded this path. At the same time, the chairmen of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences and Mechanical Engineering Committee write a report pointing to electronics as a profitable export industry for Bulgaria. They note that electronics production uses a lot of labor, especially female labor, which is cheaper than male labor, but relatively few raw metals. Furthermore, they can also be sold for a very good return. The Council of Ministers agrees and allocates people, labor, and even capitalist currencies to acquire what it needs for an industry. Professor Ivan Popov, chairman of Bulgaria's State Committee for Science and Technical Progress, or DKNTP, leads it. Professor Popov is generally seen as the founder and main driving force of Bulgaria's computer industry. He's a fascinating character. He grew up outside of Bulgaria in France, Germany, and Hungary. Yet he remained a hardcore patriot, believing that his country's future depended on a modern economy built on top of modern technologies. Popov was a natural entrepreneur. In a different time or place, he probably would have founded a company and not been a politician. He had a blunt, direct manner that did not always suit towards politics. But he had a vision for Bulgaria. And here's what I mean. In late autumn 1964, Ivan Popov goes to Professor Ilyaev and the Mathematics Institute with a Sumlok Anita calculator, the world's first all-electronic calculator. He tells them to produce one of their own. A small team of three people opens up the Anita sample. Inside, they find a bunch of vacuum tubes, including a special gas-filled tube called a Dekatron. Dekatron tubes were not available in the Soviet bloc, which was unfortunate. But some of the team members were familiar with transistors, so they re-engineered a design to use those instead of the tubes. A brilliant choice. Thus, we have the Elka 6521. Elka is short for the Bulgarian phrase for electronic calculator, and they also liked its femalish name. Elka weighs about 8.5 kilograms, uses germanium transistors, and can do square root calculations, integer division, averaging, and so on. It was one of the first transistorized all-electronic desktop calculators of its age. Other products like it include the American Friden EC-130, the Italian IME-84, and the Japanese Sharp CS-10A. In April 1965, the Elka 6521 was demonstrated in front of Zhukov and the whole Politburo. With their approval, the not-so-little calculator went abroad to Moscow the next month to be exhibited at the Inforga 65 show. There, Ivan Popov, who is fluent in French, German, Hungarian, and Russian, was ready to do business. Popov brings the Elka 6521 to the Soviet Union's State Planning Committee, or GOSPLAN. Claiming that Bulgarian scientists had made a calculator breakthrough and that large-scale factories had already been set up, he asked for a five-year high-volume sales contract from the Soviet GOSPLAN. Popov was bluffing. The government had indeed set up a plant in the city of Sofia to produce Elka calculators, but the electronics plant, as it was called, was not ready. The Russians did not end up buying the Elka 6521, though a few others did. In the next year, 1966, the team simplified the original 6521 design to make it smaller and cheaper, the Elka-22. They also produced a model with a printer called the Elka-25, likely the first such thing ever made. Popov again took the new Elka models to GOSPLAN. He asks for a price of 1,200 rubles per Elka. GOSPLAN replies that East Germany had offered their own calculator at a price of 730 rubles. Ivan agrees to cut his asking price to 700 rubles and they win the deal. East Germany later drops out of the electronic calculator business entirely. In 1967, Bulgaria established a new industrial conglomerate to develop and produce calculating machines, DSO Izot. From 1967 to 1984, Izot would generate export revenues of over 11 billion leva roughly 10 million USD in 1967 dollars as well as profits of 6.4 billion leva. Exports were sent not only to the Soviet Union but also outside the bloc to Switzerland and Italy. Notably, an Elka-42 calculator using integrated circuits would be displayed with much fanfare at the Osaka World Expo in 1970 as the first IC-based electronic calculator. A few years later, Elka branched out into cash registers. These systems were also powered by integrated circuits and thousands were exported to Switzerland. As the novelty of the Elka-42 implies, one of the reasons Bulgaria so rapidly caught up so fast had to do with its semiconductor capacity. At the same time of Izot's founding, the Bulgarian government set up the Institute of Microelectronics. It had a design house in the capital of Sofia and a production fab in the nearby town of Botovgrad. The Institute was led by the famous physicist Yordan Kasabov, a Bulgarian microelectronics pioneer who had in the prior year produced the country's first domestic MOS transistors. Professor Kasabov and his team rapidly accelerated Bulgaria's semiconductor capacity. He not only designed the IC for the Elka-42, he helped manufacture them too using modern processes like photolithography, wet etch, deposition, ion implantation, and even plasma etch. Sometime in 1972 or 1973, it's not exactly clear when, Kasabov and Lyubomir Antonov visit Silicon Valley in California. There, they experience the semiconductor industry's incredibly rapid growth. They saw a highly integrated 4-bit IC advertised in an AMD sales brochure or datasheet oddly named Bourbon. I couldn't dig up an AMD chip with that name, but considering the year, it was probably the AMD AM9300, their first product or near it. Anyway, they grasp that these ICs were powerful and flexible enough to build calculators and other devices on top of. They resolve to try and make something similar. Upon returning, they produce a series of microprocessors like the CM400, which enabled the creation of increasingly better performing 4-chip calculators like the Elka-50. In 1969, the Soviet bloc of countries got together and decided to produce a computer. The Unified System of Computers. I talked about this in a previous video. The usual way for the countries in the Soviet bloc to coordinate with one another was through the CMEA, but it was infamously slow. Professor Ivan Popov and his Soviet colleagues worried about moving fast enough to compete in the rapidly evolving global computer industry. So of course, the only solution to that was to establish another international organization. Russia, East Germany, Bulgaria, Romania, Cuba, Poland, and others founded the Intergovernmental Commission on Computing Technology. I'll just call it the IGCCT. As one of the founders, Ivan Popov made sure that Bulgaria would have an important role in the computer system's production. The IGCCT drew up a list of 105 items to produce and then assigned them, like a school project, to each individual country. Thanks to Popov, Bulgaria produced just three of those 105 devices, but they were some of the most valuable. Memory disks, magnetic memory tapes, and a processor. To build proficiency in these, Popov arranged technology transfer agreements with Western items. For instance, Fujitsu agreed to transfer their memory tape design. Other items, like IBM's disk drives, they copied. And in order to secure this monopoly, Popov rapidly coordinated the simultaneous construction of seven new plants to manufacture various components for the unified system computers. Magnetic heads for disk drives, ferret memories, and so on. Popov pushed the construction team's heart to complete the factories as soon as possible. An incredible feat. One of his collaborators recalled, I had the chance to participate in the selection of sites for the new plants, and when he was giving orders to the industrial architects. I need halls 12 meters high, with all the communications underground, electricity, water, etc. And we need it in six months. The architects often asked about what he needed these premises for, but Ivan Popov instead joked, I will grow chickens. The export and sale of these high technology systems were very profitable. Bulgaria had essentially negotiated a monopoly for itself, selling products like hard drives at very high prices. No other Eastern Bloc country made such drives. At the same time, the Bulgarian factories produced goods at large scale and of good quality, buying advanced equipment from Europe and the United States to improve their advantages. Margins were at almost 200-300%. Along with a very favorable, very profitable Soviet oil re-export deal, these electronics exports buoyed the Bulgarian economy throughout the volatile 1970s. Ivan Popov had built up Bulgaria's industry to these unprecedented successes. But his bad political skills and blunt nature became his downfall. During debates for a new five-year plan in 1974, Popov proposed to build mainframes in direct competition with the Soviet Union and East Germany. This proposal faced heated resistance and spirited debate, so to say. Todor Zhivkov himself called Popov to his office and asked for compromise. Popov refused and thus Zhivkov removed him from the Politburo and banished him to Switzerland as ambassador. In its later years, during the second half of the 1980s, Izot did eventually venture into supercomputers very competently. All of the geological centers in the Soviet Union were powered by Bulgarian computers like the Izot 1014. These were very sophisticated computers that impressed even the Americans. By 1988, Bulgaria was exporting them to countries like India in search of a supercomputer alternative to American machines. Throughout the 1970s, Bulgaria produced these mainframes and minicomputers, which were kind of like smaller versions of mainframes. But most notably, Bulgaria was very early in on the personal computing boom. In 1979, a microelectronics engineer named Ivan Marangozov joined the Institute of Technical Cybernetics and Robotics within the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences. There, he brought together a small team to copy an imported Apple II computer. The team successfully produces an almost identical clone. The ROM was even the same except for a name change. The most significant differences were that the keyboard was changed to Cyrillic characters. Oh, and it also stored data in the old and slow Tate cassette memory that the first Apple II had. So no floppy disk drives. Guess they would have needed a Steve Wozniak to put it together. This Apple II PC clone was dubbed the IMCO-1, which stands for Individual Microcomputer. Only a limited run of these were ever made. Not clear how many, but at least 50, but they were extremely popular. Not only that, they were very functional. They took IMCO-1 to an international robotics exhibition in England and showed how it can control a robot arm. The little computer did as good a job as minicomputers many times its cost. IMCO-1 was a demo, so the team goes on to build a better version for mass production, the IMCO-2. For cost reasons, the IMCO-2 was modeled on the cheaper Apple II EPC. It used a Cynertek 6502, a second source clone of the MOS 6502, as its CPU and included an optional floppy drive and a basic interpreter. Production of the IMCO-2 was then moved to a new factory in the town of Pravets, Zhivkov's hometown. The commercial variant of the little PC is thus called the Pravets 82. 82 for the year production began. 1982. Pravets PCs were still far too expensive for the average Bulgarian, however they were cheap enough to become reasonably accessible to ordinary people and thus became quite popular. Production scaled up from 500 units in 1983 to 18,000 two years later. Many schools bought these PCs and a lot of Bulgarians today first learned programming on a Pravets PC. By 1987, there were over 500 computer clubs with these computers in Bulgaria. Pravets produced a whole bunch of very interesting 8-bit and 16-bit Pravets PC variants. We don't have the time to go into all of them here, but many are well covered in vintage computing websites. At their peak, the factory had three units and produced about 60,000 computers in a year, many of which were exported abroad to the Soviet Union, other Comic-Con countries and even a few Western countries too. By the late 1970s, against all odds, Bulgaria was one of the top 10 biggest electronics manufacturing countries in the world. But there were troubles on the horizon. In the 1970s, the Bulgarian government stopped investing in microelectronics, perhaps being unable to afford it in light of its military and heavy industry economic priorities. As a result, Bulgaria's semiconductor industry hit serious limits, impeding the country's ability to compete in the increasingly competitive environment. For instance, the Institute of Microelectronics developed a powerful IC that could have enabled pocket-sized calculators. But unfortunately, the FAB couldn't make it. Thus, Izot had to import foreign-made ICs for their Elka 100 series of pocket calculators. Imported chips cost precious foreign currency and made Bulgarian calculators and computers more expensive as compared to Japanese and Western calculators. Considering the restraints, the only possible way out was a technology collaboration with a Western company. Luckily, an incredible opportunity presented itself. Vladimir Antonov's memoirs recall a delegation from the American company Rockwell visiting Sofia. He didn't say when but I'm guessing sometime after 1980, based on a June 1980 LA Times article about Bulgaria looking for joint ventures. They discussed the possibility of doing a technology collaboration to build semiconductors together. A deal was struck and the only thing left to do was to sign. Then suddenly, a member of state security appears at the negotiations hall declaring, gentlemen, the contract will not be signed. Confused, the Rockwell people even offered to extend their stay in Sofia to work through the issues. The security didn't budge and the deal fell through. No reason was given at the time but many years later, Antonov learned that authorities over in the Soviet Union felt that the deal would bring Bulgaria too close to the United States, harming their own interests in the country. Whatever the reason, it was a devastating blow to the future of the Bulgarian semiconductor industry. More sophisticated Bulgarian computers and devices would always have to use imported chips. By 1988, the Bulgarian computer industry employed over 169,000 people or about 12% of the country's labor force. But times were changing. In 1989, Todor Zhivkov lost his power after a botched assimilation drive of the country's ethnic Turkish minority. Opposition raged against his long rule and he lost the support of the Soviet Union. Finally, in November 1989, he resigned at the behest of senior members of the Communist Party after 35 years. He died a few years later at the age of 86. In 1990, the Bulgarian electronics industry employed 181,000 people. The year after that, the Soviet Union too began to collapse. 95% of Bulgaria's electronics revenue came from within the Soviet bloc, with the USSR by far the single largest market. And since so many of the industry's products were stolen from the West, once the Soviets vanished as a customer, the Bulgarians had nowhere else to go. The electronics industry also suffered from its dependence on Western-sourced critical goods for its computers. About 30-40% of the computer had to be imported from abroad. When Bulgaria's currencies weakened throughout the 1980s, those imports became prohibitively expensive. Finally, the early 1990s saw the opening up of Bulgaria's markets. Extremely cheap South Korean and Taiwanese PCs entered the market with a vengeance. And people stopped buying private PCs. The factories closed down in 1994. The once formidable Bulgarian computer industry collapsed in seemingly an instant. Shriveling away or stolen as the economy cratered. Employment crashed from almost 200,000 people to a mere 30,000 just a few years later. Bulgaria's link to the Soviet Union both helped and hurt them. Obviously, the Soviets were their single biggest customer. The Bulgarian monopoly on the computer's most valuable parts was a gift that buoyed their economy. In some ways, it was the perfect position to be in. But in the long term, the Soviet link was also a massive handicap. It meant copying from the West, which restricted exports and it prevented the Bulgarians from getting closer to the West, which capped its technological progress. Zhukov had a vision of turning Bulgaria into another Japan. They got tantalizingly close. And then it was gone. That's it for tonight. Thanks for watching. Subscribe to the channel. Sign up for the newsletter. And I'll see you guys next time.