The UK maths/compsci circuit had good links with Poland's because of Marian Rejewski and cryptography history. Well.. good and not good, he didn't always get recognition for what he'd done.
Most machines had some sort of basic rom, why was that not the preferred command processor, basic is not that great, but it provides for a much richer command environment than cp/m or dos. What was the advantage of cp/m?
I am approaching from the context of the unix shell, an operating environment rich enough to program in. I don't know what scripting was available on cp/m but dos scripting with batch files was a miserly unpleasant thing in comparison. But then I think about how all those early home computers had a BASIC rom, why did that not evolve into a BASIC shell? it would have been a much nicer environment than cp/m.
On proprietary systems, BASIC shells were a thing. Both DOS and ProDOS on the Apple II hooked into the ROM BASIC interpreter.
cp/m from the user perspective (command line) was something of a knockoff of Digital/DEC command lines similar to RSTS or RSX-11 (probably RT-11 too? never used it)--PIP ftw! These are somewhat similar to MSDOS command lines. Unlike unix "everything is a file", these operating systems had the notion that "everything's a device" (like MSDOS things with colons, CON: AUX: LPT(?): etc., and sometimes "we'll provide the baling wire so different devices can talk to each other but it's not guaranteed", COPY A:FILE LPR:
PIP (peripheral interchange program) was the workhorse that actually did it all underneath, PIP A:FILE.DOC LPR:/COPY to extend the example above. I think that they actually may have put DEST: before SOURCE: and maybe DEST:=SRC:, and maybe the /COPY had to be on the dest, i don't remember, but for this purpose it's "eh"
basic does not offer anything like that. It could have, but for whatever reason, nobody thought to add those features, they were probably thinking more along the lines of "we're in ROM, why would we need a floppy? feature!"
Floppy disks were very expensive. And needed an additional expansion board which was also expensive. Cassettes : everybody had one.
> basic does not offer anything like that
It had LOAD and SAVE as far as i remember.
TBH i think the speed of loading programs (from floppy) made a bigger difference than a "command interpreter".
The machines that came with BASIC could be personal (Atari) or business focused (TRS-80) and did make for a good default prompt. Often the storage subsystem needed a DOS-like part not included with Basic which may only have supported cassette data storage out of the box.
UNIX was of course much more powerful, but didn't run on cheap 8-bit computers. And some home computers also offered CP/M compatibility as an add-on (for instance here: the Amstrad CPC booting into CP/M: https://floooh.github.io/tiny8bit/cpc.html?file=cpc/6128sp_4...)
And the whole reason why Commodore added a second CPU to the Commodore 128 was CP/M compatibility, that's how powerful the "lure of CP/M" was at the time.
So CP/M was a lot nicer than BASIC, and if you didn't like it you could just ... run MBASIC.COM and get BASIC.
BASIC was a very slow and limited programming language.
CP/M was a disk operating system.
If you wrote programs in BASIC you could only save them painfully slowly on cassette tape, and maybe if you were lucky you could get them to load back in again. You couldn't really write useful programs in it because it had no concept of functions and a very vague idea of subroutines, and there wasn't really an editor or debugger. You couldn't load or save data files except as raw binary copies of what was in memory. Latterly some home computers like the Commodore 64 got crude disk drives, which were only a little faster and about as reliable as tape, and still couldn't really work the way we use files now.
By comparison, CP/M was more like MS-DOS in that it was a thin command interpreter that would load and run programs in memory, which could then be used to do useful stuff. In the Olden Days I used a CP/M machine to write firmware for Z80-based machine controller boards. On one floppy I had the editor, assembler, debugger, and a few other tools, and on the other floppy I had the assembly source code and object code output. Although the computer with its whopping 64kB of RAM and 256kB per floppy disk could only run one program at a time, it only took a few seconds to load the editor and the working file, and run a SUBMIT job (similar to an MS-DOS batch file) to assemble and link the code.
Pretty much all serious development was done in assembler then although there were some daft old gits who still held onto PL/I, and you could get Turbo Pascal for CP/M. There was even talk of buying a C compiler, like that C stuff they use on big Unix systems, and using a thumping great Tandon 386 with Xenix on it as a shared development machine, with 2MB of RAM and a 40MB hard disk! I left the company before they brought this in though.
BASIC is an interesting enough language, but it was inherently too limited to evolve into much without an underlying OS. CP/M required the machine running it to have a BIOS ROM with a boot loader and the machine-specific code in it to handle the hardware, which would be about half the work of the BASIC ROM.
If you want to see an interesting contrast in 80s home computers see what you can find about the Jupiter Ace, which was a Z80-based computer that ran Forth instead of BASIC. Forth would have been a far better starting point for a general-purpose OS, being essentially compiled into bytecode (really just a list of addresses of words) and run by a very simple "interpreter" that loops over the bytecode. Later on Sun would use Forth as part of OpenBoot, where it made its way into PowerPC-based Apple machines.
Edit: Added link to youtube instead of HN
I would be surprised though if this would have been the singular event that ruined the East German economy (if there was one main reason then it was the central planning and micromanagement of the entire ecomony which was mostly based on made up numbers and wishful thinking instead of reality), if anything, the focus on microelectronics was an unintended long term investment into the post-GDR future ;)
(Dresden and Jena are still high-tech hotspots, and without having access to computers and then catching the "computer virus" as East German teenager I wouldn't have become a programmer later)
The mistake was to not popularise computers and educate people about them (as the British did). They were too expensive and weren't as used as they could have been.
Video about that wonder of communism, it has Polish subs so you can use autotranslate https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CMRAMxtS21A
USSR was able to do whatever it wanted of course.
So, to this day we make good military RF-related tech (see WB-Electronics and Radwar for example). But when we tried a space program in 60s ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meteor_(rocket) ) - USSR made us stop pretty quickly.
Back to the subject - East Germany and USSR was supposed to do integrated circuits, so our industry wasn't very good in that regard. We made some, but nothing modern. Polish-made computers were mostly using foreign ICs with the exception of a Polish-made clone of 8080 used in a series of computers by Elwro.
Nowadays we have one pretty big IC factory in Poland ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilk_Elektronik ), and a few specialized IC factories for military and industrial automation.
On the other hand Poland is pretty big in software, especially gamedev.
For me, it’s the Polyend Tracker [0].
As for designers of hardware – K-202 and later MERA-404 were the most advanced TTL architectures that originated under communist regime in Poland. As for CMOS single chip CPUs whole eastern bloc only managed to copy 8 bit western designs, most notably by teams from Ukraine and Bulgaria (that was also a main Floppy Discs producer in the bloc BTW, other than that cassette tapes and reel to reel tapes were the most common storage media).
As for retaining specialists specialized in deign - they weren't too numerous to begin with. In later years of communist era regimes designed mostly to switch from attempts of developing of own designs to reverse engineering and copying western designs which involved a lot of industrial espionage and smuggling of components and software which even further limited size of group of people who were designing own solutions. Tho Poland continued to produce own designs based on own components as well as parts from the West and Soviet Union well into the 1980s. By the time communist ended a lot of them were well into their 40s and 50s with the biggest group that was about to turn 60. Poland by that time had no manufacturing capabilities to produce modern components in high quantities essential for survival of such businesses. Younger generation was more interested in developing software for western minicomputers like PC, Commodore and Atari products. So there was quite a gap in generations and their main focus.
As for today there is some research on quantum computing and photonics being done in academia. As for manufacturing of more innovative hardware and software most specialists emigrate to Germany, Scandinavia, the UK and the US. Poland is not too friendly for such business (lower level of economic freedom, overcomplicated taxation system etc) compared to these countries especially as risky ones as innovative high tech.
The local gaming industry attracts talent from the region and has a few globally successful products - even if companies themselves are incorporated in Cyprus.
But that only gained momentum relatively recently - there was no carryover from the communist era.
There are also payment systems - there's a lot of experimentation going on in that field. All the more interesting because the population is particularly price-conscious and intolerant to friction in payment processing.
The rest is largely outsourcing. We have a few large domestic IT companies doing projects for the government.
Lastly Poland is where around 3% of the world's li-ion batteries are manufactured. Not a lot in absolute terms, but it's, weirdly enough, half the manufacturing capacity of the US and in the EU second only to Hungary.
That's about it. Academia mostly gave up and resorted to pumping out masters' degrees. There is still a significant amount of brain-drain in IT, but it's countered with generous tax incentives.
PS: it's a good video, but focuses a bit too much on the political background ... which may of course be interesting as introduction for people without 'first hand' East German experience ;).
The video doesn't mention the most interesting unsolved mystery: how the Z80 was actually cloned. There are a couple of contradicting stories around (with the two extreme ends being (1) the Stasi stole the masks directly from Zilog or another Z80 vendor - which makes a good James Bond story, and (2) somebody just literally walked into a West German electronics store, bought a handful of Z80s, smuggled them back over the border, and the rest was reverse engineered via traditional decapping - which is a much more boring story, but also much more likely.
The only fact that helps to clear up some of the myths is that the East German Z80 is not a 1:1 clone of an original Zilog Z80 because it differs slightly in undocumented behaviour, but it could probably be 1:1 clone of a non-Zilog Z80 clone (such as Hitachi's).
I'm glad for the Atari version. Although it was less powerful, it was enough taking less space and running faster. An Integer Basic like on the Apple would have been great to have too.