A typical joke from the latst years of the GDR I heard back then: A delegation of Japanese visits the GDR and of course is shown many important companies and places. At the end, they are asked "What did you enjoy the most?" "The three great museums: Pergamon, Pentacon and Robotron."

Note - every East German company was called VEB - literally "people's own works". I worked In Berlin (west) in the late 70' s and was able to travel to the East fairly easily. I worked in semi conductors. In the late 80's I worked at senior level for Toshiba in Germany when they were then the world no.1 in semiconductors. Around the time of the opening up of the East we were instructed not to make any comments to the Press about any questions relating to Toshiba and Eastern Germany. Quite soon after I became involved in the (previously eastern) German semiconductor industry initially via the Treuhand an organisation set up to get investment into the previously DDR industries -The problem was efficiency within the company there was no commercial understanding, nor logistics. The company at Erfurt was split into 3 separate entities Thesys the major 6" fab , X-Fab made higher voltage Cmos for automotive applications on 4 inch wafer where geometry was not important. and a solar cell company whose name I forget. Dresden site became ZMD with a 5" fab,. The Frankfurt an der Oder site specialising in Bipolar became GED and eventuality purchased by ELMOS. I was involved at the sites in Erfurt, Dresden and F Oder Simply the failure of the companies in the DDR was due to their inability to connect to any of their customers and to produce what their customers needed. Marketing did not exist. Erfurt had around 40,000 employees and a reasonably functional 6 inch facility where they ran 3 micron Cmos which was exactly the Toshiba unified process that allowed migration to smaller geometries, Much of the process machinery was from Canon and had allegedly been delivered as combine harvesters (!) -but on top of this they manufactured the Z80 processor which held around 90% of the local market share without the knowledge of Zilog. They also manufactured a processor "very similar" (hand copied) to the Intel 286. Intel issued a cease and desist order, while Zilog just issued a license and purchased from Erfurt at a very low price. Thesys took only 400 of the 40,000 employees of the VEB workforce and X-Fab and the solar cell company took less - so 39,000 people were made redundant . Dresden (ZMD literally Dresden centre for microelectronics) had been the R&D centre for Eastern Germany and so had a smaller 5 inch Fab - 5 inch was never a popular format - it did still manufacture 256K DRAMs -(the 1M never made production) and some SRAMs - all had very poor yields and each device had to be burnt in even for commercial grade product - so profitability was nonexistent. Their main product became subcontracting TV ICS for Phillips. ZMD received senior management from Siemens/ Infineon for guidance. But Infineon built and opened a huge fab on the doorstep of ZMD and then stole all the competent personnel. AMD also opened a Fab in Dresden with the same result. Thesys was initially backed up by supplying wafers to Zilog and ZMD by selling Wafers to Philips - Both companies followed the idea of becoming mixed signal Asic companies but neither had the engineering staff or the market credibility to get the volume orders in time to grow their businesses to compensate for when the Zilog and Philips business ran out. In 1998 Thesys was sold to the Austrian company AMS but this has failed and AMS was forced to sell back its shares to the minor company X-Fab. X-fab has become like a mini TSMC handling designs customer make - Soon After X-Fab has taken over the Fab in Dresden, and ZMD was sold for 1Dm to a local investing company but it declines and was eventually taken over by IDT in 2016. Xfab has continued to grow is now headquartered in Belgium and has acquired many other fabrication facilities. It is worth ~ circa 750M$ per - but still maintains the sites in Erfurt and DResden

I used to work for a chip manufacturer in East Germany a few years ago, in a room right next to my office was a western ion implanter from the 1970s which was smuggled to the GDR some decades ago. The implanter was still being used in production :) working in the cleanroom there was like working in a museum 😄

The VEB Halbleiterwerk seen at 2:15 was in Frankfurt (Oder), it's not the VEB in Teltow. My brother learned and worked there. Now he's working in Teltow for a chip manufacturer. Some of my professors were working in Dresden on that stuff during the 70s and 80s, they told us how difficult it was because the GDR basically had to figure out the manufacturing almost entirely by itself instead of buying the proper machines on the world market. Growing of silicon crystals, slicing the wafers, manufacturing the chips, bonding the wires etc. They also said that often the "help" from the Stasi wasn't very helpful at all, but they had to incorporate the stuff (even if they wanted to do their own designs instead of just copying Western chips) because the state paid too much for it to ignore. They were proud of what they had achieved, but agreed that economically it was a pointless excercise. One of those professors later was a technical advisor for Infineon.

As an East German history buff and "insider" of sorts (my dad was East German), this is overall a very well-researched video, but I do have a few corrections near the beginning: 0:40 - East Germany did not inherit a strong industrial base at all. The low population was due to comparatively low industrialisation. Most of German industry was concentrated in the Rhine-Ruhr region in the far west (which is Germany's most populous area to this day). What little industry did exist in the East was pretty thoroughly destroyed by allied bombing, particularly in and around Berlin and Dresden. By 1945 there was literally not a single still functioning heavy industrial facility in the whole territory of East Germany. 1:00 - This is a grammatical nitpick rather than a content correction, but "strike" in the sense of "stop working" rather than "hit" is a defective verb, meaning it has no past tense. So "workers struck" is incorrect in this context, you need to use a circumlocution like "workers went on strike" instead. 2:20 - VEB is not the name of the works. VEB stands for "Volkseigener Betrieb" ("undertaking belonging to the people") and just describes the type of legal entity, much like "Inc" or "LLC" in the US and "Ltd" or "plc" in the UK. So calling VEB Halbleiterwerk the "VEB works" is like calling Alphabet's headquarters the "Inc headquarters".

Back in the early 70's the FBI were surveilling a suspected individual for suppling iron curtain nations with technology, particular computer and electronic items. The FBI became aware of the fact that the person they were watching was preparing a large shipment to go to Sweden. When the two crates were shipped the crates were weighed. When they arrived in Sweden a Swedish national received them and immediately arranged for shipment to the USSR. The crates were then weighed again and sent off to Russia. When the crates were opened in Russia there was a problem. There were no semiconductors or computer parts. Instead, they were filled with......wait for it........rocks. Somewhere along the line some one had removed the contents and then replaced them with rocks that weighed exactly what the original contents had weighed. One has to assume it was the FBI since they arrested the individual they were watching shortly after.

I've worked in Eastern Germany in 1992 at a meat factory, where they used a PDP-11. This was imported from the US and they told me that there was a regular inspection to see if it was still being used driving the factory (and not rockets).

13:36 The DEC engineers were actually trying to say, “CVAX: When you care enough to steal the very best” (a pun on Hallmark’s slogan, “When you care enough to send the very best.”) The joke didn’t translate, and the word-for-word translation they came up with didn’t even make any sense, so the East German team probably translated it from pidgin Russian into German in the way that they thought their bosses would want to hear.

19:30 that 32-bit processor from Intel - the iAPX 432 - is a really great story on its own. What was intended to be a future-proofed magnum opus turned out to be a hilariously bad design, and the purposely-near-sighted chip that was meant to merely fill the market for a few years - x86 - is still with us to this day. If you don't make a video on it, I might wind up writing a Substack article on it eventually.

Great video! There used to be a saying amongst the East-German people in those last days: "Die Mikroelektronik der DDR ist nicht klein zu kriegen." which has a double meaning of "The east-german microelectronics industry cannot be defeated." as well as "The east-german microelectronics can not be shrunk". Still there is an undeniable legacy left behind in the current industry in Germany's east. I would love to see a video about the Siemens-Infineon-Qimonda downfall and partial resurrection...

I got to work in the Dresden Global Foundries Dresden factory in 2003, it was pretty interesting to see the remnants of East Germany, and the rebuilding of the Frauenkirch which was about halfway done at the time. Making chips is no easy task, so many intricate technologies are involved, from optics, to vacuum pumps, spectrometry, to mass flow control, and precision temperature, and on and on. I am always amazed anything works at all.

Great video, it's interesting how much of Western tech managed to get behind the iron curtain, my dad was working in early 1970s as mainframe computer serviceman, on American UNIVAC computers! I have no idea how they managed to get them into Czechoslovakia, but he was even sent abroad to be trained how to maintain them. But with limited parts supply, he had to innovate lot of repairs - substituting unobtainable parts with local production and obviously doing board level repairs, but that was common even in the West at that time. The computer centre was located on Wenceslas Square, Prague of all places. I wish I would've asked him about more stories when I had the chance :(

Great video, as always. A fun tidbit: The Norwegian minicomputer company Norsk Data asked the COMECON embargo council what the difference was between a minicomputer, and a superminicomputer - which was subject to strict export controls. They replied, well, a superminicomputer is a 32-bit computer. Luckily, due to the segmented memory architechture of the ND-500 series, one could simply cut wire A31 on the backplane, and it was now a 31-bit computer - no longer a supermini. Nobody needed to map the full 4GiB into memory, so there was just no performance loss. This way, ND sold a great many very high-performance computers - they would run circles around a VAX in floating-point performance - to the Soviet Union, completely legally. They would regularily call the embargo council to make sure they were still within the law.

My uncle worked at VEB Elektronik Gera, and in general, my family had a lot of interest in electronics and electrical engineering, a lot of my relatives worked in these jobs. The companies often had very skilled people there who often had to make do with poor quality parts, and it was very difficult to even get the good parts for simple stuff like capacitors. These were always at risk to be traded at black market, especially since there was a big DIY scene in the GDR. Due to poor accounting, it remained that way until the end. I remember the propaganda about the first megabit chip made in GDR, which was to be produced in Erfurt too at even higher capacity. The plan was to cure the economy through cheap sales of Mbit chips. We mocked the incessant trumpeting of progress by state media constantly because we knew how dire the situation really was. My uncle instantly found a highly paid job as electronic engineer at a big company in the Bodensee region after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and remained there until retirement. In general, the electronics sector was symptomatic for the entire GDR system. They had lofty goals that mismatched with their capacities and most importantly: their ideology. Many progresses were hampered because the SED didn't like it. They especially didn't like individual thinking from people below their assigned positions. The GDR was very reliant on exports, which usually happened at a net loss already. They often had to rob Peter to pay Paul. Improving or development of technologies was seen as a waste of money and time. They only wanted to produce according to silly five year plans, and due to the planned economy being extremely slow and inflexible, they hoped for a fairly static world. This worked for the two decades after the war, but eventually the changes across the globe happened too rapidly, too rapidly and too costly to adapt.

East Germany did not inherit a strong industry after the war. In fact, the few industrial machines that were still functioning were dismantled and shipped as war reparations to the Soviet Union. Even many kilometers of train tracks were dismantled. Overall, East Germans paid 130 times more than West Germans, and East Germany paid the highest war reparations of the century. It culminated in the protests 53, after which the reparations were dialed back significantly. Interestingly, some of the taken machinery lacked operators in the Soviet Union, and so ended up rusting away in fields...

10:55 I literally laughed out loud when you said “and fridges”, cuz no 1970s fridges used transistors. They’re not needed for any key part of a refrigerator, which can be made entirely of electromechanical (not electronic) components. Even today, the transistors in a fridge (if it has any) will only be in a digital temperature controller, and maybe in an LED lamp driver. But simple ones will be purely electromechanical. Like every Asianometry video I’ve watched so far, you get the broad picture right, and find interesting topics, but get tons of little details (and sometimes bigger ones) wrong.

The video made it sound like the GDR never achieved anything substantial. But they successfully did produce computers, even a few of what could be called "home computers", sparking a hobbyist computer enthusiast movement - among them my father. I basically owe my whole career to that. I was hoping to learn something about how the GDR cloned the Z80 (in the shape of the "U880" and its companion chips PIO, SIO and CTC) and successfully used it in their own products. But sadly, the video never mentioned them :-(

Some of those developments even tied into the events of 1989: The GDR was trying to build a high purity silicon factory in Dresden, the so-called "Reinstsiliziumwerk Gittersee". Many people didn't like the idea of having industry dealing with highly volatile chemicals located near residential areas because any accident would have been a catastrophe. This lead to open protests in the summer of 1989. In November 1989 the project was shelved.

Thing is, looking at GDR alone it might look like a failure. Compared to what Russia and the rest of USSR produced- GDR was quite high quality and advanced. My dad used to love it when he got his hands on any East German kit. As a kid I remember playing with a Robotron 8086 clone at Dad's work- it was standing next to a Russian mainframe using magnetic tapes, with another Russian mainframe still using punchcards a couple of rooms down the hallway.

Your videos that focus on a historical perspective rather than the more technical aspects of modern tech are really what keep me coming back to your channel. The technical stuff goes *way* over my head so to my ears, you may as well be speaking a language I don't understand, but as a hardcore History geek, I can't find this sort of historical/technological perspective anywhere else. Your video about the Soviet oil industry is another example of the videos I mean. This here video is some really great work. Cheers.

This video somehow misses the story. The GDR knew they would never compete on the world market. But the Soviet Union and other Warshaw Pact states had been embargoed and would have payed any price for second-rate semiconductors.

Great video, as usual. Just a quick note on pronounciation of some German proper nouns: 0) Jena is pronounced "Ye-nah" 1) Stasi is pronounced "Shtah-zee" 2) Zeiss is pronounced "Ts-eye-s"

13:40 With this inscription on the die, Digital Equipment Corporation engineers brag about their MicroVAX product (CVAX chip) to the Soviet engineers: _"CVAX - When you care enough to steal the very best"_ (The message seems to be translated word by word from English to Russian by somebody who did not speak the language, so one has to guess somewhat regarding what exactly they wanted to say.)

E.G. bootstrapped a good school for EEs. Low-grade production of old semiconductors was what colleges in America were doing and still are doing to train their EEs. I have been in the semiconductor industry designing these chips since 1983.

By the way, many employees of the "VEB Kombinat Robotron", the leading GDR computer manufacturer, later ended up after the fall of the Wall at a company named Medion. Medion fueled the private customer market of reunified Germany with very cheap and really good PCs, the "Aldi computers". Under the right framework conditions, the employees were able to achieve really outstanding things.

Great! That's the episode I always wanted you to make one of my grandpa came to Canada after spending a couple of years in France and a decade working as an engineer for various german electronics industries, he had tons of stories about the silliness of different German industrial fighting each other and trying to corrupt different bunches of officials. My grandma always said they moved to France with some secret research but tbh I never believed that story lol

The Toshiba deal was for 256kbits not 256kbytes memory chip. You got the 1Mbits memory chip correct.

Fascinating! Thanks. More of these historical insights and shenanigans would be very welcome.

Unbelievable good content about such a complex topic that only makes sense when you get the historic context. 👍

My dad was part of that effort in the eighties, very interesting video. I hope he can understand the English in this as I'll ask him more about it and his take on it. Thank you for the video!

You mention that by the late 1960s color TVs were widely available in the GDR. That was definetely not the case. The "Color 20" the first East German color TV was introduced in 1969. You had to pay 3.700 Marks for it which was 5.5x of the average monthly gross income. So even in the 70s color TVs were a rare and priced posession for an average East German household. P.S. thanks for the informative video.

Nice video. I’d recommend making a video about the audio industry (going from vacuum tubes to solid state then Japanese companies like Roland, Korg etc appearing).

It doesn't matter what happens. When Asianometry uploads, it's a good day.

Every once in several million a video restores my faith that UKposts has not completely descended into a (sometimes entertaining) waste of time. Hats off to you for this interesting and informative work.

A great report. Thank you for all the work and then sharing.

Great video. Not a likely topic given not all sources may be readily available to you. Your broad-strokes-history on East Germany checks out and as for the tech side - at this point I basically assume you the authority on the matter since I'm getting so much information on semiconductors and tech from your channel. You are easily the single biggest source of info on the topics for me as of today. Thank you.

I was just thinking that it would be great for this channel to do a deep dive into the GDR's semiconductor industry. I was hoping for coverage of how the GDR took apart early western integrated circuites to forensically reverse engineer the technology. In the mid-90s I was gifted some of the early batch germanium transistors, schematics, and populated PCBs from the GDR. It was fascinating to identify the Z80-like system; all the chips were analogues of a western Z80 computer system IIRC. Curiously, the EEPROMs were Russian, while all other IC components and PCB were East German.

I met a sales guy from Zilog in the early 90’s. They’d been aware of a reverse engineered Z80 micro processor and were quite impressed. After the fall of the DDR, they bought the factory!

Incredible where you find your sources and how detailed your knowledge is!

Super interesting video! I know this is unrelated, however your content is incredibly helpful for Economics revision, particularly when looking at specialisation, and in this case as well as the USSR/Vietnam videos, showing how Command economies can suffer from certain problems which hold them back keep it up!

Dresden is my home town. I was so proud to buy a Athlon64 in the mid 2000s that was (partially) made in Dresden.

The GDR invented Value Subtracted Manufacturing, where the final outcome was something that was worth less than the raw materials used. The classic example was the Trabant automobile, but a semiconductor that was 4 years behind the West with a 2% yield rate has to be the ultimate example.

How I found this channel I don’t know. But his work is fabulous and gives me joy. Thank you.

Another top quality report !!! Excellent story telling again...

Note how often Zeiss shows up. Today all leading edge microchip fabs rely on ASML for their production equipment, and ASML relies on Zeiss for the lenses required in that equipment.

I thumbs up every single video as soon as I see your videos, and usually watch to the end no matter what other video I was watching. Thanks for posting another subject I’m sure to be educated in.

Love your show, hugely informative and well researched

It's not Telefunken and AEG. Telefunken was a subsidiary of AEG and later fully merged and known as AEG-Telefunken. It was German's leading manufacturer for Radio and Telecommunications equipment on that time.

I love yours channel a lot. Can't get enough of your videos.

Thanks for this informative and well-produced video!

You have an interesting way of presenting things, almost leaving some doubt in the viewer's mind that peaks curiosity. Refreshing

Outro addendum: The last remainder of the original GDR microelectronics industry besides Zeiss (I think you already made a video about the two Zeiss) is X-Fab, doing 1 µm to 130 nm high-voltage and MEMS applications. Not very glamorous, but dignified. And I'm not really sure about bankrupt -- The GDR never went bankrupt as in not paying debts. After unification the economy collapsed due to monetary unification involving having to pay staff in DMark meaning that goods which they exported previously now were uncompetitive, and it didn't help that the Treuhand sold off state-owned companies to their western competition for cents on the dollar -- who then shut those companies down instead of developing them. Overall the whole unification was mismanaged, it both cost the west and hurt the east way more than it should have, though there's the occasional foreign takeover or management buyout which went very well. Directly before unification West German mail order catalogues were full of East German fridges and washing machines and those were gone pretty much over night, it's not like their products were bad from a consumer perspective. Those fridges were CFC-free -- the east developed that technology before anyone else. *Not* producing Z80 clones etc. would also have been a huge issue to the GDR much earlier as their primary export by value was industrial machinery and importing chips to export your CAM etc. stuff would not have been feasible, and noone (with deep pockets) wanted to buy non-automated machinery. For quite a long time VW used GDR machinery with exactly those Z80 clones in them. And in the meantime, the GDR was trading cars for canned fish with its socialist big brother and the resource stream (metals, oil, etc) became spotty. I certainly don't envy the position of the GDR planners. One last quaint positive note about central planning: To get that canned fish out of the shelves (nobody would buy it because people didn't know what it was, even when they could read Cyrillic) the people running KONSUM simply called state TV which then readily dedicated two or three episodes of their cooking show to those cans, stocks soon were gone.

Here in Finland there used to be a joke that DDR had invented even shorter unit of time than one second. That was "ein ulb" . That came from the peoples reaction when they heard that Ulbricht will speak on the radio. Switching the channel took less than a second, so only "ulb" could be heard before the channel was changed...

Very insightful video indeed. Touches many points that apply to so many different fields.

The f sub T (frequency response) of transistors you could get from distributors in America was 500KHz around 1960.. That number was watched closely by those interested (Radio Amateurs mostly). The CK722 was my first transistor. And I am, personally, older than transistors which were invented in America in 1948. .

My country (Bulgaria) experienced a similar semiconductors hype in the 70s and the 80s, although in a much smaller scale. And this hype is still a breeding ground for domestic myths about how Bulgaria was so "technologically advanced" during the communism. Of course, it wasn't but at least 30% of my compatriots still believe that. And these are the same 30% who believe that Putin is a great leader... Thank you for the video!

I had a 386 by NCR specifically made in West Germany. I recently sold a 286 that had a LIM/EMS expansion board that had 2Mb of RAM on it made by Siemens, in, you guessed it, West Germany. Printed right on the chips.

This has become my favorite channel, simply great videos. Wishing you the best.

The GDR had a population of only 16 million people. They did as much as any country of that size could do on their own. Taiwan had the full backing of the US to build their semiconductor industry, with engineers trained in the best US universities.

As I understand it, the industry was founded because of the need for foreign currency, especially dollars. The need to service debts and import high tech products in foreign currencies was a big problem for Eastern Bloc countries. The East German chip industry was a huge economic opportunity as they could sell to Eastern Bloc countries, who wouldn't need to dig into their valuable forex holdings to pay for it. For East Germany, these exports would ensure the smooth inward flow of needed resources in from the USSR and other countries. The innefficency of their production, protected utterly from world markets was insane, and it was unsurprising the sector proved uncompetitive. Source: dissolution, The crisis of Communism and the fall of East Germany

AMD's plant in Dresden in 1996 was leading-edge. It was the precursor to Global Foundries that you mentioned.

I grew up in the GDR right until its end, and over 30 years later, I'm still learning new details about it all the time.

I really enjoy ALL Jon produces, always educational and entertaining thanks heaps

Really curious topic, something you won't expect to be covered by most.

I am working in the successor company x-fab in Dresden. Interesting to hear this historical view.

My favourite joke from the era; Erich Honecker is with his mistress and he says "My darling Helga, I love you and will do anything for you" Helga says "My sweet Erich, I want you to tear down the Berlin wall" He thinks about it for a moment and says; "Ah, this is good. You want to be alone with me"

I once read that even synthesizers (the music instrument) were disallowed to be exported to East Germany. Because by the end of the 70ties, those instruments started using 8086 or 68k processors for controlling settings. It is questionable how these could ever have been reverse engineered, but still.

When you see photo what is supposed to be leading edge electronics factory - with parking lot swarmed by Trabants (and one or two Wartburgs) - you now something is terribly wrong.

Funny thing to add. Brazilian's failed semiconductor foray was made thanks to tech transfers from East Germany. To this day, LSI labs here still use aging East German equipment. I have done lithography in one of such museum pieces back in college.

if you substitute "Britain" for "East Germany" you'd be describing the history of the British semiconductor industry. (Only in the UK would you plan your prototype wafer fab plant to be placed next to a Readymix cement plant......)

It is so reminiscent of the UK. I graduated in the mid sixties when the master industrialist, mightily favoured by the UK Civil Service was Arnold Weinstock, the guy who eliminated competition for govt. contracts by having his company GEC, with enthusiastic cooperation from the UK civil admin., unite many rivals in GEC. To cut a long story short, Weinstock's, who only 'invested' in secure govt. cost-plus contracts, went bust shortly after he died. The govt. put it about that the collapse of GEC was due to shortcomings in the management who struggled with their inheritance. Because of Weinstock's complete aversion to investment, GEC never had a chance, being lead as it was by govt. favours. The parallel with the GDR is clear, even if the exact model differs in detail.

"...bigger than any single country can handle...... they never should have try it......" The last few sentences hit like a hammer.

Back in the 80's you could buy DDR copys of TTL circuits here in Sweden.

@ 14:54 Chechloslovakia and that typo on the map ... love it ^^

In the early 1970s the USAF received a functioning SAM 2 Missile curtesy of North Vietnam. It hit a B-52 but didn't explode. Examining the electronics, it was found to contain Texas Instrument microchips. Further inspections found that they were clones copied in the Soviet Block down to Logo and part numbers. In the early 1980s some Soviet Block electronic testing equipment was made available to the US curtesy of Egypt. The multi meter contained resistors, capacitors and transistors which also had western part numbers. The Soviet Block had a hard time keeping up with the west in microelectronics, but were 40 to 70 years ahead in tube technology. The Soviets were able to do things with tubes we were never able to accomplish. Tubes have an advantage in a Nuke/EMP environment because they return to operation after the EMP is passed. This bit history was very interesting and filled some gapes I didn't know.

It ended up as a incubator for future manufacturers. I am in the semi business and I always wondered why Dresden is the place to invest in semi manufacturing. Now I know.

I had no idea how this debacle happened, I even knew that the DDR strove for industrial robotization. There is much to learn, thank you.

Velmi, velmi poučné video. Moc děkuji!

Love your history videos, please keep it up inbetween the modern stuff. :)

Just love these rabbit holes you send me down. When I first saw the title of the video, I thought, meh, that sounds boring. Now I'm semi-obsessed with the East German high tech industry. I want to know more about their cloned IBM 360.

Wow, great history lesson! I heard that DEC also put the Russian phrase for "For those that copy the best" on their VAX chips. We used to think that a VAX was so powerful, but now a toaster contains a more powerful processor.

I have a lot of VQB100 18-segment LED displays somewhere, made in GDR

Fascinating! Love this channel, the content is amazing!

Everybody else builds walls to keep people out. What a system.

I haven’t watched the whole video yet (only two minutes in) but I’m excited to see this topic covered. I grew up in East Germany, not far from Dresden. When you mentioned Walter Ulbricht and his goal of passing the West, I had to chuckle. What he actually said is: “Überholen ohne einzuholen”, which means “to pass without catching up”. He wasn’t the brightest :)

They had some really smart people working on this, and some of the gained know-how was perhaps useful to set up some of the fabs in eastern Germany in the 90s and the 2000s. The collapse of the SU and GDR created a trove of cheap 40xx, 74xx and Zilog family chip clones in the form of shovelware - tested and working. In some cases it was difficult to figure out what you are looking at (using different, sometimes cyrillic type designations) but some hobbyists put together comprehensive lists so that you knew what their western equivalent was. But since they were clones, you can kinda see that there wasn't much innovation by that point. I remember seeing an AK report about the GDR building a Mbit chip. They seemed very proud of it, but as it turned out at a later point, the yield rate was below 5%

Asianometry - A study in captivating, engrossing accounts of technological & political interplay. Should be a Nobel Prize for this category. You've earned it.

I think they made a good bet. Having a cutting edge semi conductor industry would've brought the GDR very well into the 21st century. Just looking at Taiwan and TSMC.

To be fair, Philips also failed at megabit memory mass production. I think in the end they converted the production lines to produce CCD chips.

another excellent video! very well researched and explained!

21:26 I can still remember when AMD produced their CPUs in "East Germany" in the late 90s and early 2000s (AMD Saxony) and when Infineon was the way to go for DDR RAM (made in Dresden; DDR pun intended). All of that is long gone... Infineon still exists and produces stuff there, but they've completely left the consumer market almost one and a half decade ago. PS: Instead of spending billions of Marx, they maybe should have tried spening billions of Engels instead :P

Maybe its outside your normal topics, but what about a video on headphone technologies, Germany and Japan in particular have quite a history

Watching this brilliant video and amazing comments from great people is the best history lesson one can imagine. Thanks good people!

Would've been nice if you had spelled out what WBN stands for (Werk für Bauelemente der Nachrichtentechnik), was a bit confusing this way.

9:51 Dr. Apel's death sounds like KGB op. Also, thank you for this great documentation about those struggles.

struck is only the past tense of "to strike" when it means beating somebody/hitting them. The labor conflict measure uses the past form "striked".

@13:43 - the message on the die in russian is hilariously badly worded. I can barely understand the idea, despite speaking russian natively(I touch-type in both latin and cyrillics). If I try to translate it to English preserving the mistakes it is like "When you fed-up stealing real best" All the words except one are spelled perfectly but no russian-speaker would put them together in that way. This was evidently translated with a dictionary word by word, by somebody who probably never heard the language. And in that case - that's an excellent job! Chinese people still cannot figure out cyrillic fonts in car entertainment systems and such, for example. But these guys did it in perfect type and kerning!!! Absolutely amazing!

I think this channel has the best comment section I've ever seen on youtube.

The GDR (DDR) "RFT VEB Funkwerk Köpenick" made excellent wireless communication equipment though. As an example see one of my video's of such a product, the HF SSB transceiver SEG-15D that I have in my collection. It is equipped with a digital frequency synthesizer which uses many of the DDR produced TTL chips that were copied from Texas Instruments. The electronic design of the radio is excellent (it even has a mechanical sideband filter produced in the DDR itself) but the reliability was poor due to often failing , DDR produced semiconductors. The nice thing is that when such a DDR chip fails, it is easily replaced with a drop-in Western counterpart as the DDR copied everything to the point where it even was pin compatible with the Western components. Here a link to the SEG-15D transceiver. As said, despite the unreliable components an otherwise excellent product, robustly built and of modular design (and as such easily serviceable): ukposts.info/have/v-deo/iqmXg7BrjJqAp4k.html

Yugoslavia has built own semi-conductors, TVs, computers. They were crude, but still did their job. The problem was that the supply chain was deliberately spread across the whole country, so everyone was employed, but when the country crumbled, so did all the industries.