this post was submitted on 01 Dec 2025
139 points (100.0% liked)

History Memes

1108 readers
742 users here now

A place to share history memes!

Rules:

  1. No sexism, racism, homophobia, transphobia, assorted bigotry, etc.

  2. No fascism (including tankies/red fash), atrocity denial or apologia, etc.

  3. Tag NSFW pics as NSFW.

  4. Follow all Piefed.social rules.

Banner courtesy of @setsneedtofeed@lemmy.world

OTHER COMMS IN THE HISTORYVERSE:

founded 6 months ago
MODERATORS
 

In case you were wondering, yes, GCHQ banned them too. This incident also led to one of the funniest FAA papers ever.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] atomicbocks@sh.itjust.works 6 points 2 days ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

Doing something like that would probably actually have been outside the capability of Russia at that time. There is a reason the Commodore 64 was still popular in Eastern Europe in the 90s. Basically in the late 70s Russia, who’s technology was largely electro-mechanical, stopped trying to innovate and started covertly importing. By the time the Soviet Union collapsed they were completely reliant on western technology.

There is a museum of Soviet era “video” games that I have always wanted to go to because their tech was so different than ours, we never had any games like them.

[–] AllNewTypeFace@leminal.space 2 points 1 day ago (2 children)

Soviet military technology, whilst behind the west, was considerably more advanced than what trickled down to the consumer (mostly because consumer expectations were kept low; the USSR only started manufacturing toilet paper in the mid-1970s, for one, and so wasn’t about to launch its own ecosystem of 8-bit home computers).

[–] atomicbocks@sh.itjust.works 3 points 1 day ago (1 children)
[–] AllNewTypeFace@leminal.space 2 points 1 day ago

Though given that they cost 4 months’ wages, they were a consumer product only in theory

[–] atomicbocks@sh.itjust.works 2 points 1 day ago

I also think you may be misunderstanding the technologies that were available to Soviet citizens. I highly recommend you check out the book How Not to Network a Nation.