And ‘fastest growing’ always seems to mean ‘up from abject poverty, to roughly modern expectations.’ A massive improvement! But they didn’t rocket past everyone else. Only their first derivative was exceptional.
And outside of monolithic projects like literal rockets, the real seize-the-future stuff was held back by bureaucracy and racist bickering. Early Soviet computers were a matter of which nations were allowed to design and construct them. Competition? Exploration? Nyet, entire industry will be decided by office politics. When they later got their hands on West German microchips, machines like the CM1910 tried to use all of them at once.
The real innovation was in cottage-industry efforts, like jumped-up Sinclair clones and samizdat home publishing, where individuals had the means to produce things. Which I assume the Soviet state wholly supported and encouraged.
And ‘fastest growing’ always seems to mean ‘up from abject poverty, to roughly modern expectations.’ A massive improvement! But they didn’t rocket past everyone else. Only their first derivative was exceptional.
And outside of monolithic projects like literal rockets, the real seize-the-future stuff was held back by bureaucracy and racist bickering. Early Soviet computers were a matter of which nations were allowed to design and construct them. Competition? Exploration? Nyet, entire industry will be decided by office politics. When they later got their hands on West German microchips, machines like the CM1910 tried to use all of them at once.
The real innovation was in cottage-industry efforts, like jumped-up Sinclair clones and samizdat home publishing, where individuals had the means to produce things. Which I assume the Soviet state wholly supported and encouraged.