[rescue] Cold War hardware movements - was Re: WTB: Functioning VAX machine

[Yuri K]

Yes, they sabotaged it so well.. Even the current President still has
his Sputnik moment.
Every time either side was caught by surprise they would come up with
this lame excuse: "we intentionally let them have it.."

b
People never lie so much as after a hunt, during a war or before an
election.b
 von Bismarck

I was actually privileged to work with some excellent gents from
Institute of Cybernetics in Tallinn in mid-1980s for a very short
period of time.
At that time it was Estonian Soviet Socialist Republic, and my crew
was installing Soviet copycats of Yugo Wang copycats all over the
place:
nuclear installation in non-existent cities in Siberia, R&D, atomic
power plants, etc. We were from Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic.
That particular institute was very strong, at the moment the dept we
worked on was reverse engineering everything KGB could steal from IBM
in Amsterdam.
It was a pleasure working with the fellows. Still remember surprising
one of them by setting "ejola_venelane" passcode for one of the
machines.

That brings some memories of Bulgarian disk drives, Czech chips and
East German printers