Thread: How do Russians and others normally switch between Latin and non-Latin keyboards?

Originally Posted by Throbert McGee

P.S. The photos of vintage computers reminded me of this classic one-liner:

Наши советские микрокомпьютеры самые большие в мире, и советские часы - самые быстрые!
Our Soviet microcomputers are the largest in the world, and Soviet watches are the fastest!

[A "boast" that has been apocryphally attributed to Brezhnev and others, though I don't think there's any evidence of any Soviet leader ever saying it! ]

Well I cannot compare Ural or BESM to the foreign analogs, but given they were exported worldwide, they were not that bad. The ЕС ЭВМ was a copy of an IBM-produced prototype so it was not larger nor smaller than IBM-produced analogs.

You can also consider a Soviet "pocket-pc" Elektronika MK-90/92/96.




It had a 16-bit processor, graphical display and embeeded BASIC interpreter.

You could also attach it to a dock station and connect to an external display and printer.


Of course this thing was much more expensive than the БК-0010 which had a similar processor and amount of memory.

Originally Posted by Throbert McGee

Yes, and what a baffling mystery!
Are you totally unaware of the beneficial effects seen under Lenin's "New Economic Policy" -- when private entrepreneurship (on a small scale) was temporarily "unbanned", in violation of orthodox Marxist thought? Are you equally unaware of what happened when Stalin ended the NEP and ushered in the "Five Year Plans"?

Well in that case you should also account what happened in 1990s in Russia after transition to Capitalism.
Demographics and natural population growth:

Industrial production:


(1-Russia, 2-Kaliningrad oblast)
This happened not only in Russia. For comparison, population of Estonia:

Population of Latvia:

Population of Ukraine:


Tuberculosis rate in Russia:

Okay, record me as old programmer too.
My first computer (I bought it for big money):
Электроника МК-61 — Википедия

and the second (it was in university, I was allowed for 2 hours per week):
Искра-1256 — Википедия

Originally Posted by Valda

Russian/Grammar/Genitive case - Wikibooks, open books for an open world



"There are no books"
"This is not a rare phenomenon"

What's the difference?

Oh, but these are English!

You wrote "двуязычие не редкого явления" (never mind that you originally used the dative ending). The correction was "двуязычие - не редкое явление".

In this expression you say "A is not (does not equal) B". Such expressions use "не" in Russian, and both A and B are in nominative case. This is your "This is not a rare phenomenon".

In "There are no books" you make no comparison, but you deny the existence or presence of books. Russian does this with нет and genitive: нет книг. In Russian you use negation and genitive to express that something is not there or that something is not being done or hasn't been done: что ты делал? (Я делал) ничего особенного. But for A is not B you simply use nominative.

Furthermore you should note the dash in the correction which is used in Russian where a form of "быть" (which used to exist but no longer does) is dropped. To make matters worse, as soon as you do use a form of быть B turns instrumental: он - (не) хороший учитель : он (не) был хорошим учителем.

Only if you say that there is or was no good teacher in general, genitive enters the picture: нет хорошего учителя : не было хорошего учителя. Note было, it was, the verb does not agree grammatically to the noun phrase which follows, as it would in some other languages (frex German), but to a non-disclosed neutral grammatical subject.

Disclaimer: while I am pretty sure this is correct I am no native speaker of Russian or English.

Disclaimer disclaimer: As no cries of outrage have been heard yet and I did receive a reputation comment on this by Lampada this post seems to be not too far off the mark.

Originally Posted by maxmixiv

Okay, record me as old programmer too.
My first computer (I bought it for big money):
Электроника МК-61 — Википедия

Well MK-61 is definitely not a computer.

To make matters worse, as soon as you do use a form of быть B turns instrumental: он - (не) хороший учитель : он (не) был хорошим учителем.

This is because you use past. If you use present "Он не есть хороший учитель" you use nominative.

I am not in the mood to argue ideology or world politics with Throbert McGee this beautiful morning, as I am off to pick mushrooms!

Not that it is anyones concern, but I am not some starry-eyed communist who thinks that the USSR was a fantastic worker's state etc, etc. Additionally I have been Christian all my life which means I have a certain natural reservation against it. But this said, I do think that the USSR is far too harshly judged in Western countries and that it had a lot of very good sides. It went through phases and was not a static entity, so the situation varied. And anyway, who are we to cast stones, eh? Particularly, IMHO, Americans!

Primarily I think that it is for the Russians and others from the ex USSR area to judge or praise this experiment which took place in their country. Particularly those who have their own memories of this time.

My only response to your comment would be that surely it is much more relevant to hear what the "eyewitnesses" have to say, rather than regurgitate 25 year old propaganda from the other side of the planet...! And I personally suspect the fluent English speaking Russians here are more pro-West than the majority of Russians, so what people are saying here is probably fairly nuanced. Why don't you ask questions instead of telling the rest of us what the answers are?

Originally Posted by Throbert McGee

AFAIK, it's not a question of "know-how," really -- it has more to do with (a) labor costs, and (b) "exporting" high-pollution manufacturing processes abroad.

Because , God forbid, you would not want to have production of essential equipment in your own country and actually create jobs that generate tangible value. Right? Let the Chinese have all that, as long as the American shareholders and banks get their profits.

Anyway, according to an article I read a couple of years ago, this IS a problem. It is an extremely specialised industry. Setting up factories for this, is an enormous investment in time/money. Staffing them is a massive challenge because it is such a specialised skill. At this point, you'd have to initially bring people in from Asia if you wanted somebody with hands-on and contemporary experience of commercial production. A sort of reversed corporate expat situation. Additionally, the rare earth elements needed for producing computer components are commercially mined only in China. China is exercising increasingly tight control on trade with them.

In a situation where the dollar lost a lot of value, or the USA had a big falling out with East Asia, you literally would not be able to get hold of new computers. Or more precisely, certain essential computer parts. Without computers, your country would essentially stop working. Obviously the situation is the same in Europe. Whereas China nowadays, no matter what happens, can build a computer from scratch even if its currency lost all its value (which seems unlikely anyway).

622px-153056995_5ef8b01016_o.jpg

PS - For the record - Bitpicker is a programmer too! And Crocodile!

Originally Posted by Throbert McGee

Yes, and what a baffling mystery!

Are you totally unaware of the beneficial effects seen under Lenin's "New Economic Policy" -- when private entrepreneurship (on a small scale) was temporarily "unbanned", in violation of orthodox Marxist thought? Are you equally unaware of what happened when Stalin ended the NEP and ushered in the "Five Year Plans"?

Or do you just stubbornly refuse to draw any lessons from these historical observation, lest you be forced to admit that, maybe, Communism is more than an ounce worse than Capitalism? I mean, it's one thing to admire Soviet technical proficiency, and to correct Westerners who underestimate Soviet science. But it's another thing to totally shut your eyes to -- for example -- what a total f**king backwards embarrassment the Soviet agricultural sector was, for most or all of the USSR's history.

Yet when one breezily says "The capitalist system is not one ounce better," you ARE shutting your eyes to the degrading effects that communist theories had on various sectors of the Soviet economy.

(At some point, this pretense of being "unbiased" and "not buying into US propaganda" crosses from intelligent historical skepticism into пошлость -- or at least, Nabokov once said this, and I agree with his point.)

Че-то после прихода капитализма в Россию сельское хозяйство в ней не выросло, как впрочем и многие другие сферы экономики. А то, что морю стран с правом частной собственности и предпринимательства до советского уровня развития как до Луны, не учитывается?

Originally Posted by Hanna

PS - For the record - Bitpicker is a programmer too! And Crocodile!

Nah, I'm more of an IT-jack-of-all-trades-but-programming.

Can script bash or perl with the help of tutorials, but that's it.

Sorry Robin, I really thought you were - must have remembered wrongly!

@Anixx - I am completely speechless by those graphs. I really would not have thought it was like that. I thought that the USSR was running poorly quite poorly during the last years, of its existance, and that perestroika was an attempt at fixing that, which went out of hand, so to speak. But these graphs at least, appear to show that problems started either at the start of glasnost, or in 1992. Either way, whatever came after looks grimmer, sort of "the cure is worse than the illness".

The Estonia / Latvia graphs must be partly down to migration of Russians. But not the one from Ukraine though, which was the more obvious one. The TB curve was terrible. I thought there was vaccination against that. And production. Surely producing *something* even if it is not the latest fashion/greatest quality, or whatever the problem with Soviet production was... must be better than just closing down the factories.

@Throbert, regarding Eastern European agriculture: Sure, you can do it a lot more efficiently than they did. But at the price of losing hundreds of thousands of jobs, in the case of the USSR. Perhaps they did not want that, or saw a strong need? After all, there WAS food for everyone - surely that is the ultimate goal of agriculture?

The agriculture/food industry you have in the USA is using GM crops, is ruthlessly exploiting third world farmers (which the USSR never did), while shamelessly subsidising your own farmers. It is creating a ridiculous superflux which means people are stuffing themselves with twice as much food as they need, and unhealthy food as that. It is making Americans fatter and unhealthier than any other industrial nation. I wouldn't hold up that type of system as an ideal.

Iit is not feasible for all countries to have this type of agriculture/food industry anyway. Only a small minority of countries can, since the exploiting nations need to have poorer, less successful countries to exploit... And keep them that way. If cheap imports stop, the system fails. And while I am pointing out the USA as the most extreme example of this, the same trend exists in Western Europe, although not quite as glaringly obvious.

The Eastern European system allowed them to keep people employed, doing something useful, feeding everybody and only importing foods that they genuinely could not grow themselves for climate reasons. I consider that as an achievement, even though technologically there was probably room for improvement.

Originally Posted by Anixx

Well MK-61 is definitely not a computer.

Why not? I had learnt main programming construct with it. Conditional jumps, loops, indirect addressing...

Originally Posted by xdns

Every keyboard in Russia already has Cyrillic and Latin letters on it.

Помню случай. Лет 8 назад главный босс нашей компании дал распоряжение купить подарок для американского партнёра. Навороченный и крутой ноутбук. Купили, а там обычные клавиши (русско-латинские). А зачем американцу русские буковки? Пришлось отдельно заказывать клавиши с одной латиницей и втыкать их в ноутбук.

Originally Posted by Юрка

Помню случай. Лет 8 назад главный босс нашей компании дал распоряжение купить подарок для американского партнёра. Навороченный и крутой ноутбук. Купили, а там обычные клавиши (русско-латинские). А зачем американцу русские буковки? Пришлось отдельно заказывать клавиши с одной латиницей и втыкать их в ноутбук.

Ну и зря. Сувенир, экзотика. Мог бы потом перед коллегами хвастаться, что русский знает - вон даже ноут с кракозябрами.

Originally Posted by it-ogo

Ну и зря. Сувенир, экзотика. Мог бы потом перед коллегами хвастаться, что русский знает - вон даже ноут с кракозябрами.

Может быть, но наш босс очень осторожный и не креативный. Его конёк - это нужные связи и отношения, а не креатив.

Originally Posted by Hanna

am completely speechless by those graphs. I really would not have thought it was like that. I thought that the USSR was running poorly quite poorly during the last years, of its existance, and that perestroika was an attempt at fixing that, which went out of hand, so to speak.

This is because of the so called "shock therapy" promoted by American economists which were councillors on free market at the time, which promised that a fast and a sudden transition to capitalism ("shock") would cure Russia. They listened them and everythign only got worse. I think if they'd stick to a more gradual transition, then we wouldn't have the present situation. Now try not to think about some kind of American Anti-Russian conspiracy to ruin our country that was involved in that shock therapy advice we naively followed.

Well I agree with you car - your country was sold out unfortunately. Why it happened, how and who was behind it, I couldn't say. Definitely it would have been less likely to happen if the country had been better run. But what happened at the demise of the USSR was surely daylight robbery and not in the interest of the majority of decent people. At least things are much better now. But with the death of the USSR an inspiring ideal was shattered, a people robbed not to mention all the ethnic troubles that the USSR kept the lid on, which exploded afterwards. I can't even imagine the confusing feelings and frustration I would have, had something similar happened to my country.

On the USA conspiracy angle -- well I am not big on conspiracy theories and at the end of the day, a country is responsible for its own fate. But it is not even a secret that the CIA has a big section for propaganda, agitation and psy-ops and it is 100% certain that the USSR was the main target for any capabilities they had in that area. If there was anything they could do to damage the USSR and further their own financial interests they did it - how much damage that really did, I wouldn't know.

My degree is actually in Political Science and from that perspective I find the experiences of the ex USSR area in the 90s until now very fascinating, but like I said, tragic too... I am glad that things are are looking brighter and people are better off.