[01:00.140 --> 01:01.480]  Good afternoon, everyone.
[01:01.840 --> 01:02.680]  Welcome back.
[01:02.900 --> 01:03.740]  Last day of HOPE.
[01:03.880 --> 01:04.680]  I hope you're all enjoying it.
[01:04.760 --> 01:05.740]  Everyone having a good time still?
[01:07.140 --> 01:08.020]  All right.
[01:08.340 --> 01:09.660]  Are you ready for another great talk?
[01:10.740 --> 01:11.560]  All right.
[01:11.800 --> 01:12.980]  So a couple quick notes.
[01:13.140 --> 01:16.760]  Closing ceremonies at 6 o'clock tonight in this venue.
[01:16.940 --> 01:22.740]  It will be simulcast in the DAC 206, which is on the second floor, instead of a little theater.
[01:22.740 --> 01:27.320]  So if there's not room here, go down to the second floor, go to 206, and there you can see the simulcast.
[01:28.980 --> 01:38.140]  If you have any feedback for the conference, please reach out to us at feedback at hope.net, and leave any comments, criticisms, ideas, whatever you have for us.
[01:38.560 --> 01:39.380]  Stay hydrated.
[01:40.380 --> 01:43.680]  Dorm room checkout for those of you who are staying in the dorms is at 8 p.m. tonight, if you're staying through today, and 2 p.m. tomorrow, if you're staying through tomorrow.
[01:47.980 --> 01:50.640]  So with that, we'll pass you off for the next talk.
[01:50.640 --> 01:56.820]  Revolution During Disintegration, Lessons from a Brief History of Yugoslav Computing by Vlado Vinci.
[01:57.980 --> 01:58.560]  All yours.
[02:03.180 --> 02:04.020]  Thank you so much.
[02:04.220 --> 02:06.180]  And thank you so much for coming, everyone.
[02:07.180 --> 02:09.780]  And I want to just give a huge shout-out to the organizers.
[02:09.980 --> 02:12.720]  This has been a fantastic conference, and it's so good to be back here.
[02:15.060 --> 02:27.920]  So, there's been sort of a series of news stories over the last couple of years, describing how tech companies from certain countries are getting banned from operating in other ones.
[02:28.320 --> 02:35.800]  The famous one being Huawei, the Chinese telecommunications giant that's been banned in the U.S., parts of Europe.
[02:35.800 --> 02:46.040]  And ever since the Russian invasion of Ukraine on February 24th, a huge number of tech companies have stopped doing business in Russia as well.
[02:46.820 --> 03:13.680]  Partially, this has been as part of larger sanctions, but tech in particular has been in the focus as it really is an integral part of so many industries that even, you know, manufacturers of cars depend on so much that the Russian car industry has been largely hit because they can no longer get electronics to put in their cars.
[03:15.140 --> 03:27.580]  Considering the world that we lived in for the last 30 or so years where free trade and communications dominated most of the world, these types of stories are somewhat new to us.
[03:27.680 --> 03:31.100]  But they're not really new in the wider history.
[03:31.780 --> 03:48.320]  Following the end of World War II and through the end of the Cold War, we lived in a block system with really two main warring sides that had very little technical and economic cooperation during this period.
[03:50.520 --> 03:59.380]  The dynamics that were common at this time were soon forgotten as we moved into the 90s.
[03:59.540 --> 04:04.120]  But we might be getting back to some of those.
[04:04.120 --> 04:13.600]  And what I've decided to do today is tell you a story about a country that was somewhere in between during this Cold War period.
[04:13.770 --> 04:15.980]  And that country is Yugoslavia.
[04:16.880 --> 04:23.600]  We're going to take a look at specific technological developments in this country that no longer exists.
[04:23.600 --> 04:37.830]  And then we're going to try to take some lessons for a potential new world that we're moving into that might have a little bit more barriers and borders and limitations than we've gotten used to in the last 30 years.
[04:38.740 --> 04:43.270]  But before I get into that, I'm just going to quickly introduce myself and tell you why I'm telling you about all of this.
[04:43.460 --> 04:44.460]  So this is me.
[04:44.640 --> 04:45.520]  My name is Vlado.
[04:45.710 --> 04:46.940]  I'm a tech worker.
[04:47.100 --> 04:48.210]  I live here in New York.
[04:48.210 --> 04:50.300]  I don't live in midtown Manhattan.
[04:50.560 --> 04:52.020]  I like this view though.
[04:52.560 --> 04:53.710]  I live in Brooklyn.
[04:54.480 --> 04:58.900]  However, I grew up in a small country on the Adriatic coast.
[04:59.100 --> 05:03.600]  That country is now known for people going on their vacations there.
[05:03.800 --> 05:04.700]  It's called Croatia.
[05:05.080 --> 05:11.100]  However, up until 31 or so years, it was called Yugoslavia.
[05:12.300 --> 05:16.760]  And the story of the Yugoslav state is really complicated.
[05:16.760 --> 05:22.180]  So I'm going to try to give you basic facts because I presume a lot of you don't remember it.
[05:22.280 --> 05:24.080]  And some of you may not even know what it was.
[05:25.160 --> 05:27.200]  I'm going to try to do this in three minutes or less.
[05:27.320 --> 05:31.920]  I could probably not do it in three days or 30 days or less, but just bear with me.
[05:34.160 --> 05:37.540]  Yugoslavia was founded after World War I, technically.
[05:37.540 --> 05:43.760]  But we're going to ignore the state that existed there in the brief interwar period.
[05:43.900 --> 05:53.360]  And we're going to focus on the state that was founded after the anti-fascist liberation movement of Yugoslavia liberated the country after World War II.
[05:53.920 --> 06:02.020]  This movement was led by Yugoslav communists, so they also founded a socialist state following the war.
[06:02.020 --> 06:07.760]  This state was aligned with the USSR for a very brief period, about three years.
[06:08.640 --> 06:14.680]  And then Tito, the leader of Yugoslavia, got into a fight with Stalin and we broke off from them.
[06:14.840 --> 06:23.220]  I don't know if this story in the tweet above is true, but that's basically the sentiment that the Yugoslavs had following this split.
[06:23.220 --> 06:46.940]  This was quite significant, because at the time, the world was getting increasingly polarized, and especially so in Europe, where essentially every other socialist country fell under the Iron Curtain, whereas on the western side of the continent, most countries aligned with the United States and NATO.
[06:47.340 --> 06:51.500]  There, of course, were some notable neutral ones, marked in grey over here.
[06:51.500 --> 06:59.260]  But Yugoslavia, as a socialist but not Soviet-aligned country, was quite a bit of an aberration there.
[06:59.980 --> 07:29.460]  Following this split in 1948, Yugoslavia focused on developing its own mode of socialism that very soon started to revolve around this idea of self-management, where instead of kind of doing top-down central control that was very common in the USSR, they would basically develop work theories of how workers could take active decision-making roles within organizations and companies.
[07:29.900 --> 07:39.900]  There's, of course, a lot of debate how successful that was, but it did make it quite different than its pure Eastern Bloc countries.
[07:40.800 --> 07:53.520]  Additionally, starting in the early 50s, collaboration with the United States and Western Europe was rising, both in terms of trade, academia, even military aid.
[07:53.840 --> 07:56.520]  But Yugoslavia never aligned itself with the West.
[07:56.780 --> 08:02.460]  Instead, it sort of tried to exploit this middle ground, and it did so quite well.
[08:04.020 --> 08:19.440]  In the late 50s, early 60s, it founded the non-aligned movement along with Egypt and India and a whole bunch of other countries, most of which were recently independent post-colonial states.
[08:19.840 --> 08:30.040]  And it really tried to use this base to establish itself on the world stage, but also to use it for its own internal development.
[08:30.380 --> 08:45.460]  Similarly, how both NATO and the Warsaw Pact were not just military alliances, but also economic blocks where the countries leading them were using this environment for trade and influence onto others.
[08:45.600 --> 08:46.670]  So did Yugoslavia.
[08:46.670 --> 08:57.290]  So during this period, a lot of the Yugoslav economy is focused on exporting the engineering and other types of expertise into what we now refer to as the Global South.
[08:57.540 --> 09:01.400]  At that time, they called it the Third World, and it wasn't a derogatory term.
[09:01.960 --> 09:07.720]  The Third World at the time was the world that wasn't NATO, and it wasn't the Warsaw Pact.
[09:07.840 --> 09:12.040]  It was everybody else, and there was actually quite a lot of everybody else.
[09:12.840 --> 09:19.020]  Now, Yugoslavia was quite successful in this, but it always had its eyes to the West.
[09:19.550 --> 09:32.460]  In the late 80s, you may have seen the infamous Yugokar, which was the final attempt to break into the United States with Yugoslavia's car industry.
[09:32.680 --> 09:34.290]  This did not work so well.
[09:35.480 --> 09:39.140]  But all of this, of course, ends in war.
[09:39.760 --> 09:57.320]  The scope of this talk is not to talk about the war that followed in the early 90s, but you will see as we get to the later phases of the 80s, the fear of conflict starts to influence everything, including technology.
[09:57.620 --> 09:59.340]  So just keep that in mind.
[09:59.340 --> 10:06.420]  The war in Yugoslavia was a tragedy, and it always...
[10:06.420 --> 10:14.080]  The moments that I'm describing here with tensions in trade, with blocks, there's always this fear of war.
[10:14.260 --> 10:21.340]  And with us living through a time of war right now, I just want us to keep that in mind as we think about computers.
[10:23.920 --> 10:25.220]  Let's talk about computers.
[10:25.840 --> 10:26.040]  Let's talk about computers.
[10:26.380 --> 10:29.600]  I'm going to tell you three distinct stories.
[10:30.200 --> 10:41.900]  The first is going to be about enterprise, which is sort of a weird term, but it's basically going to be a story about what was happening in the actual computer industry in this country.
[10:42.140 --> 10:44.420]  The second one is going to be about normal people.
[10:44.420 --> 10:56.160]  I'm going to tell you a fascinating story about a DIY microcomputer that was developed by a young engineer, essentially as a solution to bring microcomputers to Yugoslavs who couldn't get them.
[10:56.540 --> 10:59.180]  And finally, I'm going to tell you a little bit about networks.
[10:59.420 --> 11:04.240]  And that's a story where those two earlier stories converge.
[11:06.020 --> 11:16.040]  The first story is about Iskra Delta, that I'm going to call a Yugoslav startup, although that is probably not the right and precise term.
[11:16.220 --> 11:36.640]  But it's a company that I think really includes a lot of these interesting dynamics that develop in a country that is at the same time both sort of closed and limited in its access to what is happening in America where the computing revolution is really centered.
[11:36.640 --> 11:46.380]  But it has quite enough access so that it can break through and basically develop its own version of Silicon Valley culture.
[11:46.980 --> 11:50.960]  But before that, let's look at the first Yugoslav computer.
[11:51.220 --> 11:54.640]  So this is the CR-10 mainframe from 1960.
[11:54.780 --> 12:01.540]  This is a vacuum tube mainframe that was developed completely internally and domestically in Yugoslavia.
[12:01.540 --> 12:07.120]  It was finished in 1960 and was used for about 10 years in different types of institutions.
[12:07.420 --> 12:16.340]  This one is from the Tanyug News Agency, but it got some work in the military and generally big, big Yugoslav companies.
[12:16.900 --> 12:24.000]  However, even though in that early phase there were big ambitions to develop a domestic computing industry.
[12:24.200 --> 12:29.040]  And mind you, in 1960, not a lot of countries had something called a computing industry.
[12:30.800 --> 12:32.640]  There's this thing called COCOM.
[12:33.320 --> 12:39.840]  The COCOM was the Coordinating Committee for Multilateral Export Controls, a body of the U.S.
[12:39.980 --> 12:51.600]  government founded soon after World War II, essentially to establish a mechanism to enforce the types of controls that we're talking about here.
[12:51.780 --> 13:06.300]  So when you have a world with an increasing number of countries that are dividing themselves in blocks, an institution like this will help you basically prioritize what you are allowed to sell to whom and under what conditions.
[13:06.900 --> 13:14.820]  It was used to essentially limit export to, of course, the Eastern Bloc, but also a lot of the third-party countries.
[13:15.140 --> 13:29.100]  And Yugoslavia found itself in kind of a good position here as a third-country cooperation country, meaning that while it wasn't a member of COCOM, most members were NATO states and a couple of neutral ones like Switzerland.
[13:30.400 --> 13:37.180]  It was a good enough position that most American companies by the late 60s didn't really have a problem setting up shop.
[13:37.420 --> 13:38.540]  And, of course, they did.
[13:39.940 --> 13:44.460]  The Big Blue was one of the first, but others followed as well.
[13:44.460 --> 13:47.500]  Honeywell, DEC, they were all there.
[13:48.080 --> 13:51.880]  And they kind of did what they do everywhere else.
[13:52.000 --> 13:54.320]  They just take over the internal market.
[13:54.600 --> 14:01.840]  So the domestic Yugoslavia mainframe industry was essentially dead by the early to mid-70s.
[14:02.080 --> 14:06.140]  Companies were increasingly using Western-made computers.
[14:06.520 --> 14:13.060]  These companies would have their representatives, their teams that would install them, support them.
[14:13.060 --> 14:19.720]  And for the most part, it was really led from the outside in.
[14:20.080 --> 14:25.940]  However, a company that had a slightly different approach was Digital Equipment Corporation.
[14:26.380 --> 14:40.000]  And what they did was start forming very close partnerships with certain folks in the country, particularly in the Western Republic of Yugoslavia, Slovenia.
[14:40.000 --> 14:50.460]  And a lot of locals from Yugoslavia ended up going to the U.S. to get trained to support, install, and work on these computers.
[14:50.900 --> 14:57.500]  And they were having such a great time and such a good collaboration that they soon started doing their own work.
[14:57.500 --> 15:07.040]  Initially, under the umbrella of an older, bigger company called Electrotechna, founding their digital department.
[15:07.660 --> 15:16.700]  And soon splitting into their own as Delta, and finally merging with another company called Iskra into Iskra Delta Computers.
[15:16.700 --> 15:22.100]  All of these are just sort of not particularly important details.
[15:22.360 --> 15:43.240]  But what this meant was that suddenly in the late 70s, you have a domestic company that really grew within a couple of years into not only a partner of a big American corporation, but essentially something resembling an OEM.
[15:43.540 --> 15:49.280]  And this partnership was not about cloning or copying equipment.
[15:49.600 --> 15:57.060]  It was about working under license from an American corporation to develop products for the domestic and also export market.
[15:57.900 --> 16:03.220]  By the early 80s, there are Yugoslav versions of the PDP-11.
[16:03.220 --> 16:10.640]  There's two of them, one of them being the PDP-11 that was developed at the Institut Jozef Stefan and the Delta 800.
[16:11.120 --> 16:19.420]  So these are essentially PDP-11 compatibles developed in partnership with an American company.
[16:20.540 --> 16:27.920]  There's licensing agreements and, you know, it's just business as usual, but not something you would expect with a socialist country.
[16:27.920 --> 16:41.500]  They also expand into microcomputers, the two notable examples being the Triglov or the Trident, which was a really interesting machine built to support two different CPUs depending on what you needed.
[16:41.760 --> 16:54.200]  It also had this adorable all-in-one case that also had a special box in the rear for pencils so that you could, you know, access your important tools when you're working on your computer.
[16:55.020 --> 17:03.660]  Unfortunately or fortunately, the trend of multi-CPU as needed trend did not necessarily continue the way the Slovenian experts imagined it.
[17:03.820 --> 17:13.100]  But another more traditional one was the Delta Partner, which was sort of your more typical early 80s micro running on a Z80.
[17:14.340 --> 17:23.340]  The final accomplishment of Iskra Delta was getting a huge contract in China in the mid-1980s.
[17:23.340 --> 17:28.010]  And just to contextualize this, this is a period when China is really only opening up.
[17:28.100 --> 17:34.380]  And in terms of technological development, they're really trying to catch up, and they're trying to catch up very quickly.
[17:34.790 --> 17:42.620]  They somehow stumble upon Iskra Delta at the information technology fair in Zagreb.
[17:42.620 --> 17:56.030]  And they end up hiring Iskra Delta for this huge project, essentially connecting 10 of their largest cities into a network that will be used by the Yugoslav, pardon me, Chinese police.
[17:57.460 --> 18:02.990]  This is sort of an unprecedented project for a company of this scale.
[18:03.400 --> 18:08.850]  The distances between Chinese cities are larger than all of Yugoslavia is.
[18:08.850 --> 18:11.460]  But they actually managed to do it.
[18:11.920 --> 18:20.030]  There's a lot of stories about the details of how they managed to get the licensing to actually operate in the People's Republic of China.
[18:20.680 --> 18:30.310]  But this is sort of the pinnacle of the Yugoslav ICT in this non-aligned period.
[18:30.310 --> 18:39.440]  So they are using this advantage of having a privileged relationship with the United States, of working closely with an American corporation.
[18:39.440 --> 18:49.530]  And then they're basically selling this expertise and building networks and computing environments sort of on the other side.
[18:49.730 --> 19:03.770]  By this point, they're also doing some of those things in other Eastern Bloc countries, since this whole Tito Stalin, very hard and intense split, of course, has gotten a little less intense in the 30 years since it happened.
[19:04.180 --> 19:07.900]  So this is a story about what was happening at the higher level.
[19:08.400 --> 19:09.940]  What was it like for people?
[19:11.300 --> 19:22.810]  I'm going to tell you this story through this amazing history of Galaxia, because, unfortunately, in the early 80s, things were not so great for everyday Yugoslavs.
[19:23.250 --> 19:43.710]  Even though we were accustomed to a higher level, a higher standard of living than our peers in the Eastern Bloc, even though we had the right to travel, we had passports, we could freely travel to the West without visas, a lot of products that folks were really used to in Western Europe and,
[19:43.810 --> 19:53.990]  of course, in America, were just not available to Yugoslavs due to restrictive import policies, some of which were there to protect the domestic industry.
[19:54.460 --> 20:02.660]  Interestingly, even though there was this very developed enterprise computing industry, there was really no microcomputing industry.
[20:02.830 --> 20:08.180]  So in the early 1980s, Yugoslavs really could not buy any computers at home.
[20:08.550 --> 20:09.810]  So what did they do?
[20:09.990 --> 20:12.790]  They would travel to Trieste in Italy.
[20:12.790 --> 20:30.330]  This is the famous Ponterroso Square, where for 30 or so years you could find Yugoslavs from all over the country buying electronics, VCRs, computers, Levi's jeans, anything that wasn't available at home.
[20:30.940 --> 20:35.660]  The trick about this was they couldn't legally bring them home.
[20:35.660 --> 20:43.270]  So this is a comic strip from the period, someone trying to import a ZX Spectrum.
[20:43.940 --> 20:47.290]  The import limitation at the time was 50 Deutschmarks.
[20:47.590 --> 20:52.160]  And not even the ZX Spectrum could be bought for 50 Deutschmarks.
[20:52.160 --> 20:59.640]  So even as late as 1983, Yugoslavs couldn't technically buy microcomputers.
[20:59.790 --> 21:01.700]  And this wasn't great.
[21:01.850 --> 21:11.640]  A lot of them wanted them, but the only way to do them was you either had to have someone living abroad who would bring it to you, or you would go to Trieste and then you would smuggle one.
[21:11.920 --> 21:13.180]  A lot of people smuggled them.
[21:15.640 --> 21:21.010]  However, come the summer of 1983, a wonderful story happens.
[21:21.380 --> 21:26.210]  So the two gentlemen over here are Voja Antonich and Dan Ristanovic.
[21:26.920 --> 21:34.030]  Voja was a young engineer taking a holiday on the Adriatic coast, kind of like in that photo that I showed earlier.
[21:34.770 --> 21:37.210]  And, of course, he didn't want to spend time on the beach.
[21:37.210 --> 21:46.510]  He was hanging out at the hotel, scribbling something in his notebook, and designing a microcomputer on a piece of paper.
[21:47.550 --> 22:03.420]  Meanwhile, Dan Ristanovic was a young magazine editor, journalist, living in Belgrade and working on a special edition of the popular science magazine Galaxia, or Galaxy, that would focus solely on computers.
[22:03.420 --> 22:11.350]  Considering that folks couldn't get computers freely, they wanted to bring the story of computers to them through this magazine.
[22:12.040 --> 22:18.260]  Now, a mutual friend introduced them, and they soon realized they should collaborate on this.
[22:18.850 --> 22:32.090]  So, Voja and Dan spend the next five to six months, and, of course, a lot of other people helping them, working on a special edition of this magazine called Computers in Your Home.
[22:32.790 --> 22:35.180]  Now, what's the deal with the computers in your home?
[22:35.440 --> 22:37.680]  It's a magazine, not a big deal.
[22:38.520 --> 22:40.000]  It wasn't just a magazine.
[22:40.040 --> 22:53.550]  It was basically a large media project that would introduce not just computers, but also instructions and education for folks to build their own computer at home.
[22:53.550 --> 23:06.850]  If they couldn't buy one legally, if they would have to smuggle it from abroad, why not give them a way to obtain all the necessary parts legally, because the computer was designed to be just cheap enough that you can import parts yourself and assemble it,
[23:07.040 --> 23:08.480]  and then make it yourself?
[23:10.070 --> 23:13.070]  So, here's what that computer looked like in terms of configuration.
[23:14.330 --> 23:19.020]  Not unusual for... actually, a little unusual for the mid-80s.
[23:19.200 --> 23:21.790]  Not unusual for the late 70s, early 80s.
[23:21.920 --> 23:38.420]  And what you can notice here is it's definitely a little underpowered, but the reason why it is underpowered is because it's designed precisely so that when you order all of your parts that you need to get from the outside, you're coming just under that 50 Deutsch mark mark.
[23:39.540 --> 23:40.920]  This works really well.
[23:41.540 --> 23:42.700]  Folks got schematics.
[23:43.090 --> 23:45.000]  They get all necessary instructions.
[23:46.280 --> 23:47.980]  They start making them at home.
[23:49.550 --> 23:52.590]  Jova is the man on the right in this picture.
[23:53.160 --> 24:06.540]  He and the team around the magazine spend the next year basically supporting thousands of young, mostly teenage Yugoslavs, desperately waiting for their parts so they can assemble their computers.
[24:07.090 --> 24:19.160]  And they really do more for the development of computing for regular folks than anyone else really up until that period.
[24:19.720 --> 24:30.640]  Some records show that 80,000 to 90,000 issues of this magazine were sold and that at least 10,000 people ended up building a machine.
[24:30.640 --> 24:35.000]  So for a small country like Yugoslavia, this was unprecedented.
[24:35.520 --> 24:41.920]  Thanks to this one project, computers are suddenly and seemingly everywhere.
[24:42.280 --> 24:47.460]  So this is what this magazine looks like.
[24:47.740 --> 24:52.850]  This little piece of paper contains everything necessary for you to build your own computer.
[24:53.140 --> 24:56.620]  So what did I do when the pandemic hit and I was stuck at home?
[24:57.540 --> 24:58.570]  I built one.
[25:02.070 --> 25:02.940]  Thank you.
[25:06.180 --> 25:15.640]  And I built it really mostly following the instructions in this magazine, which is fascinating to me because folks were doing this 40 years ago.
[25:15.860 --> 25:20.180]  I had the whole of the Internet and human knowledge at my fingertips.
[25:20.180 --> 25:24.820]  They had the magazine, but they still attempted and succeeded in doing it.
[25:25.480 --> 25:27.180]  You can also do it yourself.
[25:27.260 --> 25:41.280]  And I just want to give a shout out to North Search Press because down on the lower level, they have this wonderful POC or GTFO Volume 2 book where there's a full translation in English with all the instructions.
[25:41.280 --> 25:42.880]  And you can do it today.
[25:43.540 --> 25:45.920]  You can also get the PCB today.
[25:46.940 --> 25:52.720]  And VOYA, 40 years later, is still updating the instructions now on Hackaday.
[25:53.220 --> 25:56.440]  So check out the references at the end of the presentation if you want to build one.
[25:58.680 --> 26:13.300]  However, this project was so successful that by the end of 1984, the law that limited the import of computers from abroad is expressly changed and everybody is just getting their ZX Spectrums and Commodore 64s.
[26:13.620 --> 26:40.160]  So this is very indicative of this dynamic where the limitations imposed on the folks and the limitations that really cause this burst of creativity and ultimately success, they sort of end up defeating themselves in that by being so successful, the limitations are then taken away and none of that domestic ingenuity is really necessary.
[26:40.480 --> 26:44.660]  I think that is quite an interesting, bittersweet, a little bit beautiful dynamic.
[26:45.220 --> 26:48.180]  It also results in some bizarre instances.
[26:48.180 --> 27:01.360]  So even though the limitations for folks to import this and buy this stuff themselves were dropped, Yugoslav schools were still under a mandate to purchase domestically produced computers.
[27:01.660 --> 27:03.680]  So what did one company do?
[27:05.280 --> 27:15.220]  They put in ZX Spectrums into a keyboard case and ended up making a really good keyboard for the ZX Spectrum, but essentially selling a domestic computer that's made in the UK.
[27:16.200 --> 27:18.160]  Now, this is not a clone.
[27:19.080 --> 27:22.100]  Yugoslavs could get, by this point, real ZX Spectrums.
[27:22.160 --> 27:27.240]  So Sinclair was just selling them the boards and they were putting them in this case.
[27:29.640 --> 27:32.940]  What happens with the networks at the same time?
[27:33.580 --> 27:37.860]  We've looked at what was happening at a high level in enterprise.
[27:37.860 --> 27:41.240]  We looked at what happened with regular folks.
[27:41.480 --> 27:49.080]  By the mid-1980s, computers are becoming sort of easy enough to access for folks like you and me.
[27:49.520 --> 28:03.840]  But even though we can now access computers and even though we have a computing industry sophisticated enough to develop a large-scale network in China, what's happening in our own country?
[28:04.700 --> 28:07.440]  Let's take a look at what's happening in Europe and the U.S.
[28:07.500 --> 28:08.140]  at the same time.
[28:09.200 --> 28:11.220]  They are trying to figure out what they're going to go with.
[28:12.200 --> 28:14.740]  TCP/IP is gaining traction in the U.S.
[28:14.740 --> 28:22.060]  The Europeans are really stuck on the ISI model and X.25 really through the 1980s.
[28:23.420 --> 28:24.580]  And the Yugoslavs?
[28:24.640 --> 28:27.680]  Well, we're just trying to figure things out very slowly.
[28:28.780 --> 28:41.000]  In the 70s, they work on the SNTI-J or the System Nauczno-Technologickich Informatii Yugoslavia, which is basically a way to connect libraries.
[28:41.420 --> 28:42.820]  It doesn't really go very far.
[28:42.820 --> 28:45.820]  Through the 80s, academic institutions...
[28:46.360 --> 28:51.700]  And mind you, academic institutions from different parts of the country are trying different things.
[28:52.040 --> 28:55.960]  But they're connecting to different types of European networks.
[28:56.260 --> 29:02.840]  Some examples are the Euronet, EUNet, EARN.
[29:03.360 --> 29:13.090]  That one's actually quite interesting because it actually provides a connection to the American BITNET, which can then provide you sort of a connection to the wider Internet.
[29:13.650 --> 29:16.070]  This is based on IBM technology.
[29:17.010 --> 29:28.850]  In the very late 80s, there's also UNet and UNAC, which eventually end up being the projects that finally connect the Yugoslavs to the Internet, literally as the country falls apart.
[29:30.990 --> 29:35.610]  In 1991, this is what the networked world looked like.
[29:35.830 --> 29:54.170]  The countries in purple are directly connected to the Internet, and then the countries in red, which Yugoslavia is one of, sort of have a connection to the Internet through these X.25 or proprietary networks like the IBM VNet.
[29:54.970 --> 30:00.110]  Basically, most of the world is not online in a sense that we know it today.
[30:00.110 --> 30:19.970]  But an interesting project that emerges in the early 80s is the UPAC or the Yugoslav Packet Switching Network, which develops as this sort of very top-down bureaucratic project being developed by the Yugoslav Post Telegraph and Telephone Service.
[30:19.970 --> 30:37.090]  And it sort of struggles along, and it mainly struggles along because, just like everything else in Yugoslavia at the time, and this is definitely sort of announcing some things to come, every republic is developing this project independently.
[30:37.790 --> 30:49.610]  So, out of the six republics, each one sort of goes through their own process of identifying the vendor, hiring them, developing this network, and UPAC really struggles along.
[30:49.610 --> 30:51.670]  The project starts in 1983.
[30:52.370 --> 30:58.070]  It's operational in Slovenia by 86, Croatia by 87, Serbia by 89.
[30:58.470 --> 31:00.850]  Most of the rest of the country is never connected.
[31:01.050 --> 31:09.490]  But here you can see, you know, in the initial 1983 plans, they were supposed to cover the whole country with this X.25 network.
[31:10.050 --> 31:12.330]  Trunks were 64 kilobits.
[31:13.210 --> 31:17.170]  It wasn't a fast network, but it was a packet-switching network.
[31:17.170 --> 31:22.110]  And UPAC sort of just stays in the background as a project.
[31:22.310 --> 31:25.670]  Nobody's actually actively using it almost until the very end.
[31:26.570 --> 31:29.810]  And the very end comes around 89, 90.
[31:29.810 --> 31:34.310]  The woman in the picture is Borca Jerman Blazic.
[31:35.030 --> 31:45.090]  She is a researcher in Slovenia who was working in the late 80s, basically doing academic research on networks.
[31:45.350 --> 31:49.130]  And she went to a conference in Santa Fe, probably 88.
[31:50.250 --> 31:52.790]  And she has this quote.
[31:52.930 --> 31:58.170]  She said, I saw how terribly deprived we were in comparison to others.
[31:58.330 --> 32:10.270]  And this is a reference to her seeing her colleagues, and even her European colleagues, whip up their luggable computers and connect to their emails from the United States.
[32:10.270 --> 32:23.890]  Meanwhile, since her university and her sort of very limited email really had no connections to the outside, she could just sort of sit there and wait.
[32:24.310 --> 32:29.270]  She comes home, and she registers the .YU domain.
[32:29.270 --> 32:37.150]  This is in 1989, and this is probably the 20th or so country-level, top-level domain.
[32:38.070 --> 32:47.270]  She registered sit with IANA, and she starts working on finally connecting our country to the wider Internet.
[32:48.090 --> 32:57.870]  This is a dramatic process that is really happening through the moments that the country is rapidly disintegrating.
[32:59.690 --> 33:04.650]  There's basically a number of bureaucratic steps that need to be taken.
[33:05.150 --> 33:11.630]  And the jurisdictions are starting to get sort of mixed up between different republics.
[33:11.730 --> 33:13.550]  She is taking planes to Belgrade.
[33:13.730 --> 33:15.750]  She's meeting with security services.
[33:16.010 --> 33:18.470]  But, you know, she keeps this going.
[33:18.610 --> 33:22.270]  And of course, there's a number of other colleagues working on this as well.
[33:22.590 --> 33:26.190]  They get their primary DNS server at UC Berkeley.
[33:26.190 --> 33:33.430]  And in late 1990, they make a request for the first IP range for Yugoslavia.
[33:33.590 --> 33:35.010]  And this is soon delivered.
[33:37.450 --> 33:43.410]  Meanwhile, the country sort of doesn't even exist anymore in a full sense.
[33:43.550 --> 33:47.470]  There is basically open revolt between the republics.
[33:47.470 --> 33:59.350]  The last Congress of the Yugoslav Communist Party is dissolved as the Croatian Slovenian delegates leave and protest.
[34:00.290 --> 34:05.370]  And while this is happening, they actually make a connection to the Internet.
[34:05.370 --> 34:11.050]  They connect to TCP/IP via X.25 through a node in Vienna.
[34:11.390 --> 34:13.450]  And then the war starts.
[34:15.530 --> 34:27.670]  The June 25th, 1991 proclamation of independence of Slovenia and Croatia prompts a 10-day war in Slovenia that begins on June 27th.
[34:27.670 --> 34:32.590]  And one of the first targets are the transmitters on the border with Austria.
[34:32.970 --> 34:36.730]  This actually interrupts this Internet connection for the first time.
[34:36.930 --> 34:38.330]  It's eventually repaired.
[34:38.370 --> 34:48.070]  And over the next couple of months, there's this sort of no man's land in terms of the Internet as the countries are basically becoming independent.
[34:48.070 --> 34:51.770]  But the infrastructure is still interconnected.
[34:53.190 --> 35:15.470]  Recently, there was a fantastic talk at the RIPE NCC Southeast Europe conference in Ljubljana, where Jelena Chosic and Slobodan Markovic presented this graph really showing the relationship between assignment of IP ranges to what was happening as the country was disintegrating.
[35:15.470 --> 35:25.870]  So, we can kind of see how Slovenia declares independence and IP range is given to University of Belgrade.
[35:26.890 --> 35:34.850]  UNAC, this project from the 80s that was supposed to bring the Internet to Yugoslavia, gets its first subnet in September 91.
[35:35.110 --> 35:40.030]  Mind you, at this point, war is actively going on in Croatia.
[35:40.030 --> 35:45.230]  Croatia then declares independence in October after a three-month moratorium.
[35:46.090 --> 35:56.710]  And April 1992, when the war in Bosnia starts, is generally used as the point where this country really and fully no longer exists.
[35:56.910 --> 36:05.150]  And then we can start to see how additional IP assignments are actually getting assigned to individual countries.
[36:05.150 --> 36:13.450]  So, in May of 1992, a first IP range is given to Carnet, which becomes the academic network in Croatia.
[36:14.570 --> 36:19.290]  We're not going to talk about this further because, at this point, Yugoslavia is no more.
[36:19.870 --> 36:26.130]  I'm going to give you just a quick little story about what is happening to everyday folks at this time.
[36:26.130 --> 36:28.690]  So, we're going to go back just a couple of years.
[36:30.110 --> 36:37.990]  All of these big academic networks are inaccessible in a similar way that a PDP-11 was inaccessible.
[36:38.030 --> 36:43.610]  And what Iskra Delta was doing wasn't necessarily relevant for everyday folks in their everyday life.
[36:43.610 --> 37:02.210]  But, in the late 80s, first BBSs started appearing in Yugoslavia, the most famous of which is probably the SESAM BBS, which, funnily enough, was founded, among others, by Dan Ristanovic of the Rationario Vasekucci and Galaxia fame.
[37:02.430 --> 37:03.890]  So, everything sort of comes together.
[37:05.770 --> 37:13.010]  And, interestingly enough, SESAM is still sort of offline, except I've been unable to get credentials for it.
[37:13.010 --> 37:17.510]  Someone is running it on a VM, where apparently everything is still kept.
[37:17.830 --> 37:23.630]  But I was lucky enough to obtain this instructions manual from the late 80s.
[37:24.050 --> 37:33.030]  So, everyday Yugoslavs do start talking to one another in the late 80s over BBSs, and they start getting spun up around the country.
[37:33.250 --> 37:36.830]  There's probably a couple of thousand people talking at this time.
[37:36.830 --> 37:53.450]  And they do transcend these Republic borders at a time when, politically, these Republics that will soon become independent countries, are really drifting apart in major ways that eventually end up in war.
[37:53.450 --> 38:10.690]  There are some messages that you can find online, the authenticity of which is somewhat difficult to confirm, that basically show you the types of interactions that we're sort of used to seeing nowadays on Twitter, when conflict like the war in Ukraine happens,
[38:10.870 --> 38:13.790]  where people are arguing about what is real and what is not.
[38:13.790 --> 38:22.790]  And we actually have examples of that from 1991, as the wars in Yugoslavia are just getting started.
[38:23.410 --> 38:26.530]  But there are some positive stories there, too.
[38:27.610 --> 38:40.290]  In the spring of 1992, the war in Slovenia is over, the war in Croatia is ongoing, the war in Bosnia is just getting started, and communication is becoming increasingly difficult.
[38:41.050 --> 38:53.550]  The phone lines are working only sometimes, other forms of communications like transportation, you can no longer take the train, you can no longer drive to the countries that are now at war.
[38:54.030 --> 39:15.150]  So, a couple of anti-war groups get connected to some of these remaining BBS operators, and they organize them into the Zamir Transnational Network, Zamir meaning for peace, which gets started essentially as a link between folks in Croatia and Serbia,
[39:15.150 --> 39:25.510]  which are now essentially at war, so they can talk to their friends, they can collaborate so that people fighting against the war can collaborate across these borders.
[39:26.890 --> 39:38.570]  And 1994, they also make a connection to Sarevo, which at this time is under siege for two years, and communication is increasingly difficult.
[39:38.790 --> 39:44.610]  So they basically provide a first public link outside this city for regular citizens.
[39:44.930 --> 39:51.430]  And just as a reminder, tens of thousands of people were living in Sarevo during this siege.
[39:51.430 --> 39:56.930]  And they also make a connection to the Internet, of course.
[39:57.090 --> 40:15.470]  So even though folks are basically talking through what is, by this point, an old-school BBS, the communication becomes global and your messages and emails can get from occupied Sarevo to New York or anywhere else within less than 24 hours.
[40:15.470 --> 40:22.190]  And this becomes incredibly important for basically doing humanitarian work such as missing persons service.
[40:22.430 --> 40:28.090]  So you have hundreds of folks looking for their loved ones who may have become refugees themselves.
[40:28.350 --> 40:32.330]  And this is a truly important link at this time.
[40:32.330 --> 40:50.870]  And it really comes back from that initial hobbyist movement that originally started by folks trying to build their own computers, folks that eventually ended up building their BBSs, and essentially acquiring the expertise necessary to provide what, at this point,
[40:51.570 --> 40:54.230]  is such an important service in war.
[40:56.530 --> 40:58.870]  So what are the lessons of all of this?
[41:00.750 --> 41:17.570]  I consider making these types of comparisons very complicated and not necessarily simple enough as saying the sanctions we're seeing right now are like the embargoes during the Cold War.
[41:17.670 --> 41:18.350]  That is not true.
[41:18.730 --> 41:27.510]  The needs of folks in occupied territories in Ukraine are not the same as the needs were for folks in these other wars.
[41:27.510 --> 41:29.370]  These wars are not the same.
[41:30.850 --> 41:38.790]  However, I'm going to try to make a couple of assumptions and a couple of things that maybe can help us as we think through this.
[41:39.950 --> 41:55.310]  When we think about sanctions and we think about limitations on import, I think what we can surmise from this story of Iskra Delta, from the story of their business in China, is technology finds a way and countries find a way to obtain what they need.
[41:55.970 --> 42:01.850]  That doesn't mean that sanctions are always unjust or that you shouldn't do them.
[42:02.390 --> 42:14.630]  It's just that it is quite complicated to make them successful, especially in a world that has different types of sort of intermediary relationships and countries that are sort of in this middle ground status.
[42:14.630 --> 42:26.330]  And I think we're seeing that right now as a lot of the world that is not aligned and allied with NATO directly is sort of taking a metal ground with sanctions on Russia.
[42:27.470 --> 42:41.390]  When we look at the story of Galaxia, I think we see how concepts like open source and hacker culture that have been associated with the Silicon Valley in America for so long.
[42:41.510 --> 42:42.270]  They exist everywhere.
[42:42.510 --> 42:49.190]  And under specific conditions, they really come out in really creative and unique ways.
[42:49.510 --> 42:58.330]  And in a certain way, they are no different, regardless of the system that they got started and developed in.
[42:58.330 --> 43:19.610]  And lastly, by looking at this story about Yugoslav networking, but especially these efforts to connect during the war and provide valuable services for people impacted by war, I think there's something important for us to consider about maintaining connections with others even during times of war.
[43:20.310 --> 43:29.250]  This is hard and emotional, especially when we're dealing with conflicts where we can clearly identify aggressors.
[43:29.530 --> 43:34.910]  But we have to remember that not everyone is responsible.
[43:35.310 --> 43:42.310]  And the fact that someone comes from a country that may attack another country does not mean that they are the ones doing it.
[43:43.210 --> 43:44.810]  It's a complicated story.
[43:45.310 --> 44:05.310]  But I hope that some of these examples are interesting enough for you to consider them as you look at news, as you look at current events, as you think about what the role of technology can be moving forward, and how we can all together use it for good.
[44:05.310 --> 44:07.650]  So, thank you so much.
[44:08.190 --> 44:12.230]  My different Internet locations are up here.
[44:12.430 --> 44:20.790]  I have sort of an obsessive number of Twitter threads, if that is your platform about this and many other topics.
[44:21.470 --> 44:26.110]  And lastly, I'm going to post this on Twitter after the talk.
[44:26.270 --> 44:31.970]  Here is a sort of a growing bibliography that can help you get started.
[44:31.970 --> 44:33.330]  Thank you so much.
[44:33.570 --> 44:35.510]  And I will take any questions you might have.
[44:35.650 --> 44:36.010]  Thanks all.
[44:44.860 --> 44:46.180]  All right, audience questions.
[44:46.360 --> 44:47.240]  We have about five minutes.
[44:51.590 --> 44:53.890]  We have at least one question from the matrix chat.
[44:54.190 --> 44:55.590]  And excuse me for the pronunciation.
[44:56.330 --> 44:57.430]  Greetings from Skopje.
[44:58.150 --> 45:00.650]  How did you come across the information for this talk?
[45:00.830 --> 45:04.470]  And are there any interesting media or documentaries you could point us to?
[45:05.270 --> 45:07.010]  Yeah, thank you so much for this question.
[45:07.090 --> 45:08.350]  This is actually a great question.
[45:09.230 --> 45:16.010]  The information for this talk, and again, a lot of this is in here, but this is only a fraction of what I've used.
[45:16.830 --> 45:19.230]  A lot of this information is very hard to obtain.
[45:21.950 --> 45:29.550]  Most of it comes from materials in Serbo-Croatian or BCS, Bosnian and Serbian Croatian.
[45:31.750 --> 45:39.130]  The information about Yugoslav computing is mostly limited to folks who are from that country.
[45:39.510 --> 45:44.490]  And it mostly can be found on obscure forums, Facebook groups.
[45:44.690 --> 45:46.010]  But there's a couple of exceptions.
[45:46.010 --> 45:58.530]  So, a good resource to getting started is the aforementioned Racunariu Vasekuchi magazine, which you can find a copy of in one of these links.
[45:58.770 --> 46:05.590]  And if you don't speak Bosnian and Serbian Croatian, there's also this great book by No Start Press.
[46:05.590 --> 46:08.790]  There's a couple of documentaries.
[46:09.350 --> 46:14.490]  Most recently, there's been a crowd-funded documentary about the Galaxia computer in particular.
[46:14.850 --> 46:17.170]  You should just Google it, Galaxia documentary.
[46:17.790 --> 46:25.590]  There's a great talk at the CCC, probably 2014, that you can find on YouTube.
[46:26.390 --> 46:28.990]  So, it's sort of a mix of things.
[46:28.990 --> 46:38.870]  What I've really been trying to do with my work is to expand access to this by almost exclusively talking, tweeting, and writing about it in English.
[46:39.130 --> 46:53.830]  So, I'm hoping more folks can access it that way and we can develop additional interest and perhaps produce some works that really summarize this a little bit better than just sort of like going through all these loose sources.
[46:57.840 --> 47:04.440]  So, you talked about how Yugoslavia was an importer of Western technology.
[47:04.680 --> 47:10.380]  But I'm curious whether much went the other direction in its status as a sort of intermediary.
[47:10.560 --> 47:16.440]  Did the West try to exfiltrate Russian or Eastern Bloc tech through Yugoslavia?
[47:17.380 --> 47:18.640]  That's a great question.
[47:18.920 --> 47:24.740]  To my knowledge, specifically in the realm of computing technology, that wasn't actually the case.
[47:24.740 --> 47:38.060]  It's the primary reason being that Yugoslavia, to my knowledge, didn't really get any Soviet computing technology for, you know, obvious reason that it was really, at that time, quite behind.
[47:38.860 --> 47:42.060]  It is possible that this happened in some other areas.
[47:42.770 --> 47:47.500]  The Yugoslavs worked extensively in later years in the Eastern Bloc.
[47:47.500 --> 48:03.500]  But I'm actually not familiar with any cases where, for example, a Soviet computer would get to the United States through Yugoslavia for the simple fact that almost no Soviet computers would actually get imported into Yugoslavia in the first place.
[48:04.500 --> 48:05.240]  Thank you.
[48:05.720 --> 48:06.760]  Yeah, thanks for that question.
[48:11.150 --> 48:11.870]  All right.
[48:11.950 --> 48:12.550]  Any other questions?
[48:15.030 --> 48:15.630]  Great.
[48:15.850 --> 48:17.190]  Thank you so much for the talk, Vlado.
[48:17.630 --> 48:18.030]  Thank you.
[48:18.030 --> 48:18.690]  Thank you so much, everyone.