History of computing |
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The history of computing hardware in the Eastern Bloc is somewhat different from that of the Western world. As a result of the CoCom embargo, computers could not be imported on a large scale from Western Bloc.
Eastern Bloc manufacturers created copies of Western designs based on intelligence gathering and reverse engineering.[1] This redevelopment led to some incompatibilities with International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) and IEEE standards, such as spacing integrated circuit pins at 1⁄10 of a 25 mm length (colloquially a "metric inch") instead of a standard inch of 25.4 mm.[2] This made Soviet chips unsellable on the world market outside the Comecon, and made test machinery more expensive.[3]