On 11 May 02 at 3:11, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: >Reply to Sender: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] >Reply to List: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] > >On Sat, 11 May 2002 14:38:50 +0000, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > >> What's with these Czechs? >> They are doing such interesting stuff! > >I agree ! >Maybe someone in Czland would care to explain why there seems to be >so much more unusual software coming out of their country than their >neighbors ? > >Did MICHAEL start this ?
No, Cold War started this. And it is similar to the question why the world champions in typewriting used to be Czech, too (on a Czech typewriter there are not 26, but 33 letters). Czechoslovakia was the technically most advanced country within the Council of Mutual Economic Assistance. Even though the GDR economy was still superior in some respect this was mainly because of some priviledged access to technology through Western Germany. Export restrictions to socialist countries made it necessary AND possible to replace hardware by software. While their computers were hopelessly outdated their programmers' brain had the same abilities as in any other places in the world. And their brains were challenged by the minimalist hardware. I think this is the main reason why still today there are excellent programmers in Czech Republic and Slovakia. Besides that, it would be possible to argue about the question whether socialist countries succeeded in organizing science and development in a way that promoted 'useful software'. I have some doubts. Anyway, the software project Text602, was rather part of an early capitalist experiment in socialist Czechoslovakia during the 1980ies. Text602 is one of the most interesting word processors ever written: * it based on the minimal compatible hardware: PC with matrix printer * it was mainly oriented at the real office work that is correspndence, reports * it solved the Latin2 and Russian character problem and the code page mess * it provided WYSIWYG on a text display (not only fat and italique, but also double wide and double high) * it had all common formatting features necessary to produce even longer documents, output on laser printers etc. BTW: In our days the Software602 company has a free download (about 13 MB) on the web. They say they can do that because they have a different marketing concept than Microsoft. What you can download is a complete Office packet for MS-Windows, made in Czech Republic: reading and writing MS-Word and MS-Excel format and running in W9x. Christof Lange (who is neither programmer nor Czech) ________________________________________________________________ Ceskobratrska cirkev evangelicka - Betlemska kaple na Zizkove Prokopova 4/216, 130 00 Praha 3, Czech Republic Tel. (00420-2) 22 78 06 73 / 22 78 20 02 http://www.volny.cz/cce.zizkov
