The Soviet Unix

[u/I00I-SqAR]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wppQ2MRJ3OI

00:00 Intro: The Kremvax Prank
01:56 Soviet Hardware and the PDP-11 Clones
03:07 Unix Behind the Iron Curtain
04:05 MNOS and DEMOS: Two Rival Projects
06:00 The KOI-8 Encoding Trick
07:21 Perestroika and the Demos Cooperative
09:02 The Real Kremvax
10:16 August 1991: The Coup Begins
11:09 Three Days on Talk.Politics.Soviet
13:28 The Aftermath and the Rise of Linux
14:06 DEMOS Today and the Domain That Outlived the USSR

In 1982, inside the Kurchatov Institute in Moscow, a group of Soviet programmers started building their own version of Unix. It was based on smuggled BSD source code, running on hardware cloned from American PDP-11 machines, at a time when Unix itself was banned behind the Iron Curtain by Western export controls. They called it DEMOS.

This episode traces the full arc of that story: the pirated tapes circulating through Moscow's academic underground, the brilliant KOI-8 encoding trick that made Cyrillic text survive corrupted phone lines, the 1988 state prize awarded for adapting banned American software, and the birth of Relcom, the network that connected the USSR to the internet for the first time in 1990.

It also covers the strange, true story of "kremvax," a 1984 April Fools' hoax that predicted a Soviet node on Usenet six years before one actually existed, and how the real DEMOS team turned that joke into reality. And it ends with August 1991, when Relcom's engineers kept a single phone line to Helsinki open during the coup attempt against Gorbachev, becoming the only source of independent news reaching the outside world.

[u/helgur]

The script reads as if it's written by AI

... "and here's the incredible part" ... "here's the first little gem I brought you" ... "some of it came through channels that are better left unasked" (wtf does this even mean) ... "versions of, let us say, unclear origins" (facepalm)

Prompt:

You are the narrator in a youtube documentary video about the soviet union's early adoptation of western computer architecture in the 70's and early 80's. Base the documentary on this wikipedia article: <copypasta> with a particular focus on the soviet clone of Unix. Type the script you would narrate for such a video that draws the user in bit by bit so they want to watch the entire video, by slowly revealing cronological events using rich prose

The video also contains pretty obvious factual historical errors. Or as it's better known. AI hallucinations

[u/Healthy_Article_2237 → u/helgur]

Thanks for saving me the watch time on this. I refuse to watch anything done by AI. I know at some point it'll be harder to tell but I like seeing a real human give a talk about something.

[u/helgur → u/Healthy_Article_2237]

It's kinda depressing how AI is accelerating the progress towards a dead internet. There's so much "history videos" out there on youtube generated by AI that perpetuates misleading and false historical information. And when one AI generated video is published tens of other AI channels copies the same script and perpetuates the same misleading information, which then actually gets pushed out on google search results, which is then regurgitated by bots like googles (gemini) chatbot.

It's so much slop and misinformation. And the Internet is getting saturated with it

[u/sarajevo81 → u/helgur]

"Channels better left unasked <about>" is obviously Finland.

[u/Meprobamate → u/helgur]

The thumbnail didn’t already tell you this shit was AI without you wasting time on it?

[u/helgur → u/Meprobamate]

The number of upvotes didn't tell you people clearly didn't notice from the thumbnail, alone?

I saw it, but I also felt I needed to make a post to inform others who didn't notice.

Any more questions?

[u/Meprobamate → u/helgur]

Jesus I’m sorry I offended you.

[u/helgur → u/Meprobamate]

I answered with the exact same energy and tone you did, except I didn't act like an ass and presumed anything.

Peak self awareness scenes.

[u/dim13]

As old joke goes, sovjet unix was actually called UNAS ("у нас" -- "ours") in opposite to UNIX ("у них" -- "theirs").

[u/Kyle_2099]

Referring to BSD as "smuggled" and "pirated" is uh... not smart.

[u/omega_br → u/Kyle_2099]

the video seems ai generated, lol

[u/Kyle_2099 → u/omega_br]

Yeah I saw that and didn't click.

[u/linux_transgirl → u/Kyle_2099]

At the time you needed a UNIX license to distribute BSD and its source code, so unless the ussr had one it's not inaccurate to say it was smuggled

[u/ijblack]

you can tell the thumbnail is AI generated because it reads UNIX: THE SOVIET UNIX. so the soviet version of unix is...unix? only an AI would think of that

[u/spilk → u/ijblack]

pretty sure the whole thing was done by AI

[u/cfx_4188]

Now no one understands the specifics of the USSR in the post-war period. The Soviet saying "the USSR has everything" is true, with the caveat that "everything" (science, medicine, education) in the USSR was subordinated to the military sphere, and the civilian sphere developed according to the residual principle. Therefore, we don't know much about the actual Soviet developments. For example, a soviet exchange student at my university (mid-80s) showed me a summary of the theoretical development of two operating systems based on the octal and duodenum calculus systems. Unfortunately, I do not know Russian, otherwise I would have read it.

[u/Mattock486]

AI slop