Elwro

~ the obit ~

Elwro closed when I was nine, in a country I had never been to, building machines that never arrived in mine. Poland spent thirty years making its own computers. Turkey imported everybody else's, and that difference is the whole of my distance from this factory. It is also why the name still carries weight in Wrocław and almost nowhere outside it.

Wrocławskie Zakłady Elektroniczne opened on 6 february 1959 and was calling itself Elwro, short for elektronika wrocławska, more or less immediately. In 1961 it delivered the Odra 1001, the first computer built in Poland. The Odra line then ran for two decades across a dozen models, and by 1966 the plant had put a hundred machines into service.

In the 1970s Elwro was folded into the shared computing program of the eastern bloc and started assembling R-series mainframes to a Soviet specification, which meant a Wrocław factory building the same architecture as plants scattered from Minsk to Sofia. Employment climbed toward six thousand. The assembly halls in the surviving photographs are the size of a hangar, filled with rows of benches where the wiring was done by hand.

Then the system that ordered the machines stopped existing. Privatization reached the plant in 1993 and Siemens bought it. What Siemens wanted was a foothold in the Polish telecommunications market, and holding that did not require six thousand people or a computer line, so production was wound down practically as the ink dried. The remains of the site went on to an American firm called Telect in 2000. In 2015 the city council named the ground it had stood on Elwro Square.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the odra years ~

The interesting decision in the Odra story is a licensing one. The 1304 and 1305 were built as functional counterparts of ICL's 1905 and 1906 under a software agreement, which let Polish institutions run a British software catalog on a Polish machine. A country with hard currency problems could not buy mainframes from England, but it could buy the right to be compatible with them and then build the hardware at home.

That is a different engineering culture from the one that produced clones by reverse engineering, and it produced machines with unusually long working lives. Odras stayed in service for decades in institutions that had no budget to replace them and no reason to, since the software still ran and the spare parts came from the same city.

~ the school machine ~

From 1986 the plant built the Elwro 800 Junior, shown first at the Poznań fair and aimed squarely at classrooms. Underneath it was a ZX Spectrum clone, but the part that mattered to a ministry of education was CP/J, a version of CP/M that could drive a local network called Junet with up to fifteen machines on it. The teacher's unit had the disk drive and acted as the file and print server for a room full of student units that had none.

The estimate repeated in Poland is that more than a million students met a computer for the first time on Elwro equipment. That is a large number for a machine nobody outside the country has heard of, and it is the reason Elwro is remembered as a school rather than as a factory.

~ what got buried with it ~

A product line can be discontinued and picked up later. A factory cannot. When Elwro stopped, what went with it was six thousand people who knew how to build a computer out of components. The training center went too, along with every supply relationship that had made the work possible inside a planned economy. None of that transfers to a new owner who has already decided the answer is imports.

Wrocław did fine in the end. It is one of the larger software cities in Europe now, full of engineering offices belonging to companies headquartered somewhere else. The city kept the engineers and lost the factory, which is the trade most of the post-1989 bloc made, and the square with the old name on it is what got kept instead.

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