VEB Robotron

~ the obituary ~

Turkey sat on the western side of the export-control line, so hardware here was a question of money. Duty and importer margin made a machine cost more than it should have, but the machine existed and you could point at it through a shop window. Further north, in Dresden, that machine did not exist and could not be bought at any price, so somebody had to build one that behaved like it. That was Robotron's job description.

VEB Kombinat Robotron was founded on 1 april 1969 out of an older office-machine authority, and by 1989 it was the largest electronics manufacturer in East Germany by a wide margin. Sixty eight thousand people across twenty one separate plants, turning over 12.8 billion marks. It made mainframes and office machines at one end and radios and television sets at the other, because a socialist combine was expected to cover a sector rather than a product.

Almost none of what it built was original, and that was policy rather than failure. The ESER program, run across COMECON, produced mainframes like the EC 1040 and the EC 1055 that were reimplementations of IBM's System/360 and System/370, so that software written for IBM would run on them. The K 1840 was a VAX 11/780. When Robotron needed an eight bit processor, VEB Mikroelektronik in Erfurt supplied the U880, an unlicensed Z80 that copied Zilog's part closely enough to reproduce its undocumented opcodes and its bugs.

None of this reached me. I was six years old when the combine was dissolved, on the other side of a line that had already stopped mattering. What I can read now is the arithmetic, and the arithmetic is the part worth sitting with: an entire national computer industry whose stated task was to arrive where the West already was, permanently late by design.

~ the case file ~

~ the copy machine ~

Cloning is harder than it sounds when you cannot buy the thing you are cloning. Western computers reached the Eastern Bloc through embargo-dodging purchases, which meant engineers were often working from a single specimen and whatever documentation happened to arrive with it. The U880 is the clearest artifact of that method. A clean-room reimplementation would have matched the published instruction set and stopped there. Copying the undocumented opcodes as well means somebody went through the silicon behavior exhaustively, and it also means a program written to abuse a Z80 quirk kept right on working on a machine made in Erfurt.

The one thing that was genuinely Robotron's own is the K 1520, a bus standard it defined in 1980 and then used across the whole line, so boards from one machine went into another. The home computers came out of that: the Z 9001, the KC 85 series, the KC 87, the Z 1013. The office machines too, the A 5120 and the PC 1715. A single country's entire idea of what a computer looks like, coming out of one organization.

~ the slide ~

The economics never worked and the state knew it. Semiconductor fabrication is the most capital-hungry thing a country can attempt, the return on it comes from volume, and East Germany had neither the capital nor the market. A PC 1715 office computer, a perfectly reasonable CP/M-class machine running the U880 at 2.5 MHz, went on sale in 1985 at an introductory price of 19,000 marks. That is not a price. It is an accounting entry describing how much of a country's industrial capacity one desk computer consumed.

Meanwhile the target kept moving. Robotron was still shipping System/370 architecture in the late eighties, by which point the West had put a 386 in a beige box that a dentist could walk in and buy. Being permanently behind is survivable while your customers have nowhere else to shop. In november 1989 they suddenly did.

~ the postmortem ~

The Kombinat was dissolved as an economic organ on 1 july 1990, the same day the currency union took effect and East German marks became Deutsche Marks at a stroke. Its plants were converted into capital companies with the Treuhandanstalt, the agency set up to privatize an entire national economy, holding all the shares. Siemens Nixdorf and IBM bought pieces. The rest was judged unsellable at market rates and wound up.

Fewer than five percent of the sixty eight thousand made it into a successor company. That number is what this grave is actually about. The machines were obsolete and everyone involved knew it, but the machines were not what the combine mostly consisted of. Robotron Datenbank-Software GmbH still trades in Dresden today, a normal software house with the old name over the door, which is the closest thing to a survivor and is nothing like the same organism.

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