Thing is these Iron Curtain copies and clones are totally different to the KIRFs of today. Where they've just taken whatever cheapo tat and made it look like an iPhone or a Samsung, because they were actually copying the chips, circuit board layouts, etc. even the production errors.
BTW here's a nice techy anecdote from MOSCOW website, which says something about the semiconductor industry in Poland at that time.
"Incidentally, there is a bizarre piece of trivia about CEMI... It was meant to be, like many other things of the communist era, a showcase of Polish industrial might (semiconductor, in this case). It was, of course only fitting, that such a showcase would be built near the capital, so the dignitaries would not have to trouble themselves with long trips to some far away places when showing off to other visiting dignitaries. So, the edict was to build it almost in the center of Warsaw.
Indeed, the visits were quite frequent and there was a lot of hoopla for a while. Then, it turned out that there were certain, shall we say, "physical limitations" of the location. Never mind clean air and other "small" things required for a successful semiconductor fab... The rumble from the nearby tram (street-car) line was so enormous, that it was impossible to keep the IC masks still for exposure. So, prior to exposure, employees would be looking thru the window, watching for gaps in street traffic and yell "Do it!" when the coast was clear"
http://www.taswegian.com/MOSCOWx/k764.html
I used to do some electronic repair as a hobby in the 1980s, and early 90s. Friend came up with a hi-fi type cassette deck,
made in USSR, for me to look at. He'd bought cheap at an auction somewhere. Interesting thing was the cassette deck mechanism itself was Japanese, but the rest of the electronics was Russian. But it had a fault in that it wouldn't record properly, it played tapes no problem. The fault was that the bias oscillator wasn't working. There was a load of cut-tracks and wired bodges around the bias oscillator that had some Russian IC, and from what I could tell the hackery was done during production. After some hours of poking around with it, with a multimeter and scope. I came to the conclusion quite possibly it could never have worked.
...The printing on the front of the machine was all Cyrillic, so presumably it wasn't intended for export.
@Mikedt -
Check this one out. I read somewhere that the Chinese have an actual possibly working duplicate of the Blaise Pascal accounting machine from the time it was made. I forget if it was the 16th or 17th century. The Chinese seemed to be interested in automata, imported a Pascal calculator, and copied it. In a museum somewhere in Beijing.
Copying has been going on longer than the electronic age.
I'll have to check that out, next time I'm in Beijing.
