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A comment on Colour Clash: The Engineering Miracle of the Sinclair ZX Spectrum. Parent comment

Re:Colour Clash: The Engineering Miracle of the Sinclair ZX ... by flohofwoe on Monday October 01, 2018 @07:19AM (#18111612)
No sure why the sibling was downvoted to oblivion, the Eastern Block countries would have loved to import Western microelectronics (soft currency issues aside), but there was indeed an embargo in place which prevented this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coordinating_Committee_for_Mul...

AFAIK 8-bit chips weren't really covered by this anymore during the 80's, but apparently the Amiga fell under the embargo for being 'too powerful'... probably a convenient marketing myth ;)

The Eastern countries were pretty quick to build clones of popular chips though (mostly Z80s and x86, Bulgaria also built MOS 6502 and Motorola 6800 clones).

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Re:Colour Clash: The Engineering Miracle of the Sinclair ZX ... by setquk on Monday October 01, 2018 @10:16AM (#18112694)
I have a lot of respect for the eastern bloc engineers. After being throughly pillaged of all industrial infrastructure after the war, surprisingly by the early 1980s some of the stuff being churned out was amazing. Right down to minicomputer clones.
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