History of computer hardware in Eastern Bloc countries
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For the history of computer hardware in the Soviet Union, see History of computing in the Soviet Union.
The history of computing hardware in the Eastern Bloc is somewhat different from that of the Western world. As a result of the CoCom embargo, computers could not be imported on a large scale from Western Bloc.
Eastern Bloc manufacturers created copies of Western designs based on intelligence gathering and reverse engineering.[1] This redevelopment led to some incompatibilities with International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) and IEEE standards, such as spacing integrated circuit pins at 1⁄10 of a 25 mm length (colloquially a "metric inch") instead of a standard inch of 25.4 mm.[2] This made Soviet chips unsellable on the world market outside the Comecon, and made test machinery more expensive.[3]