Yeah, probably I’m pretty bad at spelling stuff ☺️

My dudes… Dr. Strange is my new neighbor!

She’s a veteran… but I’m kind of an animal so I figure it should be OK 😎

Also; 2 cats, one of which is definitely smarter than the average bear… the other, is orange.

In retrospect… yes.

I offered the story as a kind of parable (except not because I didn’t make it up) or random data point if you will, on pissing standing up.

I’m afraid I really have no answers for you… but then again I don’t think I’m your survey pool.

But I did once stay at a small hotel in Germany that had a sticker imploring male guess to sit and pee. I pissed all over that poor toilet before we left.

15 years later I feal guilt but also righteous indignation. I really hate being told what to do apparently… even when there are good reasons like another human being, asking you to not make their life hard 😞

Yeah, as I said, most factories closed by the end of the 70s, but some operated till the USSR dissolved.

My mind is suitably blown :-) I remember seeing some of the “newer” segmented style tubes in a train ticket machine (probably late 70’s erra manufacture) here in Oakland, California, USA back in the late 90s or very early 00s. Probably not of Russian manufacture, though ;-)

The system wasn’t that bad to be honest… at least not in Yugoslavia. USSR was a different story. We had all the perks of the west with none of the obligations. Of course, you can’t compete with the western tech markets (yes, we did try that, look up Zastava, Yugo, Iskra, Gorenje)

Don’t sell yourselves short, Yogo’s were very well known here! ;-) … yeah, it’s still rigged pretty well.

There are other open forums, free for registration. I could look up the URLs if you want, I have them in a plain text file on my PC (I’m on my phone right now), some are also good, like vinafix for example (not ex USSR, but still good, it’s Vietnamese). I haven’t visited them in years though, things might have changed. I started working in IT and just lost interest in that… no money, no point in doing it. Hardware is dirt cheap nowadays.

Yes please, but feel free to do it at your convenience. I have yet to check out the first few you offered — although I will by weeks end. To many projects, as always :-) I’m going to look up the other big companies you mentioned as well. I was born in ‘77 so I missed the coldest days of the Cold War… but I have an irresistible fascination with the evolution of technology… especially these parallel worlds that developed in countries on both sides. Objects that are both instantly familiar but also “alien” in design, not the greatest example but phones are probably the most familiar examples.

Anyway… it’s been delightful chatting the last few days. I hope we can keep the conversation going, but for now I have one or more work tables to excavate ;-)

Really? It just seems like the NOS stockpile is endless… though I had read somewhere that there was still a factory operating in the early 90’s… guess you did say most.

Doorknob operators, love it! 😊 And thanks for the explanation, Mr. Ellness (which I’m almost certainly misspelling) really couldn’t articulate the reason behind it, nor did his “minder” offer any explanation.

Hopefully I didn’t come off as glorifying the system, it certainly wasn’t my intention to do so.

Thanks for the recommendations! I vaguely remember Louis Rossman video (back when you made repair videos) where he sort of flashed the watermark on the screen for a second. Always thought I would go back and find that video, never did :-)

IDK… I would have liked to visit in the 80’s or something like that; peek Soviet propaganda, factories still churning out Nixie tubes by the truckload because it was part of the last 5 year plan. Jr. Highschool history teacher visited, said they employ old ladies in the Moscow subway to watch the escalators just because everyone needed a job.

So uh… what Soviet electronics forums should we be visiting OP?

Hopefully a few thousand of them were the ones responsible for making the website dog shit 😅

Comeon 0.0001%! Let’s get those last 5 people who know what an extension is but were holding out for…???

Yeah… These articles are like reading the tally marks on a prison wall. Let it go.

I remember when he bulldoze a bunch of people‘s vehicles… and part of me was like “Cool, riding an ATV in Central Park for fun probably should result in your vehicle getting crushed…” and the little voice in the back of my head says this is a bit over the top, even for a publicity stunt. 

Need to listen to that little voice more often 😅

🥇

We’re calling it Proposition #66 😉

Obviously you’ve never been… everything here causes cancer. We’re amending the law next year so we can just label everything that isn’t carcinogenic because it will substantially reduce the number of Prop 65 labels that end up in landfills ;-)

Try picking your front door… could be very instructive ;-)

To soon!

Yeah, it was definitely intended as humor an attempt at levity.

Followed shortly by ‘oh shit’ and ‘we dropped two weights’ then ‘guys, it’s getting kind of wet in here…’

Just kidding, mostly.

Serious question: how does a submarine know how much it weighs?

👀

Dopemobile?

Is there an award for the most British headline?