It was called iron curtain, not iron wall. Yugoslavia was in between the west and the east back then. We were not under USSR control. We could hop on a plane and fly to London any time we pleased, unlike for example, Hungarians or east Germans.
> It's more under Russian influence today than then.
Yugoslavia no longer exists.
While Serbia may be -- I've been there twice and it's a rather scary country -- the other fragments of Yugoslavia are far less so. Bosnia has a distinct Ottoman influence, while Croatia and Slovenia are very Western Europeanised indeed.
I haven't been to Montenegro yet, but had the best beer I tasted in Bosnia was Montenegrin (as opposed to the awful Jelen).
Of course, I meant Serbia since Galaksija comes from today's Serbia as well as it's creator, a very prominent man today.
What was scary in Serbia? And I agree, Jelen is bottom of the barrel. Only worse than thet would be private store brands, and you might even find better than Jelen among them.
I went to the Guča trumpet festival. It's pretty intense. Things like rifles being fired into the air in the crowd at a music festival is scary to me. This is something I might associate with the Middle East, not Europe.
The T-shirts on sale were another example. My Cyrillic is poor and my Czech is too but I can understand a bit. One was in English: "I am Vladimir Putin, and what I put in, stays there." The ones praising "war heroes" were worrying, too.
On my train back to Budapest the last time I was there, the crop-haired older gentleman opposite me was reading "Ветеран" magazine and a biography of a general.
The general impression I got was that here was a country whose sympathies lie East, not West.
At the time, I lived in Czechia, and I drove to Guča with some friends. The cultural difference from where I lived and where we drove in a single day -- and we didn't drive fast -- was shocking.
Yes, but Yugoslavia wasn't behind the Iron Curtain. It wasn't aligned with the USSR. It wasn't under USSR control (after 1948 [1]). It was officially neutral during the Cold War (Yugoslavia founded the Non-Aligned Movement). Sometimes close to the USA, even receiving American military aid at times.
Relevantly for us and this topic, Yugoslavia was not subject to the Western bans on exporting sensitive technology to Communist countries. Western personal computers and semiconductors could be legally imported, in theory, assuming you could afford them and the unfavourable exchange rates.
I actually don't know if Yugoslavia was embargoed too though (technically, Yugoslavia wasn't part of the "Eastern Bloc").
But of course even without embargo the markets were just not interesting for western companies, because of the worthless currencies (for instance, 8-bit home computers didn't fall under the embargo, but they were still not generally available in shops, only on the grey market).
Import into Yugoslavia was not that open during (low-mid) eighties. There were limits on how valuable items you could import. Personal computers got some separate exemption, but limit was set in Yugoslav currency dinars. Because of deprecating dinar you could import let's say C64 with a disk drive and a monitor when these exemptions were introduced, but in a year it was not enough for a Spectrum. By the end of the decade these limits were slowly eliminated.
Of course, there was always smuggling and bribing custom officials, citizens who emigrated for work didn't have these limits when returning home, so there were ways to get computers.
But Galaksija was important at that time (1984) because it was cheap and because it was sold as a kit to be soldered by end user, so it wasn't affected by import limits.
At least into Hungary my parents literally needed to smuggle a ZX Spectrum they sourced in Munich from a bargain bin. That was in 1985. I learned programming then and haven't really stopped since :)
For instance, East Germany had so called "Intershops" stuffed full with western consumer products (also home computers), but those were sold for hard currency only, and their main purpose was to siphon off the circulating D-Marks which were coming into the country via relatives from West Germany, or to directly sell to western visitors, because some prices were cheaper than in Western Germany.
From time to time Western companies also did one-time deals for industrial products (East Germany had a pretty good optics and mechanical engineering industry which could come up with competitive products from time to time, but usually such deals didn't benefit the general population).
In Yugoslavia, various companies 'produced' computers by essentially relabeling Western equipment, especially during the eighties when I was a child. For instance, the Electronic Industry in Niš (EI Niš) imported Honeywell computers. My father worked on a Honeywell DPS-6 imported from the U.S., which bore EI stickers. Surprisingly, sometimes they didn't even bother applying the EI stickers.
During my time at university we had VAX 11/785, MicroVAX 3100, and by the mid-'90s, we even had an SGI Indigo. Additionally, we had some IBM VM computer, though I can't recall the exact model. There was an IBM 1130 in the seventies.
As far as I can recall, the western parts of Yugoslavia had around 300 VAX machines deployed across various companies. Each republic developed its own computing ecosystem, resulting in a diverse landscape.
While there were some microcomputers in limited production, such as the Orao, Pecom, and Oric Nova, the ZX Spectrum and C-64 enjoyed far more popularity. Later, the Atari ST and Amiga took their place.
In the late eighties, my high school had a collection of original Apple II computers, along with IRIS 8 clones.
It's not surprising when you count the worthless currencies with state-mandated exchange rates into the calculation. If you wanted to do things legally as a western company then you had to price everyone of the 25 million out. It was done precisely for that reason - to protect the uncompetitive internal market from western competition.
Only the richest of the rich (literally few hundreds of people) could buy legally imported western electronics. It was available, even in the Eastern Bloc, but nobody had the money.
Yugoslavia wasn't member of the Warsaw Pact or the COMECON for instance, and apparently people were even allowed to travel to western countries.
Famous message from Tito to Stalin:
“Stop sending people to kill me. We've already captured five of them, one of them with a bomb and another with a rifle… If you don't stop sending killers, I'll send one to Moscow, and I won't have to send a second.”
Ha, good joke. Yugoslavia wanted Stalin dead because Stalin tried to kill Tito twice up to the point of the Yugo Secret Service advicing Stalin that they should stop fucking around, if not they would get rid of Stalin themselves.
