Compounding this hurdle were the tight restrictions imposed by the country on imports of any item costing greater than 50 Deutschmarks that limit was well under the amount needed to buy an 8-bit microcomputer produced anywhere on the continent. The average price of an Iskradata 1680, Sinclair ZX81, or Commodore 64 - standard consumer-grade systems, found across the country’s government offices, accounting firms, and university science labs - exceeded by many times the monthly salary of the average Yugoslavian worker. Yugoslavia became a technological pressure cooker, incubating an idiosyncratic computer culture that flowered due to intense institutional support.īut computers were expensive. The rise in living standards throughout the 1960s and 1970s introduced a need for the ever-more widespread adoption of bookkeeping computers in bureaucracy. Rajko Tomović - a roboticist instrumental to the invention of the world’s first five-fingered artificial hand - worked alongside teams of mathematicians and mechanical engineers at the Institute for Nuclear Sciences, Vinča, and Belgrade’s Telecommunication and Electronics Institute, Mihajlo Pupin (later the Mihajlo Pupin Institute) to develop manufacturing techniques using local instruments and local parts. Moving to fill this demand, a local computing industry began to bloom.ĭr. Robust calculating machinery was essential for the comprehensive real-time monitoring of vast quantities of commodities in production and exchange. The fast-track growth of defense stockpiles and industrial facilities after the war, and especially after Yugoslavia was expelled from the Cominform in 1948, necessitated nothing less than a logistics revolution. Yugoslavia’s unique geopolitical situation and its infrastructural autonomy constituted the fertile ground upon which the seeds of the country’s national identity were planted. This constituted one of the few genuine anti-authoritarian, anti-imperial international alliances of the twentieth century. Ruled by a Communist Party but spurned by the Eastern Bloc following the 1948 Tito–Stalin split, this federation of six republics was held together under Tito’s banner of an inter-ethnic, inter-religious, and international “brotherhood and unity.” Subsequent to its repudiation by the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia bootstrapped its geopolitical precarity into a Herculean effort to chart a middle course between the two world superpowers.Īlong with Egypt, Ghana, India, and Indonesia, the country founded the Non-Aligned Movement, a patchwork of developing nations aspiring to chart a decolonial “third option” of formal neutrality during the Cold War. The Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia was a political anomaly.
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