Die chance genutzt

JUST FOUR YEARS after its invention by scientists at Bell Labs and two years after the country came into being, the ironically named German Democratic Republic (GDR) decided it would invest in R&D for semiconductors. East Germany was by no means slow to adopt the transistor. Sony, by comparison, would not start making transistors until three years later. Despite this head start, the GDR-based technology lagged behind the West by five to ten years by the time the Berlin Wall fell. In reality, it fell far behind long before the 1980s. The ruling party made a poster for its final Party Day, held in 1986, that showed a female engineer working on a massive computer. The slogan was "Wir haben die Chance genutzt"or "we have taken the opportunity". In some respects the poster was spot on: in a time when the personal computer was the future, the GDR ruling party's rhetoric was wedded to an image of technology that was resolutely stuck in the past. With flagship products such as DRAM, Dresden-based ZMD pulled out all the stops to keep up with the West. It reported its first 1Mb DRAM in 1987, as the first devices moved into production in US and Japanese fabs. To make sure ZMD could do it, the ruling party allocated 40 per cent of the entire R&D budget for three years to the 1Mb DRAM project as ZMD was unable to buy in a lot of the parts needed to make the devices from the West.