I found the follow up to this hilarious. It was especially funny the way they tried to put it in the wrong machine.
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!!!deleted!!! (41638798) — 10 years ago(February 21, 2016 10:54 PM)
This was just one of MANY, many scenes that showed how being behind the iron curtain meant you did withoutespecially modern things.
These moments were sprinkled throughout all the episodes without any fanfare.
When Hartmann said "we can't get the IBM since Reagan started the embargo on electronics." That said it all. They were not part of any free market supply chain.
Others were:
*The fascination with the Worcestershire sauce at lunch. The guys in Walter's office were baffled and passing it around, dumping it on their food. They'd never heard of it.
*Of course the iconic scene with Rauch in his first western supermarket. He was awed and confused at so much food selection and all the vegetables and fruits. He'd never seen anything like that behind the iron curtain. (I remember well when Nikita Khrushchev came to the US in the '50s. He was taken into a modern supermarket and accused the Americans taking him around that that supermarket was fakethat all that stuff had been put in there to lie to him about America. I'm serious.)
The head of the entire USSR was so ignorant and parochial he didn't even know supermarkets existed. That summed up the type of person the Soviets produced then, in their closed society.
*The Walkman scene.
*The scene in which Edel made reference to Bobby Sands and the IRA starvation protest. Because all news from the West was entirely embargoed inside the entire Soviet bloc, Rauch never heard of the IRA or Bobby Sands.
Any others? -
Karl Self — 9 years ago(April 23, 2016 12:37 AM)
To me that was just bad writing. An East-German "microelectronics" expert would certainly have been aware of the 8" and 5.25" floppy disc formats. And despite export restrictions, the HVA could easily have purchased over-the-counter goods in the West and taken them east of the border.