Software Crossed What Machines Could Not

This Vault has established that machines were confined by their markets — the Galaksija appears only in Yugoslav pages, the PMD-85 only in Czechoslovak ones, and the countries with a free import trade have no such machines at all.

Software behaves in the opposite way, and asymmetrically.

Western games went everywhere

Counting how many of the thirteen territories held here mention each title at all:

Title	Territories	Mentions
Elite	12	4,924
Pac-Man	11	1,187
Boulder Dash	11	515
Winter Games	11	347
Digger	11	86
Knight Lore	10	435
Manic Miner	10	286
Bruce Lee	10	391
Tetris	9	1,492

Elite reaches the press of Argentina, Brazil, Czechoslovakia, West Germany, Spain, France, Britain, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Poland and Yugoslavia. Twelve of thirteen.

No machine in this library does that except the ones that were freely traded. A game is a cassette, a listing, or a copy; it crosses a border a computer cannot.

But almost nothing came back

The traffic is one-directional.

Title	Mentions	Distribution
Robbo (Polish)	41	Poland 97%, Britain 2%
Novotrade (Hungarian software house)	258	Hungary 98%
Galaksija	276	Yugoslavia 100%

Robbo was among the best known Polish games — Bajtek‘s 1990 readers’ poll describes it as the one title breaking out of the standard, and it is still being indexed in the magazine in 1994. It appears twice, in total, outside Poland.

So a Polish reader in 1987 could read about Elite, Knight Lore and Boulder Dash, and a British reader in the same year had essentially no way to hear about what Polish programmers were writing.

Measured against the catalogue, not against three names

Three titles are an anecdote. The TOSEC software catalogue makes a census possible: it names 703,399 releases for the six 8- and 16-bit machines this library covers, and tags each with the territory it was released in.

Two filters turn that into a usable list of local software. The first is period: releases dated 1982 to 1995, which removes a large modern homebrew scene — two thirds of the Hungarian entries are dated 1996 or later. The second is origin purity: a title counts as local only if every entry it has in the catalogue carries one local tag and it never appears untagged. Without that second filter the lists fill with imports, because the tag records where a release came out, not where it came from.

That leaves 250 titles from Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, the Yugoslav successor tags, Argentina, Brazil and Greece whose names are built from words that do not occur in the Anglophone corpus at all — piskvorky, budżet domowy, adatállomány, návrh plošných spojů, velika akcija. Against them, 250 British-published titles of the same period, drawn at random.

Every territory’s corpus was sampled to the same 8.0 MB of text first, so that Britain’s 1,386 issues could not out-vote Poland’s 149. And every apparent crossing, in both groups, was then read on the page — because a title is only a string until you look at the sentence around it.

Matched sample, 250 titles each	Local-language titles	British titles
Appear in their home press	19	17
Cross a border, before reading	6	32
Cross a border, after reading	0	27

The two groups are found at home at the same rate, which is what makes the last row mean anything: the method finds local titles in Polish and Czech magazines as readily as it finds British ones in British magazines. It then finds the British ones in ten other territories — Greece, Australia, West Germany, Yugoslavia, the United States, France, Poland, Hungary, Italy and Brazil — and the local ones in none.

Reading is what separates the two rows. All six local crossings dissolved: Hydraulik in the East German press is the German word for hydraulics, Inspektor in Yugoslav pages is Inspector Gadget, and fotografie, kilometry and cubo magico are ordinary words in the languages that printed them. Five of the thirty-two British ones dissolved too — Flight Simulator is Microsoft’s, the Evil Dead mentions are a 2000s console game, “Pro Sound Designer” is a French audio card, and “terrorists” and “treasure hunt” are prose.

The twenty-seven that survive are unmistakable. Bajtek explains that Paul is a member of the Enigma Force. A Hungarian chart lists Graeme Souness Soccer Manager at number 30. A Greek dealer prices Samurai Warrior under Firebird, a Yugoslav one lists Operation Thunderbolt, and an Australian reviewer compares a game unfavourably with Cybernoid II.

⚠ Only 19 of 250 local titles are found even at home, and 17 of 250 British ones. Most catalogued software of any nationality never reached print anywhere. The survey measures whether titles that reach print at all cross borders; it cannot speak for the rest.

What this means for the record

The asymmetry is not evidence that local software was worse. It is evidence about who was writing the magazines that survive, and about which direction the distribution machinery ran. Western publishers had export businesses, trade press and advertising budgets. A Polish or Hungarian program reached its market through a magazine listing, a club, or a copied cassette — mechanisms with no outward reach at all.

That has a direct consequence for a Vault built on magazines. A history assembled from any one national press will contain the international titles and its own local ones, and will systematically miss every other country’s local ones. The absence of Polish games from British magazines is a fact about British magazines.

⚠ Territory counts are “appears at all”, which a single passing mention satisfies. They measure reach, not popularity.

See also

• The C64 across borders — the machines, which did not travel
• PAPERsoft — Italian listings translated from English, one program at a time
• Bajtek, Institutional computer press