It truly is because English is the universal language.
Sure, in the USA, we generally speak only English, but
everywhere in the world, except for Quebec, Canada,
English is taught to all the school children as a second
language.
Back during the cold war, a USSR Mig was flown to NATO
soil by a Russian defector. The US experts were all
over it, and tore it to bits in order to study the state
of USSR technology. Everyone was feeling all warm and
fuzzy until one of the engineers noticed that inside of
every assembly all of the writing was in English. They
figured that they had been had.
It appeared to be a very elaborate deception too, as all
of the technology was from the US 1940's and 50's. One
Russian defector was about to get his butt kicked back to
the Soviet Union...
Well, everyone was blushing about their stupidity, when
someone put the question to the intelligence agencies, and
the answer was that the Russians did that on everything
they made that they might want to export... which given the
state of their economy was pretty much everything.. The
idea being that since all of the Soviet kids were already
taught English, they would need to make only one model for
domestic and export, rather than two.
It is a story that sounds like an urban legend, except that
it was told to me by my father, who was working in electronic
countermeasures for the Navy at the Pentagon, at the time,
and was directly involved.... if you are doing
countermeasures, it helps to know what your enemy is using
against you.
Including Tektronix scope clones...
-Chuck Harris
Jeff Urban wrote:
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On Thu, May 3, 2018 at 08:20 pm, Dave Seiter wrote:
Why does it say "Made in USSR" in english?
You get the observant award of the day. I didn't even think of that and if I had I might have dismiss it as English being a "universal" language, which is actually a farce. English speaking is not in the majority even though it is spoken by people of many tongues as a second language. My UScentroism leanings is the reason, and I freely admit that.
But that of course does not answer your quite astute question. Why indeed ? Unless they intended it to be found by US ians knowing we are the most unilingual people on Earth. (if even that lol)
Thanks for refreshing my brain here.
