The State - News from June 14, 1985

Government investigators, searching Silicon Valley for high technology smugglers, charged four of them with diverting a computer to the Soviet Bloc, officials said. A federal grand jury in San Jose returned indictments against Marino Pradetto, president of PBN Electronics of West Germany and three others for illegally exporting a Digital Equipment engineering computer, the VAX 11/780, the agency announced. The computer is especially valuable because, as a favorite of defense contractors, it can run sophisticated software developed for the Pentagon, officials said. The computer was shipped to Haiti, to Switzerland and then to Czechoslovakia, the government charged.