The underground story of Cobra, the 1980s’ illicit handmade computer

This is an awesome story. It almost made me cry.

At the same time these guys were building illicit computers in their dorm rooms, I and my buddies were building illicit robots in ours. We weren't in danger from the secret police, of course, so I don't mean to directly compare the experience. But we were at a religious university that simply didn't have the ability to think broadly enough to allow for the possibility that students might have interests outside the established course work, and certainly frowned on the use of power tools in church-owned dorms. We ignored the rules, quite openly, made burn marks on the desks and left pounds of aluminum shavings in the carpets, and definitely felt rebellious doing it.

In any case: the article says that these guys feel like they didn't really accomplish anything, because while they were bootlegging Sinclair Spectrum clones, Apple, on the other side of the world, was reinventing the entire computer industry. I have to disagree. It's not about the destination, it's about the journey - and these guys had quite a journey. Maybe they didn't contribute decisively to bringing down Communism; but if that's your success metric, then I think almost everybody fails.

In my case, that first robot that we built - which sucked - led to a second one, that didn't. And that led to a graduate research assistantship at a different university that was more welcoming of student initiative - and that led, eventually, to a career in space robotics.

It's been quite a ride, and it isn't over. And I wouldn't trade a minute of it.

I don't think it was illegal to assemble computers at that time there. I did something like this in USSR at that time and don't think that it was too different in Romania.

And actually from the same parts - I see couple of chips there marked "сделано в СССР" (made in USSR).

USSR produced clone of i8080. Z80 clones were produced GDR (East Germany) and USSR too. The only problem was to buy those chips. You could buy them only on black market realistically speaking. Only that was kind of illegal.

Interesting that schematics of such hobby computers was published in state magazine "Radio", like this one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio-86RK

If the idea of building a computer and understanding what every part does sounds interesting, I'd highly recommend checking this out:

http://nand2tetris.org/

I failed to understand the point: there were ZX Spectrum clones, there was a clone called HC, and the article is about an illegal clone Cobra. Some of the people building Cobras even used the cases of HC. So what were the functional differences? Except for knowing you've made your own machine, was there some other advantage of Cobra over the HC or some other clone? Were all illegal for home use?

Something I've always wondered, but really haven't dug too deep into is, did these clones do any tricks that would be considered better than what they were based on? That goes with the clone CPUs also. Did they have any undocumented features, that would make it "better"?

> “People don’t care about optimizing the code anymore”

Rest assured that some still care.

The guy in the first picture, Mihai Moldovanu is wearing a tee with a Greek flag. Does anyone know what the connection is? Did Romanians go to Greece to study computers, in the '80s or something like that?