Galaksija: The Soviet-Era, Z80-based microcomputer | Hacker News Reader

Galaksija: The Soviet-Era, Z80-based microcomputer

spectrum.ieee.org

101 pointssundarurfriend80 comments

Galaksija was truly a "masterpiece" at that time, made by a single person by stitching together various smuggled parts from the West. I have a huge admiration and respect for Voja, especially after he decided to give up everything in Serbia and move to the US and start from scratch on his own in his late sixties!

He's a very humble man despite his remarkable impact and influence on the early tech industry in Yugoslavia. He and Dejan Ristanovic [1] started one of the first PC magazines in the 80's which was the bastion of progress filled with ingenious articles and insights collected from all over the world mostly by the word of mouth (remember there was no internet back then). They and a few others actually founded the first ISP and BBC in Yugoslavia in the late eighties.

Anyway, I am glad to see this article on HN and would suggest you all to watch Voja's interview [2] given to Computer History Museum in Mountain View where Galaksija rightfully got its own piece of the history.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dejan_Ristanovi%C4%87

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nPLyzOEobw8&ab_channel=Compu...

It's hard to overstate how important how these magazines "Računari u kući", "Svet kompjutera" and "Moj Mikro" were important during 80s. There was very limited amount of computer literature to be found, so we all learnt 90% of what we knew from these magazines. Hats off to Dejan Ristanović, Voja Antonić, and all others who wrote for these magazines. They were the light that guided many of us to our future careers.

It is not correct to refer to it as Soviet-Era. Using the logic from the title, Apple Macintosh is also Soviet-Era. Yugoslavia was never part of Warsaw bloc, it had its own political system and no USSR army on its territory.

Everything East of the Iron Wall (German Divide) was under USSR control.

But it’s Yougoslavia, it’s to the south

as they say, its in the name: land of the south slavs :)

It was called iron curtain, not iron wall. Yugoslavia was in between the west and the east back then. We were not under USSR control. We could hop on a plane and fly to London any time we pleased, unlike for example, Hungarians or east Germans.

Interesting. I stand corrected, then.

Thank you!

Yes, but Yugoslavia wasn't behind the Iron Curtain. It wasn't aligned with the USSR. It wasn't under USSR control (after 1948 [1]). It was officially neutral during the Cold War (Yugoslavia founded the Non-Aligned Movement). Sometimes close to the USA, even receiving American military aid at times.

Relevantly for us and this topic, Yugoslavia was not subject to the Western bans on exporting sensitive technology to Communist countries. Western personal computers and semiconductors could be legally imported, in theory, assuming you could afford them and the unfavourable exchange rates.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tito%E2%80%93Stalin_split

Technically, import was legal into all Eastern Bloc countries, it's the export from a western country which was illegal because of the COCOM embargo:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coordinating_Committee_for_Mul...

I actually don't know if Yugoslavia was embargoed too though (technically, Yugoslavia wasn't part of the "Eastern Bloc").

But of course even without embargo the markets were just not interesting for western companies, because of the worthless currencies (for instance, 8-bit home computers didn't fall under the embargo, but they were still not generally available in shops, only on the grey market).

It's a surprising sight to see Western companies showing no interest in 25 million strong economy.

It's not surprising when you count the worthless currencies with state-mandated exchange rates into the calculation. If you wanted to do things legally as a western company then you had to price everyone of the 25 million out. It was done precisely for that reason - to protect the uncompetitive internal market from western competition.

Only the richest of the rich (literally few hundreds of people) could buy legally imported western electronics. It was available, even in the Eastern Bloc, but nobody had the money.

Deals happened, but on a small scale.

For instance, East Germany had so called "Intershops" stuffed full with western consumer products (also home computers), but those were sold for hard currency only, and their main purpose was to siphon off the circulating D-Marks which were coming into the country via relatives from West Germany, or to directly sell to western visitors, because some prices were cheaper than in Western Germany.

From time to time Western companies also did one-time deals for industrial products (East Germany had a pretty good optics and mechanical engineering industry which could come up with competitive products from time to time, but usually such deals didn't benefit the general population).

In Yugoslavia, various companies 'produced' computers by essentially relabeling Western equipment, especially during the eighties when I was a child. For instance, the Electronic Industry in Niš (EI Niš) imported Honeywell computers. My father worked on a Honeywell DPS-6 imported from the U.S., which bore EI stickers. Surprisingly, sometimes they didn't even bother applying the EI stickers.

During my time at university we had VAX 11/785, MicroVAX 3100, and by the mid-'90s, we even had an SGI Indigo. Additionally, we had some IBM VM computer, though I can't recall the exact model. There was an IBM 1130 in the seventies.

As far as I can recall, the western parts of Yugoslavia had around 300 VAX machines deployed across various companies. Each republic developed its own computing ecosystem, resulting in a diverse landscape.

While there were some microcomputers in limited production, such as the Orao, Pecom, and Oric Nova, the ZX Spectrum and C-64 enjoyed far more popularity. Later, the Atari ST and Amiga took their place.

In the late eighties, my high school had a collection of original Apple II computers, along with IRIS 8 clones.

Import into Yugoslavia was not that open during (low-mid) eighties. There were limits on how valuable items you could import. Personal computers got some separate exemption, but limit was set in Yugoslav currency dinars. Because of deprecating dinar you could import let's say C64 with a disk drive and a monitor when these exemptions were introduced, but in a year it was not enough for a Spectrum. By the end of the decade these limits were slowly eliminated.

Of course, there was always smuggling and bribing custom officials, citizens who emigrated for work didn't have these limits when returning home, so there were ways to get computers.

But Galaksija was important at that time (1984) because it was cheap and because it was sold as a kit to be soldered by end user, so it wasn't affected by import limits.

Import was way more complex than that.

At least into Hungary my parents literally needed to smuggle a ZX Spectrum they sourced in Munich from a bargain bin. That was in 1985. I learned programming then and haven't really stopped since :)

Except Austria, Finland, Yugoslavia, Albania (Enver Hoxha switched to China) and Greece and Turkey. So not everything at all.

Yeah, it was so much under control that Yugoslavia and the USSR were at brink of war. It's more under Russian influence today than then.

> It's more under Russian influence today than then.

Yugoslavia no longer exists.

While Serbia may be -- I've been there twice and it's a rather scary country -- the other fragments of Yugoslavia are far less so. Bosnia has a distinct Ottoman influence, while Croatia and Slovenia are very Western Europeanised indeed.

I haven't been to Montenegro yet, but had the best beer I tasted in Bosnia was Montenegrin (as opposed to the awful Jelen).

So, no: only one of its fragments, I think.

Of course, I meant Serbia since Galaksija comes from today's Serbia as well as it's creator, a very prominent man today.

What was scary in Serbia? And I agree, Jelen is bottom of the barrel. Only worse than thet would be private store brands, and you might even find better than Jelen among them.

There's nothing scary in Serbia - except Jelen and other domestic beers. Rakija could be scary as well, but only if you drink too much.

Oh, I don't know, one measure of it made me nervous. :-D But I don't usually drink spirits.

I went to the Guča trumpet festival. It's pretty intense. Things like rifles being fired into the air in the crowd at a music festival is scary to me. This is something I might associate with the Middle East, not Europe.

The T-shirts on sale were another example. My Cyrillic is poor and my Czech is too but I can understand a bit. One was in English: "I am Vladimir Putin, and what I put in, stays there." The ones praising "war heroes" were worrying, too.

On my train back to Budapest the last time I was there, the crop-haired older gentleman opposite me was reading "Ветеран" magazine and a biography of a general.

The general impression I got was that here was a country whose sympathies lie East, not West.

At the time, I lived in Czechia, and I drove to Guča with some friends. The cultural difference from where I lived and where we drove in a single day -- and we didn't drive fast -- was shocking.

On my next visit, I had an overnight stop.

Yugoslavia was a bit of an exception:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tito%E2%80%93Stalin_split

Yugoslavia wasn't member of the Warsaw Pact or the COMECON for instance, and apparently people were even allowed to travel to western countries.

Famous message from Tito to Stalin:

“Stop sending people to kill me. We've already captured five of them, one of them with a bomb and another with a rifle… If you don't stop sending killers, I'll send one to Moscow, and I won't have to send a second.”

Ha, good joke. Yugoslavia wanted Stalin dead because Stalin tried to kill Tito twice up to the point of the Yugo Secret Service advicing Stalin that they should stop fucking around, if not they would get rid of Stalin themselves.

'Soviet' is not a name, it is a political term, so I don't see why you cannot apply it to countries with USSR-like regimes, even if they don't carry S in their name.

For the curious, it is translated as 'council'.

True, but at least to me "Soviet era" is associated with the Soviet Union. As someone who grew up in Eastern Germany I would actually have expected that it is about a computer produced in the Soviet Union when reading "Soviet-era computer" (despite popular belief, not everything east of the iron curtain was part of the Soviet Union, countries had varying degrees of independence, even though the Soviet influence ran deep and depending on time and place was actually an occupation.

Within the group of European socialist countries, Yugoslavia was the most independent from the Soviet Union, and at times even an open opponent.

Indeed:

https://www.politico.com/story/2013/11/harry-truman-requests...

"The United States then began inching closer to Tito, supporting his regime rhetorically, economically and, finally, militarily, in order to ensure that Yugoslavia would remain out of the Soviet orbit. Throughout the Cold War, American officials saw in Tito a useful example of a communist leader who was not under the Kremlin’s thumb."

...

"With congressional assent, the United States and Yugoslavia signed a bilateral military agreement in November 1951 that tacitly incorporated Yugoslavia into NATO’s defensive web."

Cold War Diplomacy - Defense Treaties of the United States

https://avalon.law.yale.edu/subject_menus/mutdef.asp

(in 1949-1951)

- 1949 - NATO Treaty; April 4

- 1951 - Defense of Greenland: Agreement Between the United States and the Kingdom of Denmark, April 27

- 1951 - Defense of Iceland: Agreement Between the United States and the Republic of Iceland, May 5

- 1951 - Mutual Defense Treaty Between the United States and the Republic of the Philippines; August 30

- 1951 - Security Treaty Between the United States, Australia, and New Zealand (ANZUS); September 1

- 1951 - Military Facilities in the Azores: Agreement Between Portugal and the United States, September 6

- 1951 - Security Treaty Between the United States and Japan; September 8

- 1951 - Military Assistance Agreement Between the United States and Yugoslavia, November 14

Soviet

> A communist.

Yugoslav

> An unfaithful communist.

These good relations with USA did real good when their country was obliterated to shreds when it was no longer needed. Sigh.

> These good relations with USA did real good when their country was obliterated to shreds when it was no longer needed.

The US had these teachers:

"We have no eternal allies, and we have no perpetual enemies. Our interests are eternal and perpetual, and those interests it is our duty to follow."

https://www.oxfordreference.com/display/10.1093/acref/978019...

Always new counties which have to experience that.

Can you please define this political term and explain why it can be used in this context? Application of it to Yugoslavia seems very unusual to me. Its history normally does not include "Soviet Era".

As I see, it means something akin to "People's Democracy" which is an alternative terms of some other left authoritarian regimes.

Haven't heard of anything like that. Looks like it is some American pop culture definition that reduces the history of Europe to a few very broadly defined buckets to reduce the intellectual workload. It is often called ignorance. Do you think it makes sense to continue saying it is a valid use?

Well, yeah, but it's the same way on the other side of the Curtain: Such as, France had its own nuclear weapons and was in complicated relationship with NATO, but it gets totally conflated into the Western bloc with no reservations. Same with neutral Sweden and even Finland.

So I don't see any point to nitpick.

I don’t know really how things are in the new members of EU, but Russia is indeed a twin of USA in everything, including the ignorance and isolation of political discourse. It doesn’t mean that because Russia has it, it is a good thing.

> Haven't heard of anything like that.

(Speaking of ignorance.) The parent knows what they're talking about. "The people's democracies" was indeed the term that was customarily used within the Soviet block to include countries that did not belong to said block but otherwise lived under similar regimes.

I have not heard of equivalence between „Soviet“ and „People’s democracy“ before. In fact those terms are mutually exclusive. Either your country has multi-party system, at least formally, or it is a Soviet republic.

Not to disagree, but that’s what they were using.

"People's democracy" is actually the regime when there's a single ruling party system but it calls itself democratic because it is comprised of, you know, the people.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/People%27s_democracy_(Marxism–...

As opposed to regular plain old democracy.

It is literally in the first paragraph of the Wikipedia article:

People's democracy is a theoretical concept within Marxism–Leninism and a form of government which developed after World War II and allows in theory for a multi-class and multi-party democracy on the pathway to socialism.

Incidentally,

The German Democratic Republic had a plural multi-party system. The largest by members and parliament seats were the Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED), followed by Christian Democratic Union of Germany (CDU) and the Liberal Democratic Party of Germany (LDPD).

(The was also National-Democratic Party [1].)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Democratic_Party_of_G...

It still doesn't apply to Yugoslavia.

Well, Yugoslavia did cease to exist as soon as the "Soviet era" had ended.

It's specifically not a USSR-like regime.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tito%E2%80%93Stalin_split

Like. Absolutely. Because communist dictatorship. Like China. With differences (and perhaps more freedom), but still.

That's a very reductive view.

Yugoslavia didn't have a top-down economy the same way soviet countries did, it had a market of worker-run coops (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Workers'_self-management).

It also wasn't allied with the Soviet Bloc, but a leader of its own block of non-aligned countries (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-Aligned_Movement).

Yugoslavs also enjoyed much greater Freedoms, at one point having the strongest passport in the world - the only one that allowed for free travel to both the West and the East.

Yugoslavia was Soviet during the Cold War the same way Switzerland was Nazi during WW2 - not at all, just neutral.

"Soviet", in both English and Russian, very specifically refers to the USSR. I'm not aware of anyone (be it Westerners, Soviets or Yugoslavians themselves) calling Yugoslavia Soviet.

The designer of this computer, Voja Antonic, works for Supplyframe now, parent company of Hackaday. He designed couple badges for the annually held Superconference, all of them are a delight to play with. This year’s Supercon will be held in the first week of November! Very excited!

"Uninspired" is a little unfair – the Soviet Union took the PDP-11 architecture to strange new heights, once they had integrated it into a small 40-pin DIP package, and then later QFP: home computers with surprisingly good demoscene capabilities [1], little engineer's calculators with full QWERTY keyboards that ran BASIC programs [2], etc. DEC: when you care enough to steal the very best.

[1] the UKNC, with two LSI-11 compatibles on the same Qbus – one as a CPU, one for IO – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UKNC

[2] https://gregescov.tripod.com/calc.htm

Funnily enough, the 1801 microprocessor [1] wasn't stolen from DEC. Or rather, the instruction set was the only thing stolen. The 1801 was a new Soviet design originally with its own instruction set. It was later adapted to the PDP-11, probably because of the popularity of the PDP-11 and its software in the USSR. DEC never manufactured anything like the 1801, targeted more as a microcontroller than as a microprocessor. (Soviet military and aviation industries were the original intended use.)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1801_series_CPU

> The picture is one of a landscape littered with uninspired attempts to copy American IBM PCs, British ZX Spectrums, and other Western computers.

As opposed to the Galaksija, which, er... copied the ZX Spectrum? I somehow fail to see the point that the article is trying to make here. If anything, the designers of the Galaksija had an easier job than those of the numerous other Eastern European Spectrum clones (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ZX_Spectrum_clones?use...), because they at least had some access to western-made components...

EDIT: after reading the Wikipedia article, I stand corrected: the Galaksija wasn't a Sinclair clone, it was an independently designed Z80-based home computer. Which of course meant that you couldn't access the extensive software library (= games) available for ZX Spectrum, but had to develop your own software.

The Z80 chip family was also "easily" available behind the Iron Curtain because East Germany manufactured reverse-engineered Z80 clones (called the U880).

AFAIK the ZX Spectrum ULA could be 'emulated' with TTL logic, that's what East German hobbyist Spectrum clones did at least. That's also why Spectrum clones were so popular, they didn't require any complex custom chips like the C64.

There were clones of 8080, Z80 and 8086. The KR580VM80A - an 8080 clone was the most popular/accessible in the USSR I think.

The U880 was a Z80 clone, Soviet designation KR1858VM1, but most of the early-mid 1980s 8-bit home-built machines were 580- and thus 8080-based.

From its design/specs, it looks to have very similar capabilities as a Sinclair ZX80/ZX81. And the lesser-known Jupiter Ace.

Read: ~3/4 of the time the CPU cycles through some tightly-coded ROM software, and character data from ROM + a bit of circuitry generates the monochrome video signal.

Roughly ~1/4 of the time (vblank) the CPU can work on user programs.

Given the constraints of composite video timing, the Galaksija must be doing this in similar fashion. So with a Z80 at 3MHz it would perform as if at ~0.8MHz. Slow (even by those days' standards!), but useable.

ZX81 is rather flexible in how it produces graphics (esp. with 16KB RAM). And has a "FAST" mode in which the video generation is skipped, giving full CPU speed @ the cost of a blank screen. Dunno if Galaksija can do this.

ZX Spectrum added dedicated video hardware (no CPU work needed to generate image), color, sound, and more extensive BASIC. So from programmer's perspective, a very different beast.

Disclaimer: I'm one of the very few people who re-implemented the ZX81's "ULA" chip (a kind of semi-custom gate array) in a CPLD. So I know a 'little' about how this works. :-)

If you want more info just ask. Not familiar with the Galaksija design though.

Wow! I can’t believe I never heard of this.

Despite being born in Yugoslavia and alive at that time, I’ve never encountered or heard of Galaksija in my life. Sinclair stuff was pretty common: Spectrum and the older zx80, Commodore, even Amiga in the late 80s/early 90s. The only domestic machine I ever encountered was Orao.

cf https://emulator.galaksija.org/MagScans/index.html

It was really "popular" in 1984 and 1985, and for hobbyists only. If you started being interested in computers after 1985 there was a big chance to never hear of it.

You never had a chance to experience another Yugoslavian computer Pecom 32 then :)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pecom_32

Indeed I haven't, thanks for sharing. Wow a computer developed in Nis. Never thought I'd read about that.

Galaksija was a very impressive undertaking considering the fact that it was made by a single person. However, it was underpowered compared to other computers accessible to citizens of Yugoslavia at the time. I was a little kid back then but even I looked at Galaksija as mediocre in terms of power and features. My parents were middle class but we could afford a more powerful computer with color graphics and more memory.

We had one at our school but I never got the chance to use it. It was for older kids only and I got assigned to the ZX Spectrum with the others :) Not that I'm complaining.

> uninspired attempts to copy American IBM PCs

I fondly remember Bulgaria made Pravets, which was an excellent, high-quality clone.

I looked for pravets but could not find. Did you mean Pravetz? There seems to be a lot of love for those things. An article here on its genesis...

https://3seaseurope.com/pravetz-ivan-marangozov-inventor-bul...

We had a couple of these in primary school, as late as early 90s, as part of the "computing section", an extra-curricular activity with a couple of us attending a couple of times a month. We typically practiced BASIC commands and writing a couple of example "programs" - taking the keyboard input, producing results of arithmetic operations or producing lines on the screen, which was absolutely magical.

As I said in another thread, there used to be more European computer technology in the 80s. Hardware technology shifted to the US, then to China. The rest of the world only does software now.

Way more for sure, it was akin to a Cambrian explosion. One large downside was compatibility though - at best you could hope for two machines to be CP/M compatible, otherwise if you needed an app you could've written it yourself or hoped that someone else would do it.

Of course, if you needed an app you were out of luck, as there were no apps at the time. There were programs, though.

Cambridgian explosion, you mean?

soviet in title, nothing soviet in article.

Yeah, this confused me, too, at first.

It's unclear to me if it was ZX-Spectrum compatible, seems like it wasn't. Which would have severely limited it's usability.

ZX-Spectrum clones were as pervasive as mushrooms after rain in Eastern Europe, Romania had 5 different "brands" of them.

There were also attempts at producing proprietary, non-ZX spectrum compatible, Z80 based computers. They were short lived and failed in the market, like this weirdness: https://retroit.ro/product/amic/

Overall if it didn't run Spectrum games it was fairly useless.

It was partially inspired by the TRS-80 but wasn't TRS-80 compatible either.

I can't imagine how slow it is without a graphics chip

"Slow" is relative, but I do remember how a Voodoo 2000 turned my 100 MHz box into a supercomputer!

Many early 8-bit computers didn't have a graphics chip, including the Apple II and the Commodore PET 2001. The first real GPU was the ANTIC in the Atari 400/800.

The C64 had a VICII.

Yes, but it's not a GPU. The ANTIC is a processor as it has instructions. The VIC-II is a Video Interface Controller, thus the name.

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_home_computers_by_vide...

The VIC2 is literally a GPU, it doesn’t matter if it’s a processor

Reply on news.ycombinator.com