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Home Computers Behind the Iron Curtain

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This is surprisingly similar to the story of home computers in Brazil.

From 1984 (during which time we were under a military dictatorship) to 1991, we were under a market reserve. Because of this, the computers we had were either cloned from smuggled devices, or, funnily enough, devices imported legally with the intention of being reverse engineered.

Reverse engineering was not only legal, it was encouraged by the reserve. Due to government incentives, even companies that had nothing to do with computers ended up building them.

Cloned computers ranged from ZX81 and Apple II+, to ones with more elaborate circuitry, such as the Mac 512 (this one has a lot of interesting stories -- albeit somewhat sad, in a sense --, some even involves orange juice embargo from the US government).

The idea behind the reserve was to create a computer hardware industry in Brazil, but this ended up never happening the way it was supposed to happen.

Although locally-developed peripherals were made, there were very few computers that were actually designed in Brazil that ended up having a significant portion of the market. Clones thrived, mostly. Local semiconductor companies failed to produce quality components, but those were used anyway. Some companies managed to import (with special permission from the government) processors and other components we were never able to properly manufacture.

In a move that's both obvious and surprising, the focus moved to software when the reserve was finally lifted.

Obvious because, although we had many skilled people that managed to reverse engineer circuits (including ASICs, as was the case with the Unitron Mac), and build new ones, often improving them (either making them faster, more reliable, or just cheaper), we still depended on foreign technology to build our computers. The whole idea of the reserve was to reduce that dependency.

Surprising because, during the reserve, software was most often hacked versions of foreign stuff. Although some important bits and pieces (such as compilers, operating systems, CAD programs, word processing and a bunch of other stuff) ended up being made locally, unless you're a collector, you're not going to find the remnants of these bits.

My first computer ( I was born in a soviet country ) was Pravetz 16 [1][2]. It was bought for me by my father around 1994. It was a IBM PC compatible computer that run on DOS.

Until today I haven't found any significant difference between what I had back then and what similar age IBM-PC was in terms of hardware.

They were both with AT power [3] and they had the same extension slots ( Back then it was ISA [4] ).

I still remember extending my Pravetz with a color screen and a EGA card [5]. It was so expensive ( the card + color monitor ), that I had to ask my father to combine the presents that I had as a child for a series of occasions. ( I think it was one birthday + christmas + name day ).

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pravetz_computers

[2] http://templar.blog.bg/photos/31865/original/photo-pravetz-1...

[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_supply_unit_%28computer%2...

[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industry_Standard_Architecture

[5] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enhanced_Graphics_Adapter

> Until today I haven't found any significant difference between what I had back then and what similar age IBM-PC was in terms of hardware.

On the other side of the curtain we had SVGA instead of EGA. And 486 or (barely) Pentium instead of pre 386. Probably more RAM. Probably a bigger harddisk. Probably printer or modem or both. Maybe a sound card. And CD-ROM.

These computers were manufactured in mid to late 80's, so most of them predate both 486 and CD-ROM.

>It was bought for me by my father around 1994

Yeah back then my Pravetz was already 6 years ( manufactured around '88 [1] ) old and still very popular. I didn't have CD-ROM until I got my first 486DX4 custom case computer.

[1] http://www.pravetz.bg/05-Pravetz-History.html

Precisely. And I listed what many of us on the other side had in '94.

I used http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pravetz_computers as my source of information about Pravetz since I don't speak Bulgarian or Russian.

East Germany showing off their home computers in a parade, 1987:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/9a/Bundesarc...

Only tangentially relevant here, but that photo reminds me of MIT's "Make Way for Cruftlings" hack: http://hacks.mit.edu/Hacks/by_year/2003/cruftlings/

Even more tangentially relevant, but has there been just one hack in all of 2014?

I was absolutely delighted when I found out that most East German home computers (and probably most Eastern Bloc computers in general) are supported in the MESS emulator. About a year ago I spent a few weeks to get some of my old KC85 games from the 80's running in the browser via JSMESS and emscripten (no sound support yet at that time unfortunately):

http://www.flohofwoe.net/history.html

MESS has since been merged back into MAME, and has been moved to github:

https://github.com/mamedev/mame

And some info on how to get started with coding on the KC85:

http://flohofwoe.blogspot.de/2014/11/new-adventures-in-8-bit...

Man, this brings me back. Couple of noteworthy entries from the lands of the ex-Yugoslavia:

Orao (Eagle): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orao_%28computer%29

Galaksija (Galaxy): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galaksija_%28computer%29

VUK (Wolf): Only in Serbian, magazine scan from the 80s... the graphics screenshot looks incredible for the time: http://retrospec.sgn.net/users/tomcat/yu/magshow.php?auto=&p...

The Ulimate Galaksija Talk [29C3]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DIwC9vdqfqw

Bit of a tangent but I recommend the Polish miniseries Decalogue. http://m.imdb.com/title/tt0092337/

All are great vignettes and ultimately quite secular.

The first episode is what made me think of it here. Watch to find out why.

The first episode (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decalogue_I) is the most poignant of all I think. If you are, like me, teaching your young child how to program this will be both very interesting and heart wrenching to watch. Note that the father's name is Krzysztof, which may refer to either Kieslowski or to Krzysztof Piesiewicz with whom Kieslowski collaborated on the script or both, perhaps hinting that this may be one of the more personal episodes (Kieslowski's father was an engineer, too).

At Atari (in the mid 80s) we had some relationships with dealers in Poland; they would occasionally visit us in Sunnyvale to do buys and say "hi".

They loved our computers, but the Polish government wouldn't allow them to sell any of the printers we made . . .

Probably because we had Soviet bloc manufacturers of printers, Mera-Błonie in Poland, Robotron in East Germany, etc.

Im guessing Polish delegates were representing Pewex, or Baltona. Those were the only two institutions allowed to openly sell goods imported from the west. You could buy anything you wanted, including cars :o, the catch was you had to pay in western currency or fake dollars called "Bon towarowy". Their only purpose was to extract foreign currency from black market.

The secondary goal was to give party members high up enough a way to get perks in terms of western goods.

That PMD-85 looks interesting.

If you're into this kind of thing, there's a similarly interesting resource here:

http://www.computer-museum.ru/english/index.php

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