Eastern bloc computing

[copse]

Occasionally I catch mention about computing in I guess what could be called "The Eastern Bloc". People not able to afford or access the computers we had in the "West", and even improved Spectrum clones.

Take for example this post.

Faster Z80 processors and better storage devices might have extended the lifespan of these machines, much like with the eastern bloc Spectrum clones. But at this point Europeans had switched their attention to the increasingly affordable Atari ST and Amiga models.

Does anyone know about interesting developments Spectrum and beyond in "The Eastern Bloc" that were not visible to "the West"? To a large degree large powers like China and Russia have their own ecosystems not visible to us, which may contain interesting things both in the past and current day that we have not heard about (like these upgraded clones for me at least).

[BigD]

Russia and to a lesser extent China had clones of IBM PCs and even the NES with the Dendy Consoles. To be honest the more interesting situation is Poland, Croatia and yje Eastern European countries, where the Amiga development window extended into the late 90s as they got the technology later!

[Reynolds]

There are plenty of interesting facts about the hungarian situation way back. There is a documentary called "Vakondok: végigjátszás", which was about the sw development part, how it went here.

[ Show youtube player ]

I don't know if there is any english sub available though. There are some parts which are interviews with foreign ppl btw.

[Megalomaniac]

The Spectrum probably won there because it was easier to clone, being mostly made up of off-the-shelf parts rather than custom chips. Had the Soviet Union lasted an extra five or ten years there would have probably been interesting ST clones rather than Amigas, for much the same reason.

Without watching the video, so apologies if this has been said, some interesting stuff came from behind the Iron Curtain before it fell, and from those countries afterwards. Tetris is obvious, but also Novotrade's works (Sentinel Worlds on the C64, Impossible Mission II, Ecco the Dolphin), the late era C64 RPG Newcomer, and those Polish Amiga games which mostly didn't get noticed in the west (mostly deservedly so, I think, but Citadel / Cytadela was an impressive effort at Doom for the A500). Not to mention the lingering claims that the original C64 Last Ninja was ripped off from a Hungarian team (which appears to be untrue, Games That Weren't has some content on it).

[dreadnought]

I grew up in Poland at that time. We didn't really have many popular clones. There were two Meritum models, first one cloned TRS-80 and the later one ZX Spectrum, but they were made mostly for schools and in low volume. And also some more obscure industrial ones. Oh, and the infamous Pegasus - NES clone for which you could buy a 100s-games-megacart

Amiga scene was pretty big, the most famous games would be Franko: Crazy Revenge and Teenagent, which actually sold well in shops despite 99.9% prevalence of piracy (I think I recall vaguely because the price was very decent). Some other games of note: https://www.ppe.pl/publicystyka/2029...e-pomysly.html

Also the Atari 8 bit scene was very strong, with some companies such as LK Avalon doing very well selling homebrew games, first locally and then worldwide.

Fun Fact: Messrs Iwinski / Kicinski, the founders of CD Projekt Red started out as ZX Spectrum pirates at Warsaw's computer fair (there's actually a small probability I bought warez from them, since I commuted there from across half the country a few times to get the latest ones).

Some of the Amiga /Atari guys would also go on to have big careers in the industry later, eg Adrian Chmielarz (also a pirate & Teenagent dev).

In Russia the ZX Spectrum clone scene was quite wild, these guys didn't mess about - they had several clones, with Pentagon being probably the most well known, also cloning TR-DOS and heaps of software. Actually it is still going pretty strong, with devs such as Zosya killing it with incredible coding feats and people still making bizarre Spectrum clones/hybrids such as ZX Evolution or TS-Conf.

Many of these fascinating old machines are available as cores for MiSTer now.

[chb]

During the latest month of the German Democratic Republic, a clone of the Amstrad CPC called "KC compact" was produced by VEB Mikroelektronik „Wilhelm Pieck“ . Due to the end of the GDR, it was only produced in rather small numbers (probably low thousands) and did not have much of an impact.

KC here stands for "Kleincomputer", literally "little computer". There exists earlier systems from the same manufacturer, the KC85 series (HC900, KC85/2,KC85/3 and KC85/4), which were much more widespread, at least in educational institutions. Those were not compatible with any western systems and had their own operating system and BASIC. Fun fact for Amiga enthusiasts: The OS was called CAOS (meaning "Cassette Aided Operating System"), like the originally planed AmigaOS.

[Locutus]

I would like to have a play with one of the pdp11 based soviet home computers:

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

My hope would have been to get BSD2.11 to run on one, but i fear that as nobody has ever done so before it doesn't actually implement the pdp11/23 style MMU.

[chb]

The Elektonika BK is super interesting indeed. You are most likely correct that is doesn't have an MMU, as it is a clone of the LSI-11, which also doesn't have one. But there's is LSX for the LSI-11 and based on that BKUNIX.

[copse]

Originally Posted by Megalomaniac

the late era C64 RPG Newcomer

It took me a while to parse this and work out the name of the game

https://www.lemon64.com/game/newcomer

I see from the often interesting Lemon comments that there's an "ultimate newcomer" that "reduces disk swapping frustration" in perpetual development.

[Docent]

Originally Posted by dreadnought

Fun Fact: Messrs Iwinski / Kicinski, the founders of CD Projekt Red started out as ZX Spectrum pirates at Warsaw's computer fair

And they continued doing so on Amiga & pc well into nineties

Originally Posted by dreadnought

Some of the Amiga /Atari guys would also go on to have big careers in the industry later, eg Adrian Chmielarz (also a pirate & Teenagent dev).

Chmielarz never did anything on Amiga. In case of Teenagent, he did only pc version but the source was in asm and a real mess... Amiga version of Teenagent was written from scratch by Maciej Marzec (also known as Mok or Mac on Amiga scene)

[pandy71]

Issue with former soviet bloc was RWPG ( Comecon ) - every country has very strict role to play in industry - for example Poland main task was heavy industry, mostly mining equipment - there was no freedom in research and development - countries was forced to obey Moscow decision - as such electronics was allowed only to some degree and each country was strictly controlled by "soviet friends" - most advanced electronics was in Soviet Union and in former German Democratic Republic (in fact GDR received lot of technologies from Western Germany, also industrial espionage played very important role in GDR electronics strength).

Generally countries in soviet bloc followed Intel products also teaching in universities was mostly limited to Intel architectures. CPU's like 6800 or 6502

Some countries like for example Bulgaria was able to detach from Intel and started production clone (perhaps legal not sure on this) of the 6502 (interestingly - 6502 was not cloned by Soviet Union till half of 90's - to produce Apple clone named Agat they used initially 16 bit CMOS bit slice family K588 but due of slow CMOS technology - clock was around 1MHz emulated 6502 was slower than real 6502 in Apple and as such lot of software was not able to run on Agat properly due Apple developers frequent practice to exploit hardware quirks heavily).

Nevertheless in Poland you had lot of domestic developments mostly around produced i8080 (Poland clone was named MCY7880 - at least in theory because polish primary semiconductor vendor CEMI was unable practically till end of own existence provide this as mass product)

Side to already provided by dreadnought clones of the TRS80 (Meritum) there was clones of ZX Spectrum ( Elwro 800 Junior Elwro 700 Solum and few others).


Btw i've heard at the beginning of 90's rumors about Amiga clone made in then Russia (former Soviet Union) by TTL MSI/SSI and perhaps some programmable logic (PROM's etc) - this clone accordingly to rumors should be made by some private enthusiast however i was never able to find any solid facts on this so let say this was probably another urban legend and if such clones of Amiga was ever made then it was probably made with original Amiga chips.

[drHirudo]

Originally Posted by pandy71

Issue with former soviet bloc was RWPG ( [URL="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comecon?useskin=vector"]
Some countries like for example Bulgaria was able to detach from Intel and started production clone (perhaps legal not sure on this) of the 6502 (interestingly - 6502 was not cloned by Soviet Union till half of 90's - to produce Apple clone named Agat they used initially 16 bit CMOS bit slice family K588 but due of slow CMOS technology - clock was around 1MHz emulated 6502 was slower than real 6502 in Apple and as such lot of software was not able to run on Agat properly due Apple developers frequent practice to exploit hardware quirks heavily).

Agat was purely Soviet invention and it was slower than the Apple II. Western journalists joked in the articles that the Soviets won't be able to sell it, even if they give it for free.

On another hand in Bulgaria we had very big computer industry, being able to clone Apple II, starting with IMKO-1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IMKO-1
released as early as 1980, then the IMKO-2 (Pravetz-82), which was pure Apple II analog, made for use in Schools and Business. We were able the clone the 6502 CPU, called CM630P. There were legends that people were using microtome to be able to clone and reproduce the chips. But once I've met one of the main engineers who worked there and he told me that they simply bought the schematics from some Malaysian/Thailand pirate workers, who produced the chips in their factories.

There were computer rooms equipped with Pravetz-82 and it was quite popular.

Later came Pravetz-8M, which had built-in Z80 for CP/M, and then the Pravetz-8A and Pravetz-8C which were Apple //e, //c analogs and even had colour output. Additionally, for pure home use was the Pravetz-8D, which is a clone of the Oric Atmos. Unique to all these machines was that they had Cyrillic alphabet in their ROMs and in my Pravetz-8C I had jumper to switch between lowercase Latin letters or Cyrillic. The eastern bloc countries have huge history of computing, which is closely related to the western computer industry, usually with 2-3 years delay (the time to being able to clone the new technology). The top range computer, before the fall of the communism was the Pravetz-16, which is XT analog with faster than 8 MHz speed or up to 286 speeds. We also had some own developments - in the 1980-ies the Puldin https://olimex.wordpress.com/2015/01...-from-scratch/
and some PDP compatibles. The software development was not to be neglected as well. We had many Apple and Oric games translated to Bulgarian - Karateka, Drol, Cavern Creatures and many more. For the business Apple Works was translated to Paris (as in the mythology guy, not the city), Apple Logo, Fortran and so on. For the Pravetz-8D there was operating system for handling floppies borrowed from Pravetz-82/Apple II.

Because the Commodore C64, Amstrad CPC and the Amiga were hard to clone, there were no clones of them here. But I still have some C64 tapes with Bulgarian cracks of games (if they still work) and some floppies. The C64 was quite popular, but hard to get. Same with the Amiga.

I can write about Bulgarian/Eastern bloc computer history for hours and hours. Ask me if you are interested in anything particular. Like how I was able to obtain magazines and 8-inch floppies, because I lived next to one of the biggest - the mighty ZIT - https://www.zitbg.com/
Video about ZIT - https://www.zitbg.com/bg/node/142

[Predseda]

I live in a country where we were able to invent this in 1985, which is the year Amiga was introduced:

[pandy71]

Originally Posted by drHirudo

Agat was purely Soviet invention and it was slower than the Apple II. Western journalists joked in the articles that the Soviets won't be able to sell it, even if they give it for free.

Seem comrades in Soviet Union decided to follow closely US - if Apple was chosen as education computer they willing to repeat same in Soviet Union and probably also reuse large amount of educational software too...

Originally Posted by drHirudo

On another hand in Bulgaria we had very big computer industry, being able to clone Apple II, starting with IMKO-1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IMKO-1 released as early as 1980, then the IMKO-2 (Pravetz-82), which was pure Apple II analog, made for use in Schools and Business. We were able the clone the 6502 CPU, called CM630P. There were legends that people were using microtome to be able to clone and reproduce the chips. But once I've met one of the main engineers who worked there and he told me that they simply bought the schematics from some Malaysian/Thailand pirate workers, who produced the chips in their factories.

Bulgaria had also fruitful industry espionage experience. But this is strange why Soviets simply didn't take this plans to reproduce 6502 in their portfolio? Instead they tried to replace 6502 trough some emulation in 16 bit slice solution...
East Germany used to clone various IC's, East German Communist Party pushed very hard for microelectronics - so they cloned plenty of circuits, even uPD7220. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kombin...useskin=vector

[tygre]

Hi all!

China has actually a very rich history of home-grown and cloned computers!

For examples:

• https://zhuanlan.zhihu.com/p/42973469
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subor
• https://www.computinghistory.org.uk/...tung-TPC-2000/

It's just difficult to access its history

Cheers!