Bulgarian here. My best friend had this one, it was an https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oric https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oric based computer clone, and fun to us

Bulgarian here. My best friend had this one, it was an https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oric https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oric based computer clone, and fun to use :) - all you need is a TV. My father bought me Pravetz 8C (An Apple ][ /e, or was it /c) clone with 128KB RAM! (pr#8 hi-res mode) + floppy. It was more expensive than buying a good russian car back then, and I'm thankful for what he did for me! We had few magazines, books to learn from, and were typing like crazy hex codes to get TETRIS, or someother game on. For a long time, I thought it was the "Merchant" that made Karateka, only later to understand that was one of the earliest cracking groups (some of them later turned into demo groups), and that's how we got most of the software in. Years before communism fell, our biggest hard-drive maker, started making their "own" games - which were complete rip offs of other western games, and "cyrilized" to the bone (like "Karateka" again). Another friend of mine's mom was working in a company, back then durign communism and all they did was byte-code replace english into russian in lots of DOS apps - like PC Tools. Hence the weird abbreviation, as often russian would not fit. Really, it was direct hex-editing! All, in all, I'm somehow thankful to the regime (ahem...) for giving me "free" of a lot, here in the US, is paid. Especially the programming clubs, courses, etc. Obviously that whole scheme did not scale :) but it was good times (while I was kid).