8 ms·

Galaksija: The Soviet-Era, Z80-based microcomputer

101 points by sundarurfriend 3y ago

tomca32 3y ago
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.
- 082349872349872 3y ago
  cf https://emulator.galaksija.org/MagScans/index.html https://emulator.galaksija.org/MagScans/index.html
- otto2 3y ago
  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.
- ivanche 3y ago
  You never had a chance to experience another Yugoslavian computer Pecom 32 then :) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pecom_32 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pecom_32
  - tomca32 3y ago
    Indeed I haven't, thanks for sharing. Wow a computer developed in Nis. Never thought I'd read about that.
- hahamaster 3y ago
  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.
- 0xbs0d 3y ago
  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.
Koshkin 3y ago
> uninspired attempts to copy American IBM PCs I fondly remember Bulgaria made Pravets, which was an excellent, high-quality clone.
- Daub 3y ago
  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-bulgaria-computer/ https://3seaseurope.com/pravetz-ivan-marangozov-inventor-bul...
poyu 3y ago
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!
otto2 3y ago
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.
- nickpp 3y ago
  Everything East of the Iron Wall (German Divide) was under USSR control.
  - Muromec 3y ago
    But it’s Yougoslavia, it’s to the south
    - throwaway71271 3y ago
      as they say, its in the name: land of the south slavs :)
  - hahamaster 3y ago
    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.
    - nickpp 3y ago
      Interesting. I stand corrected, then.
      - hahamaster 3y ago
        Thank you!
  - retrac 3y ago
    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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tito%E2%80%93Stalin_split
alluro2 3y ago
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.
esafak 3y ago
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.
- ivanche 3y ago
  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.
  - CrLf 3y ago
    Of course, if you needed an app you were out of luck, as there were no apps at the time. There were programs, though.
  - RetroTechie 3y ago
    Cambridgian explosion, you mean?
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
manca 3y ago
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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dejan_Ristanovi%C4%87 [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nPLyzOEobw8&ab_channel=ComputerHistoryMuseum https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nPLyzOEobw8&ab_channel=Compu...
- grujicd 3y ago
  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.
rob74 3y ago
> 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?useskin=vector#Czech_&_Czechoslovak 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.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- flohofwoe 3y ago
  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.
  - lstodd 3y ago
    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.
- RetroTechie 3y ago
  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.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
nxobject 3y ago
"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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UKNC [2] https://gregescov.tripod.com/calc.htm https://gregescov.tripod.com/calc.htm
- retrac 3y ago
  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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1801_series_CPU
bar000n 3y ago
soviet in title, nothing soviet in article.
- Koshkin 3y ago
  Yeah, this confused me, too, at first.
bowsamic 3y ago
I can't imagine how slow it is without a graphics chip
- Koshkin 3y ago
  "Slow" is relative, but I do remember how a Voodoo 2000 turned my 100 MHz box into a supercomputer!
- timbit42 3y ago
  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.
  - anthk 3y ago
    The C64 had a VICII.
    - timbit42 3y ago
      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_video_hardware https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_home_computers_by_vide...
      - bowsamic 3y ago
        The VIC2 is literally a GPU, it doesn’t matter if it’s a processor
MichaelRo 3y ago
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/ https://retroit.ro/product/amic/ Overall if it didn't run Spectrum games it was fairly useless.
- timbit42 3y ago
  It was partially inspired by the TRS-80 but wasn't TRS-80 compatible either.

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.

082349872349872 3y ago
cf https://emulator.galaksija.org/MagScans/index.html https://emulator.galaksija.org/MagScans/index.html
otto2 3y ago
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.
ivanche 3y ago
You never had a chance to experience another Yugoslavian computer Pecom 32 then :) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pecom_32 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pecom_32
- tomca32 3y ago
  Indeed I haven't, thanks for sharing. Wow a computer developed in Nis. Never thought I'd read about that.
hahamaster 3y ago
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.
0xbs0d 3y ago
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.

Koshkin 3y ago

> uninspired attempts to copy American IBM PCs I fondly remember Bulgaria made Pravets, which was an excellent, high-quality clone.

Daub 3y ago
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-bulgaria-computer/ https://3seaseurope.com/pravetz-ivan-marangozov-inventor-bul...

poyu 3y ago

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!

otto2 3y ago

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.

nickpp 3y ago
Everything East of the Iron Wall (German Divide) was under USSR control.
- Muromec 3y ago
  But it’s Yougoslavia, it’s to the south
  - throwaway71271 3y ago
    as they say, its in the name: land of the south slavs :)
- hahamaster 3y ago
  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.
  - nickpp 3y ago
    Interesting. I stand corrected, then.
    - hahamaster 3y ago
      Thank you!
- retrac 3y ago
  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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tito%E2%80%93Stalin_split

alluro2 3y ago

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.

esafak 3y ago

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.

ivanche 3y ago
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.
- CrLf 3y ago
  Of course, if you needed an app you were out of luck, as there were no apps at the time. There were programs, though.
- RetroTechie 3y ago
  Cambridgian explosion, you mean?
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]

manca 3y ago

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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dejan_Ristanovi%C4%87 [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nPLyzOEobw8&ab_channel=ComputerHistoryMuseum https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nPLyzOEobw8&ab_channel=Compu...

grujicd 3y ago
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.

rob74 3y ago

> 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?useskin=vector#Czech_&_Czechoslovak 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.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
flohofwoe 3y ago
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.
- lstodd 3y ago
  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.
RetroTechie 3y ago
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.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

nxobject 3y ago

"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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UKNC [2] https://gregescov.tripod.com/calc.htm https://gregescov.tripod.com/calc.htm

retrac 3y ago
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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1801_series_CPU

bar000n 3y ago

soviet in title, nothing soviet in article.

Koshkin 3y ago
Yeah, this confused me, too, at first.

bowsamic 3y ago

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

Koshkin 3y ago
"Slow" is relative, but I do remember how a Voodoo 2000 turned my 100 MHz box into a supercomputer!
timbit42 3y ago
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.
- anthk 3y ago
  The C64 had a VICII.
  - timbit42 3y ago
    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_video_hardware https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_home_computers_by_vide...
    - bowsamic 3y ago
      The VIC2 is literally a GPU, it doesn’t matter if it’s a processor

MichaelRo 3y ago

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/ https://retroit.ro/product/amic/ Overall if it didn't run Spectrum games it was fairly useless.

timbit42 3y ago
It was partially inspired by the TRS-80 but wasn't TRS-80 compatible either.