Galaksija

~ the last words ~

In december 1983 I did not exist yet, so this one is read rather than remembered. What was on sale that month in Belgrade was a magazine. Not a magazine about computers, a magazine containing one. The full schematic ran in it, down to the ROM listing, along with everything else you needed to build a working Z80 machine on a kitchen table if you could hold a soldering iron.

The designer was Voja Antonić and the special issue was called Računari u vašoj kući, computers in your home, written up by Dejan Ristanović and printed as a one-off edition of the science magazine Galaksija. The magazine's circulation was around thirty thousand. Antonić and Ristanović estimated that perhaps a thousand readers would actually attempt the build. About eight thousand ordered kits, and an unknown further number sourced the parts themselves, because every component in the design was deliberately something you could get hold of.

The reason it had to be built rather than bought is Yugoslav customs. A finished Western home computer was an import, and imports were expensive and awkward enough that people carried Spectrums back from Italy one at a time in hand luggage. A pile of loose components was not a computer for customs purposes, and around two hundred marks of loose components turned into one on your desk after somewhere between eight and twenty four hours of work.

The part I recognize is the parts list. Twenty years after this, on Turkish hardware forums, my generation had a forum signature listing every component in the machine under the desk, updated whenever one of them changed, and there was a whole social economy built around arguing about somebody else's list. Same instinct, different decade, much lower stakes. The Yugoslav version of that list was the machine itself, and yours only existed if you built it.

~ the record ~

~ the machine that drew its own screen ~

There is no video chip in a Galaksija. The Z80A, running at 3.072 MHz, generated the video signal itself in software, which meant the processor spent most of its life painting the screen and comparatively little of it running your program. Antonić knew exactly what he was giving up. The trade bought him a drastically simpler board and a drastically lower price, and price was the entire point of the exercise.

This is the sort of decision that only makes sense when you know precisely who the machine is for. A commercial vendor would have added the chip and passed on the cost, because a slow computer reviews badly. Somebody publishing a schematic for readers to build has a different constraint: the design fails if the parts are expensive or hard to find, and it does not fail if BASIC runs slowly.

~ the giveaway ~

Antonić took no patent and asked for no royalty on any machine built from his design. He was paid for writing the magazine piece and that was the end of his financial interest in it. Anyone could build one, and anyone could manufacture one, which is what happened next: Elektronika Inženjering in Zemun started producing assembled units, and the Institute for School Books and Teaching Aids put them into classrooms. Over a thousand went out that way in about a year.

Radio Belgrade broadcast software over the air so listeners could record it onto cassette and load it at home. A country got a computer and a software library to run on it out of one magazine special issue and a transmitter, at approximately no cost to anybody, because the one person who could have charged for it declined to.

~ the long tail ~

Commercial production ran to 1985 and then stopped, killed by the ordinary thing: machines you did not have to solder got cheap enough, and the Commodores and Spectrums came in. Antonić moved on. In 1995 he threw out almost everything he had kept, including the documentation and five Galaksija prototypes, which is the sort of thing you do when you are certain nobody will ever ask.

People asked. The Galaksija turned into the founding artifact of Serbian computing, cited constantly in coverage of the country's software industry, rebuilt by hobbyists from scans of the original magazine and kept alive in emulators. Antonić himself went on to the international hardware-hacking world and is now a fixture there. The machine did what he designed it to do, which was not to sell, but to get a generation to the point where they could build the next thing.

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