IQ 151

~ the obit ~

The IQ 151 did not start out as a school computer. In 1982 a group at the Czech Technical University in Prague built a display terminal called the IK 80-M, intended for military work, and the machine Czech children later learned BASIC on is a direct descendant of it. ZPA Nový Bor, a plant inside the industrial-automation combine, took that design into production in 1985.

The processor was an MHB8080A at 2 MHz, which is Tesla's own reimplementation of the Intel 8080. Czechoslovakia could not spend hard currency on Western machines, so it built its own out of Western designs it had already copied at the chip level. Base memory was 32 kB of RAM against 4 kB of ROM, doubled later. Everything else arrived as a module you slotted in from outside: video cards for the display, language cards carrying BASIC. Two different network cards were made so a classroom of them could be wired together, and a separate controller talked to an eight inch floppy drive.

More than two thousand units shipped in 1985 alone and the machine kept going into Czech classrooms for the rest of the decade. An operating system called AMOS was written for it by students at the Faculty of Mathematics and Physics in Prague under Rudolf Kryl, and a CP/M variant named MIKROS existed as well. Slovak schools ran the PMD 85 instead, so a single country taught its children on two machines with nothing in common.

I was one year old when the first of these reached a classroom. My own computing happened on imported hardware and my internet started in 1998 on a modem, in a country that never had to design a school computer because it could buy one. Reading about the IQ 151 is reading about a constraint no engineer I know has worked under, where the question is not which machine is best but which machine can be built out of parts that exist inside the border.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ from a military terminal ~

The IK 80-M was a terminal, which is to say a keyboard and a screen with just enough logic in it to talk to something bigger. Turning that into a standalone computer meant adding memory, a BASIC, and a reason for a fourteen year old to sit down at it. The origin shows in the shape of the finished machine, especially the expansion modules hanging off the back, which read like lab instrumentation rather than anything sold to a household.

The keyboard came out of the same thinking. The IQ 151 shipped with a keyboard that people who used both machines rate below the PMD 85's, and the PMD 85's keys were repurposed telephone buttons. Typing on it is the first complaint in almost every surviving account of the machine.

~ the heat ~

It ran hot under almost no load at all. The standing joke in Czech write-ups is that it worked as an excellent warmer for a mug of coffee, which is the sort of joke that only attaches to hardware people actually had to live with every day. Early units also shipped with a power supply that could not carry several modules at once, so the expansion system meant to be the machine's strength was capped by the thing feeding it.

~ two school computers, one country ~

Czechoslovakia ran the IQ 151 in Czech classrooms and the PMD 85 in Slovak ones. The split was drawn by which plant built what and which ministry paid for it, and it sat almost exactly on the line the country would divide along in 1993. Nobody designed it as a preview. A generation of Czech and Slovak programmers still learned on incompatible hardware four years before they stopped sharing a state.

Production stopped after 1989. Once imports were possible there was no case left to make for a 2 MHz 8080 clone with a bad keyboard and a heat problem, and the state that had commissioned it was busy turning into something else. No successor was attempted.

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