KC 85

~ the eulogy ~

The machine shipped in 1984 called the HC 900, where HC stood for Heimcomputer. A year later the same machine, unchanged in every electrical respect, was called the KC 85/2, where KC stood for Kleincomputer. Nothing about the hardware had been found wanting. The plan had simply decided that this was not a thing people would have at home, so the word for home came off the lid.

It was built at VEB Mikroelektronik "Wilhelm Pieck" in Mühlhausen, running a U880 at about 1.75 MHz, which was East Germany's unlicensed reimplementation of the Zilog Z80. Four models ran from 1984 to 1990, opening with the HC 900 and closing with the KC 85/4 of 1988. Around forty five thousand were made in total, which for six years of a country's flagship small computer is a number you can hold in your head.

Where they went is the part that matters. The overwhelming majority landed in schools and in the training rooms of enterprises, allocated rather than sold. A private citizen who wanted one was not facing a price so much as a queue and a decision made elsewhere. The KC 85/3 listed at 1,700 marks and the KC 85/4 at 4,100, and for most people neither number was the binding constraint.

I have spent enough years around product roadmaps to recognize what happened in 1985, even at that distance. A machine gets built for one audience, a review upstairs reassigns it to another, and the engineering does not change at all because the engineering was never what was under discussion. The difference is that a market usually delivers that verdict slowly and through sales. Here it arrived as a memo, and the memo changed the name on the case.

~ the dossier ~

~ the two KC 85s ~

There is a KC 85/1 and it has almost nothing to do with any of the above. Robotron in Dresden launched a machine called the Z 9001 in 1984, and in 1985 renamed it the KC 85/1 for exactly the same reason Mühlhausen renamed the HC 900. Two separate combines, two incompatible computers, one naming directive applied to both. The Dresden line continued as the KC 87 until march 1989.

So a country with a planned economy and a single approved naming scheme ended up with a KC 85/1 that could not run software written for the KC 85/2. Wikipedia has to state the disclaimer outright in both articles. If you were a teacher handed a crate of these in 1987, the number after the slash was doing considerably more work than the letters in front of it.

~ the module slots ~

The one genuinely good idea here was expansion. The base unit had two slots on the front, and you extended the machine by pushing in modules the size of cartridges. RAM went in one, a floppy controller in the other, and extra housings stacked on when you needed further slots. It meant a classroom could start with the cheapest configuration and grow it out of a stationery budget over several years, which is precisely what an institution buying in bulk needs and precisely what a home user, who buys once, does not care about.

Read backwards, the modular design tells you the rename was already true before it was announced. Nobody engineers an incremental expansion path for a machine going into living rooms.

~ the actual end ~

The KC 85/4 was still in production in 1990. The currency union arrived on 1 july, the Kombinat structures were handed to the Treuhandanstalt, and by the third quarter the line at Mühlhausen had stopped. There was no announcement to make. The buyer of essentially every unit ever built had been the East German state, and that customer was in liquidation.

What survives is unusually well kept for a machine of this size. The KC 85 has an active preservation scene with emulators and restored hardware, the documentation reconstructed alongside it, most of that work done by people who met one in a school room in Thuringia and never entirely let go. Forty five thousand machines is nothing next to a Spectrum. It is quite a lot when they were all in the same country and half of them were the first computer somebody ever touched.

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