Maťo

~ the goodbye ~

Závadka nad Hronom is a village in central Slovakia, under the Low Tatras, and in the late eighties it had a state agricultural enterprise. One of the people working there was Ivan Urda, and outside the job, in his own time, he designed an eight bit computer. The prototype came together in 1988 under the name BAPO, after the director of the works. By the time it went into serial production in August 1989 it was called Maťo.

The machine was a reworked PMD 85, running the same MHB8080A at 2.048 MHz, Tesla's reimplementation of the Intel 8080. It carried 48 KB of RAM and 16 KB of ROM behind a system monitor and a BASIC called BASIC-G, and it drove a monochrome television at 288 by 256. What it added over the original was a built-in power supply and a much lower price, and the way it reached that price was by not being assembled. You bought a kit and you built it yourself.

Around 5,500 went out before production stopped in 1992, which makes Maťo the last eight bit computer designed in Slovakia. It is also filed, accurately, as a commercial failure.

~ the chronicle ~

~ a computer from an agricultural enterprise ~

The detail that keeps this one interesting is the manufacturer. Štátny majetok Závadka nad Hronom was a state farm, and it put a computer into serial production because one of its employees could design one and the enterprise had the standing to try. Planned economies threw up this kind of accident regularly. Capability would be sitting in the wrong building, and it got used where it was found, because there was no mechanism for moving it to the right one.

~ the compatibility problem ~

Maťo was derived from the PMD 85 and would not run PMD 85 software. That single fault decided everything downstream of it. Slovak schools had standardized on the PMD, with most of a decade of accumulated programs and teaching material sitting behind it, so a cheaper machine that could read none of that had to win on price alone against an installed base that already had a library.

~ what 1989 did to it ~

Serial production started in August 1989 and the Velvet Revolution began in November. Within about two years the border was open to imports, a Slovak household could buy a Spectrum clone or a secondhand PC instead of an eight bit kit from a farm, and the economics that had justified a domestically designed machine stopped applying to anything.

I was five years old and in Turkey when this went into production, which is about as far from it as you can get while staying in the same decade. The part I find legible anyway is the kit. You bought a box of parts and made your own computer, and that relationship with hardware disappeared everywhere at roughly the same time, for the same reason: finished machines got cheap enough that building one stopped being the cheap option.

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