Microdigital Eletrônica

~ the last words ~

Brazil spent the 1980s with its border closed to computers. The policy had a name and eventually a law of its own, the informatics market reserve, and the version an ordinary buyer met was simple. You could not get a foreign machine, so somebody local had to make you one. Microdigital Eletrônica was founded in São Paulo in 1981 by two brothers, Jorge and Tomas Kovari, and their initials went on the front of everything the company ever shipped.

The first machine was the TK80, a copy of the Sinclair ZX80, and the line tracked Sinclair from there. By 1983 the TK85 was doing the ZX81. In 1985 the TK90X did the ZX Spectrum and landed as the first color computer most Brazilian families could actually afford.

None of it was licensed. Sinclair's ULA was a custom bipolar chip, and Microdigital's engineers rebuilt its behavior in CMOS from the outside, which is real engineering wearing a copy's clothes. The result was better fitted to its market than the original had been. Sinclair BASIC picked up extra commands, and the character set carried the accents that Portuguese needs. Sound came out through the television's RF signal instead of the Spectrum's internal beeper, and the TV standard was switchable, because a machine sold across South America runs into more than one of them.

By 1985 the company had around four hundred people across three industrial plants and more than seven hundred resellers working the country. In October 1986 the TK90X was leaving at 2,500 units a month. There were professional machines as well, the TK2000 and later the TK3000 IIe, compatible with the Apple II at the level of Applesoft BASIC rather than at the level of the hardware.

I was one year old when the TK90X went on sale, so the distance here runs two ways at once. Turkey never sealed its border the way Brazil did, and in any case the eight-bit decade was finished before i had a machine of any kind. My own start is 1998, a PC at home with a modem hanging off it. What reads clearly from that far away is that Microdigital was not in the computer business. It was in the access business, and access was a thing the state was handing out.

~ the record ~

~ what the wall was for ~

The reserve was not an accident of protectionism. It was an industrial policy with a stated goal, dating from the late 1970s and written into law in 1984: small computers would be built by Brazilian-owned firms, so that the country would end up with an industry instead of an assembly line for somebody else's brands. Companies like Microdigital and Prológica existed because of it.

The bill came in the usual currencies. Machines cost several times what the same hardware cost abroad and ran a generation behind it, and a healthy smuggling trade grew up alongside the legal one. What the policy did produce was people. A generation of Brazilian engineers learned their trade reverse-engineering chips they were not allowed to buy.

~ the day the wall came down ~

The reserve ended in October 1992, when the market was opened to imports. The protection that had made these companies viable came off in one movement, and what walked in was every foreign brand at once, cheaper and two generations ahead. Microdigital wound up its activities that year.

The easy story is that a clone maker lost to the real thing, and that is not quite what happened. The TK90X was a competent machine and in some respects a better one than the Spectrum for the country it was sold in. It died because the question it answered stopped being asked. When you can buy the original, nobody needs a legal copy of it.

~ the long tail ~

The machines survived their maker by a wide margin. TK cassettes and manuals still circulate and emulators still carry TK profiles. The Brazilian retro scene treats the line as national history rather than as a footnote to Sinclair's. That is fair enough. For a lot of people in that country, a TK was not a clone of their first computer. It was their first computer.

The argument outlived the company too. Every few years some government decides it will grow a domestic technology industry behind a tariff, and the Brazilian decade is the case everyone reaches for. The lesson people usually draw is that the wall failed. The more useful reading is that the wall worked exactly as designed and then came down, and eleven years turned out to be too short a run to build anything that could stand up on the other side of it.

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