PMD 85

~ the goodbye ~

PMD stands for Piešťanský Mikropočítač Displejový, which is to say it is named after the town it was built in. Piešťany is a spa town in western Slovakia, and Tesla had a plant there, and inside that plant an engineer named Roman Kišš put together the first personal computer designed in what is now Slovakia. He has compared the room he did it in to the Jobs and Wozniak garage, with the obvious difference that he was doing it inside a state enterprise and could not order parts.

Not being able to order parts is the whole texture of the machine. The processor was an MHB8080A at 2.048 MHz, Tesla's own reimplementation of the Intel 8080, which is what a Czechoslovak engineer had access to rather than what he would have chosen. The keyboard was built from telephone buttons made at the Tesla works in Stropkov, because those were buttons and they existed. The first units at Piešťany were assembled from what the plant already had lying around.

It worked, and then it worked too well. The prototype appeared in 1983, production started in 1984, and Piešťany got about eight hundred machines out before running down to a stock of components sufficient for another five or six. Volume production moved to Tesla Bratislava with parts imported from the Soviet Union, and over the next four years somewhere between a hundred thousand and a hundred and fifty thousand machines went out, most of them into Slovak schools. If you learned to program in Slovakia in the late eighties, this is the machine you learned on.

I work in Ankara as an engineer and the part of this story I keep turning over is not the hardware. It is that the person who designed his country's first personal computer left the country roughly the moment leaving became possible. That happens everywhere, including here, and the version of it people write articles about is always the one who left. The ones who stayed do not generate a narrative, they just keep going to work.

~ the chronicle ~

~ now it is a political matter ~

Kišš's actual technical contribution was in how the machine used dynamic memory, and he presented it at a professional conference where it landed hard enough that officials asked him to give the talk again. The line he remembers from afterward is the one worth keeping: his work was finished, and the matter was now political.

That sentence is the entire difference between this grave and a Western one. A design that impresses people in a market economy turns into a company, or at minimum into an argument about who funds the next one. Here it turned into a state decision about which factory would build it and which ministry would distribute it, made by people who had not been in the room. The engineer's involvement ended at the point where a Western engineer's would have started.

~ what 20,000 crowns meant ~

The PMD 85-1 listed at twenty thousand Czechoslovak crowns. For a private household that was not a purchase decision, it was a fantasy, which is why the machine's real life happened in classrooms rather than living rooms. Schools got them in bulk and Slovakia standardized on the PMD while Czech schools mostly ran the IQ 151 instead, so a single country ran two incompatible educational computers along a line that would turn into a border five years later.

~ the clones outlived it ~

The line ran through two more revisions after 1986 and arrived at the PMD 85-3 in 1988, and that was the end of it. Nothing replaced it. The Velvet Revolution in november 1989 opened the market to imports that were better in every measurable way, but by then the PMD had already stopped being made, so the revolution did not kill it so much as guarantee no successor.

The clones did better. Didaktik Alfa arrived in 1986 out of a plant in Skalica, designed by Kišš again, aiming at the lowest price anyone could manage, and it spread widely. The Maťo, developed by Ivan Urda, ran from 1989 to 1992 and sold around 5,500 units, which makes it the last eight bit computer designed in Slovakia. The original was gone before its own imitations were, which is an unusual order for these things and says something about how thoroughly the state had detached the design from the person who did it.

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