Pravetz

~ the obit ~

Bulgaria shares a land border with Turkey. From Ankara it is closer than most of Turkey is. For roughly a decade, on the other side of that border, a town called Pravets was turning out tens of thousands of personal computers a year, and essentially none of them came south. The entire output pointed north into the Soviet Union, because that was who had ordered it.

The work started in 1979 at the Institute for Technical Cybernetics and Robotics under the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, where an engineer named Ivan Marangozov built the IMKO-1. Three prototypes appeared in plastic cases in late 1980 and about fifty were made in series through 1981. It was an Apple II, closely enough that nobody involved has ever pretended otherwise, and Marangozov spent the rest of his life being described in Bulgarian coverage as both the father of the national computer and the man who copied Wozniak.

Production moved to the town of Pravets, where the Pravetz 82 started shipping in 1982 and gave the whole line its name. The ramp is the part worth reading slowly. Five hundred machines came out in 1983, and two years later the figure was 18,000. The combine eventually ran at something like 60,000 a year, which made it the largest producer of personal computers in COMECON, out of a country of nine million people.

None of this was visible from where I was. My hardware questions started in the late nineties and were about money, an importer's margin and what the shop in Ankara had in stock. It never once occurred to me to ask what was being built four hundred kilometers away, and the honest reason is that the answer was irrelevant, because none of it was ever going to be for sale to me. Two countries can be neighbors and still be plumbed into completely separate machines.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what it actually was ~

The eight bit line was Apple II compatible, running from the Pravetz 82 up through the 8C. The odd one out is the Pravetz 8D, which cloned the Oric Atmos instead, apparently because somebody wanted a cheaper machine and the Oric was cheaper to copy. The sixteen bit Pravetz 16 arrived as an IBM PC clone and the line eventually reached 386 and 486 machines.

Copying is the whole story and it was never a secret. An export-controlled economy cannot buy the reference machine in volume, so it reimplements it, and the measure of success is not originality but whether the software written for the original will run. On that measure Pravetz worked. Bulgarian schools taught on Apple II software, on Bulgarian hardware, without an Apple in the country.

~ the town ~

Pravets is a small place in the Balkan foothills. It is also where Todor Zhivkov, who ran Bulgaria for thirty five years, was born. The national computer industry was built in the leader's home town, and Bulgarian writing on the subject has never been shy about the connection.

The result is stranger than the cynical reading allows. Whatever the reason the plant landed there, it worked: a town that size acquired an engineering workforce and an export business, and Bulgaria became the Eastern bloc's designated computer supplier rather than one more customer for East German machines. Bulgaria still trades on this. The country's software sector is repeatedly traced back to the engineers this decade trained.

~ the iraq contract ~

The most ambitious thing in the entire file never happened. Bulgaria built a plant in Iraq intended to produce one million Pravetz 16 machines a year, a figure roughly sixteen times what Pravets itself ever managed. It never entered operation. Events in 1991 closed that door permanently, and a factory sized for a million computers a year sat there having produced none.

~ what got buried with it ~

There is no shutdown announcement to point at, which is normal for this kind of death. Production of all models wound down around 1990 as Bulgaria moved to a market economy, and the mechanism was not competition in any recognizable sense. The Soviet ordering system that consumed most of the output simply stopped placing orders, and a combine built around a single institutional buyer has nowhere to take 60,000 machines a year.

The factory buildings were privatized in the way things were privatized in Bulgaria in the nineties, which is its own separate and unhappier article. The name came back in 2014 on tablets and phones that have nothing to do with the original beyond the word, sold to a domestic market with long memories. What actually ended in 1990 was not a product line. It was the last decade in which a country of nine million was expected to design and build its own computers, and got very close to being good at it.

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