Prológica

~ the obit ~

Brazil wrote the protectionism straight into law. There was a reserved market for domestic informatics through the eighties, formalized in 1984, and it meant that for most of a decade a foreign micro was something you smuggled rather than something you bought. Turkey answered the same instinct with import duty and a grey market, so what turned up in Istanbul was the real machine at an unreal price. Brazil went the other direction and grew a domestic computer industry out of copying, and in the home half of that industry the largest name was Prológica.

It was founded in São Paulo in 1976 by Leonardo Bellonzi, who ran an electronic components business, with Joseph Blumenfeld doing the engineering. The first machines were Z80 boards for hobbyists. What made the company was the decision to stop designing and start copying, and the line it chose to copy was Tandy's.

The CP-500 arrived in april 1982 and was a TRS-80 Model III with a different badge on it. The CP-200 was a ZX81 and the CP-400 Color was a Color Computer 2. None of this was hidden and none of it was illegal in Brazil, because the law that kept Tandy out was the same law that let Prológica sell Tandy's machine. By the mid eighties the company was third among Brazilian makers with about 1,500 employees, and the CP-500 was one of the best selling computers the country ever had.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ how it landed ~

For the generation of Brazilians who learned to program in the eighties, these were not clones of anything. The CP-500 was the computer, the way a Spectrum was the computer to a British kid, and the fact that the design came out of Fort Worth was an accounting detail that never reached the person typing. The machines came with Portuguese manuals and a repair shop in the same city, which is more than a smuggled one offered.

Prológica went after the business market too, with the Sistema 700 and later with 286 and 386 boxes under its own name. In 1990 Microsoft sued the company over SO16, an operating system Microsoft said was MS-DOS with the serial numbers filed off. That case marks where the whole model was heading, because copying works as national policy right up until the company you copied can reach you.

~ what got buried with it ~

The reserve came apart between 1990 and 1992 under Collor and the market it had been holding shut opened all at once. Real IBM and Compaq machines arrived officially while cheap Taiwanese parts arrived the other way, and a manufacturer whose entire advantage was legal cover had nothing to offer against the original at a lower price. Prológica shrank through the early nineties and was gone by 1995.

What the reserve actually produced is still argued about in Brazil. It built a domestic engineering base and gave a generation of programmers a machine to learn on. It also left the country roughly a decade behind on hardware while paying more for less. Both of those are true at once. Prológica is the part you can still hold, a beige box with a Portuguese keyboard that a lot of people have never quite thrown out.

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