Cold War–era computing has a poor reputation. The picture is one of a landscape littered with uninspired attempts to copy American IBM PCs, British ZX Spectrums, and other Western computers. But then there was Yugoslavia’s Galaksija, a very inspired bid to put a computer into the hands of regular comrades.
The Galaksija is a Z80-based, 8-bit DIY machine, cleverly designed so that its bill of materials meshed exactly with what a Yugoslavian was able to import from Western Europe. During its brief heyday, thousands were built, leading to commercially assembled Galaksijas finding their way into homes and schools across the country. And now you can try this scrappy machine for yourself.
There’s a huge world of computing to discover in former USSR countries, former USSR satellite states, and other countries that delicately straddled the west and east such as former Yugoslavia, many of which most people in the west have never heard of. While many of them may not have been competitive with what the Americans and Europeans were building, that doesn’t mean they’re not interesting or that there’s nothing to learn from the approaches the engineers took.
I would love to tinker with old USSR (or, like in this case, Yugoslavian) computers. Unfortunately the language barrier makes it impossible.
Talking of Yugoslav computers:
-Galaksija: interface in English language
-TIM-011 (I used it in high school): interface in English, operating system written in USA, used FAT file system
-Pecom-32 and Pecom-64: interface in Serbo-Croatian as we used to call that language then
There were others too, from Slovenia, but not familiar to me.
From today’s perspective, probably thw most interesting thing was the relationship Yugoslavia had with Apple computers. In 1982, a company called Velebit, located in Zagreb, became a technology partner of Apple, the only such company outside USA. This meant it was not just a reseller but also a hardware builder: it received the parts from Apple, assembled it locally and then sold it. Software-wise, they translated the whole Operating System to Serbo-Croatian. Top management of Velebit once said: went they visited Apple headquarters they saw a world map of all Apple places across the world, and Zagreb was presented with a pin in a colour different to all other non-USA cities, and only few ones in USA had that same colour too.
By the way, Yugoslav law mandated that foreign companies could not open local branches, instead that had to cooperate with local company (provide technology and know-how, while local company makes the final build and sales). That was even more visible in the automobile industry (e.g. “Opel Kadett J” was made in YU only). Apple had to comply with such laws, but it’s interesting to see they wanted to do this at all (no other computer maker did).
Yugoslavia had even more interesting computer history in the areas far from home computers, but that’s a different story. Just one example: it was 8th (eighth) country in the world to build a computer on its own, in late 1950s.