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Galaksija: The Soviet-Era, Z80-based microcomputer

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Re: Galaksija: The Soviet-Era, Z80-based microcomputer

#51

Post by thriftwy »

ivan_gammel wrote: post #39
thriftwy wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As I see, it means something akin to "People's Democracy" which is an alternative terms of some other left authoritarian regimes.

Haven't heard of anything like that. Looks like it is some American pop culture definition that reduces the history of Europe to a few very broadly defined buckets to reduce the intellectual workload. It is often called ignorance. Do you think it makes sense to continue saying it is a valid use?

Well, yeah, but it's the same way on the other side of the Curtain: Such as, France had its own nuclear weapons and was in complicated relationship with NATO, but it gets totally conflated into the Western bloc with no reservations. Same with neutral Sweden and even Finland.

So I don't see any point to nitpick.

Re: Galaksija: The Soviet-Era, Z80-based microcomputer

#52

Post by Koshkin »

ivan_gammel wrote: post #39
thriftwy wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As I see, it means something akin to "People's Democracy" which is an alternative terms of some other left authoritarian regimes.

Haven't heard of anything like that. Looks like it is some American pop culture definition that reduces the history of Europe to a few very broadly defined buckets to reduce the intellectual workload. It is often called ignorance. Do you think it makes sense to continue saying it is a valid use?

> Haven't heard of anything like that.

(Speaking of ignorance.) The parent knows what they're talking about. "The people's democracies" was indeed the term that was customarily used within the Soviet block to include countries that did not belong to said block but otherwise lived under similar regimes.

Re: Galaksija: The Soviet-Era, Z80-based microcomputer

#53

Post by Koshkin »

nsajko wrote: post #44
thriftwy wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

'Soviet' is not a name, it is a political term, so I don't see why you cannot apply it to countries with USSR-like regimes, even if they don't carry S in their name. For the curious, it is translated as 'council'.

It still doesn't apply to Yugoslavia.

Well, Yugoslavia did cease to exist as soon as the "Soviet era" had ended.

Re: Galaksija: The Soviet-Era, Z80-based microcomputer

#54

Post by RetroTechie »

rob74 wrote: post #12

> The picture is one of a landscape littered with uninspired attempts to copy American IBM PCs, British ZX Spectrums, and other Western computers. As opposed to the Galaksija, which, er... copied the ZX Spectrum? I somehow fail to see the point that the article is trying to make here. If anything, the designers of the Galaksija had an easier job than those of the numerous other Eastern European Spectrum clones ( http…

From its design/specs, it looks to have very similar capabilities as a Sinclair ZX80/ZX81. And the lesser-known Jupiter Ace.

Read: ~3/4 of the time the CPU cycles through some tightly-coded ROM software, and character data from ROM + a bit of circuitry generates the monochrome video signal.

Roughly ~1/4 of the time (vblank) the CPU can work on user programs.

Given the constraints of composite video timing, the Galaksija must be doing this in similar fashion. So with a Z80 at 3MHz it would perform as if at ~0.8MHz. Slow (even by those days' standards!), but useable.

ZX81 is rather flexible in how it produces graphics (esp. with 16KB RAM). And has a "FAST" mode in which the video generation is skipped, giving full CPU speed @ the cost of a blank screen. Dunno if Galaksija can do this.

ZX Spectrum added dedicated video hardware (no CPU work needed to generate image), color, sound, and more extensive BASIC. So from programmer's perspective, a very different beast.

Disclaimer: I'm one of the very few people who re-implemented the ZX81's "ULA" chip (a kind of semi-custom gate array) in a CPLD. So I know a 'little' about how this works. :-)

If you want more info just ask. Not familiar with the Galaksija design though.

Re: Galaksija: The Soviet-Era, Z80-based microcomputer

#55

Post by Koshkin »

malermeister wrote: post #47
thriftwy wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

'Soviet' is not a name, it is a political term, so I don't see why you cannot apply it to countries with USSR-like regimes, even if they don't carry S in their name. For the curious, it is translated as 'council'.

It's specifically not a USSR-like regime. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tito%E2%80%93Stalin_split

Like. Absolutely. Because communist dictatorship. Like China. With differences (and perhaps more freedom), but still.

Re: Galaksija: The Soviet-Era, Z80-based microcomputer

#56

Post by malermeister »

Koshkin wrote: post #55
malermeister wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's specifically not a USSR-like regime. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tito%E2%80%93Stalin_split

Like. Absolutely. Because communist dictatorship. Like China. With differences (and perhaps more freedom), but still.

That's a very reductive view.

Yugoslavia didn't have a top-down economy the same way soviet countries did, it had a market of worker-run coops (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Workers'_self-management).

It also wasn't allied with the Soviet Bloc, but a leader of its own block of non-aligned countries (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-Aligned_Movement).

Yugoslavs also enjoyed much greater Freedoms, at one point having the strongest passport in the world - the only one that allowed for free travel to both the West and the East.

Yugoslavia was Soviet during the Cold War the same way Switzerland was Nazi during WW2 - not at all, just neutral.

Re: Galaksija: The Soviet-Era, Z80-based microcomputer

#59

Post by RetroTechie »

ivanche wrote: post #17
esafak wrote: post #10

As I said in another thread, there used to be more European computer technology in the 80s. Hardware technology shifted to the US, then to China. The rest of the world only does software now.

Way more for sure, it was akin to a Cambrian explosion. One large downside was compatibility though - at best you could hope for two machines to be CP/M compatible, otherwise if you needed an app you could've written it yourself or hoped that someone else would do it.

Cambridgian explosion, you mean?

Re: Galaksija: The Soviet-Era, Z80-based microcomputer

#60

Post by herculity275 »

thriftwy wrote: post #29
otto2 wrote: post #7

It is not correct to refer to it as Soviet-Era. Using the logic from the title, Apple Macintosh is also Soviet-Era. Yugoslavia was never part of Warsaw bloc, it had its own political system and no USSR army on its territory.

'Soviet' is not a name, it is a political term, so I don't see why you cannot apply it to countries with USSR-like regimes, even if they don't carry S in their name. For the curious, it is translated as 'council'.

"Soviet", in both English and Russian, very specifically refers to the USSR. I'm not aware of anyone (be it Westerners, Soviets or Yugoslavians themselves) calling Yugoslavia Soviet.
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