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Comment by terramex | Hacker News Reader

Our first computer was БАЙТ - Belarussian clone of ZX Spectrum. It was mid to late 90s and it was already super obsolete at the time, but every time we took it out and connected to TV it filled me with a sense of wonder and unknown that started my fascination with electronics and programming. What an amazing impact Sir Clive had on so many lives.

Even my nickname on this very website comes from my favourite game I played on Spectrum when I was a kid. Now I'm a game developer myself.

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Very similarly mine was Santaka, another Belarusian clone of a 48K. Had that horrid Cyrillic font instead of lowercase Latin.

It was built by a former military supplier plant so its heritage stuck out in unexpected details (like 8x 2Kb ceramic package gold plated ROMs). I've upgraded it over the years with memory expansion, printer port, "real" keyboard, sound chip and disk controller. It grew into quite a hairball!

https://twitter.com/varjag/status/1146500643328331776/photo/...

Saw those ROMs in my Romanian clone called Cobra (Computers Brașov). Young me was fascinated by the way they were encased in some sort of clear epoxy instead of black ceramic. You can read more about the clone here: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2017/11/the-underground-stor...

At some point in the mid to late 1980s, there was a craze in Minsk of seemingly everyone home-building ZX Spectrum clones. Probably the Ленинград design, though I'm not entirely sure. As I recall, all the components were off-the-shelf Soviet parts (K155 TTL series), so no ULA or anything fancy like that.

https://spectrumforeveryone.com/technical/zx-spectrum-ula-ty...

Yes it was, however when the factories started picking up they usually didn't use Leningrad version. Mine was a from scratch design (it came with schematics), and sure all of them emulated ULA with discrete logic - but usually not as half assed as Leningrad did.

This was the huge advantage of Spectrum: the whole thing could be built from COTS components and the only imported part in USSR had to be the Z80A. None of those Sid, Frodo, Bilbo etc ASICs.

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