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A comment on Home Computers Behind the Iron Curtain.

Re:Home Computers Behind the Iron Curtain by drinchev on Monday December 15, 2014 @05:17PM (#8754795)
My first computer ( I was born in a soviet country ) was Pravetz 16 [1][2]. It was bought for me by my father around 1994. It was a IBM PC compatible computer that run on DOS.

Until today I haven't found any significant difference between what I had back then and what similar age IBM-PC was in terms of hardware.

They were both with AT power [3] and they had the same extension slots ( Back then it was ISA [4] ).

I still remember extending my Pravetz with a color screen and a EGA card [5]. It was so expensive ( the card + color monitor ), that I had to ask my father to combine the presents that I had as a child for a series of occasions. ( I think it was one birthday + christmas + name day ).

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pravetz_computers

[2] http://templar.blog.bg/photos/31865/original/photo-pravetz-1...

[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_supply_unit_%28computer%2...

[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industry_Standard_Architecture

[5] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enhanced_Graphics_Adapter

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Re:Home Computers Behind the Iron Curtain by peterfirefly on Monday December 15, 2014 @07:34PM (#8755334)
> Until today I haven't found any significant difference between what I had back then and what similar age IBM-PC was in terms of hardware.

On the other side of the curtain we had SVGA instead of EGA. And 486 or (barely) Pentium instead of pre 386. Probably more RAM. Probably a bigger harddisk. Probably printer or modem or both. Maybe a sound card. And CD-ROM.

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Re:Home Computers Behind the Iron Curtain by dfox on Monday December 15, 2014 @08:46PM (#8755509)
These computers were manufactured in mid to late 80's, so most of them predate both 486 and CD-ROM.
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Re:Home Computers Behind the Iron Curtain by rasz_pl on Tuesday December 16, 2014 @03:02AM (#8756245)
>It was bought for me by my father around 1994
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Re:Home Computers Behind the Iron Curtain by drinchev on Tuesday December 16, 2014 @04:12AM (#8756386)
Yeah back then my Pravetz was already 6 years ( manufactured around '88 [1] ) old and still very popular. I didn't have CD-ROM until I got my first 486DX4 custom case computer.

[1] http://www.pravetz.bg/05-Pravetz-History.html

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Re:Home Computers Behind the Iron Curtain by peterfirefly on Tuesday December 16, 2014 @10:54AM (#8757633)
Precisely. And I listed what many of us on the other side had in '94.

I used http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pravetz_computers as my source of information about Pravetz since I don't speak Bulgarian or Russian.

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