On Wed, 23 Jul 2003, Mark Firestone wrote:
> They had computers in East Germany? Wow. What was it, some sort of Soviet
> PDP clone or something?
They had computers throughout the former Soviet Union. You'd be amazed at
the number of clones of western computers that were produced, not to
mention original designs throughout the Union in the various satellite
states.
The computer I got was by a company called Robotron, which was a fairly
large East German computer manufacturer. They did indeed produce a clone
of the PDP-11. One of these systems is on display at the Computer History
Museum.
The computer I have is a Robotron A5120. It's based on a cloned 8080
microprocessor. It has an 8" floppy disks built into the cabinet along
with the CRT. It's a heavy beast. I also got an additional chassis with
two more 8" drives, plus the main computer had a naked 5.25" rigged up to
it.
Here's a website with more information (in Deutsch) and a picture of what
it looks like. The one I have is the one on the left.
http://www.robotron-net.de/pc_s.html
Scroll down for even more cool designs.
--
Sellam Ismail Vintage Computer Festival
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Received on Wed Jul 23 2003 - 10:01:00 BST