How one engineer beat the ban on home computers in socialist Yugoslavia | Games

Very few Yugoslavians had access to computers in the early 1980s: they were mostly the preserve of large institutions or companies. Importing home computers like the Commodore 64 was not only expensive, but also legally impossible, thanks to a law that restricted regular citizens from importing individual goods that were worth more than 50 Deutsche Marks (the Commodore 64 cost over 1,000 Deutsche Marks at launch). Even if someone in Yugoslavia could afford the latest home computers, they would have to resort to smuggling.

In 1983, engineer Vojislav “Voja” Antonić was becoming more and more frustrated with the senseless Yugoslavian import laws. “We had a public debate with politicians,” he says. “We tried to convince them that they should allow [more expensive items], because it’s progress.” The efforts of Antonić and others were fruitless, however, and the 50 Deutsche Mark limit remained. But perhaps there was a way around it.

Antonić was pondering this while on holiday with his wife in Risan in Montenegro in 1983. “I was thinking how would it be possible to make the simplest and cheapest possible computer,” says Antonić. “As a way to amuse myself in my free time. That’s it. Everyone thinks it is an interesting story, but really I was just bored!” He wondered whether it would be possible to make a computer without a graphics chip – or a “video controller” as they were commonly known at the time.

Typically, computers and consoles have a CPU – which forms the “brain” of the machine and performs all of the calculations – in addition to a video controller/graphics chip that generates the images you see on the screen. In the Atari 2600 console, for example, the CPU is the MOS Technology 6507 chip, while the video controller is the TIA (Television Interface Adaptor) chip.

Instead of having a separate graphics chip, Antonić thought he could use part of the CPU to generate a video signal, and then replicate some of the other video functions using software. It would mean sacrificing processing power, but in principle it was possible, and it would make the computer much cheaper.

“I was impatient to test it,” says Antonić. As soon as he returned from his holiday, he put together a prototype – and lo and behold, it really worked. Thinking outside the box had paid off.

His next thought was that perhaps other people would want to make their own version of the computer – although he didn’t foresee how far that particular thought would take him. “Everything that happened after that was not because of me,” he says, “but because of smart journalists, who knew how to make good story.”

Journalist Dejan Ristanović regularly wrote articles on computing for the Yugoslavian popular science magazine Galaksija (Galaxy in English), and he met with Antonić in the summer of 1983 to discuss the clever, budget-priced computer he had come up with. Yugoslavia didn’t have any homegrown magazines dedicated to computing at the time, but computers certainly came under Galaksija’s science remit. Ristanović was impressed by Antonić’s design, and his editors decided it should be included in a special, 100-page spin-off magazine called Racunari u vasoj kuci (Computers in Your Home).

The 100-page magazine would contain detailed instructions on how readers could build their own version of Antonić’s computer. He didn’t have a name for the machine at this point, but it was quickly decided that it should be named after the publication – and it was duly christened the Galaksija.

Antonić and Ristanović, along with the editor Jova Regasek, began working together to refine the machine and provide detailed instructions on how to build it. Readers would be able to order a self-assembly kit from a Croatian company that contained all the components they needed: the chips came from Austria, and the other components (like the printed circuit boards) were sourced from within Yugoslavia. Readers could also send in their EPROMs to be loaded with the Galaksija software, which included Galaksija BASIC and a limited character set (only upper case characters were included, as there was no room to include lower-case letters).

The first issue of Racunari u vasoj kuci is dated January 1984, although the issue actually went on sale in December 1983. Antonić and Ristanović expected that perhaps a few hundred people would send off for a kit to build their own Galaksija. But the magazine’s initial print run of 30,000 quickly sold out, and a reprint run was made – and then another. In total, around 100,000 copies of that first issue were sent out. “And we received more than 8,000 letters from people who built Galaksija,” says Antonić. “I’ve seen that pile of letters, it was huge, it was unimaginable. Only then, when I saw that, I thought whoa, something is really happening.”

One interesting quirk of the Galaksija is that the kit didn’t come with a case. Some readers improvised their own cases made from metal or wood, while many other Galaksijas remained “naked”. The result is that no two Galaksijas look alike.

One person who really helped to boost the profile of the Galaksija in the early days was Zoran Modli. He hosted a show called Ventilator 202 on Radio Belgrade, and he was approached by the Racunari editor, Jova Regasek, with the idea of broadcasting programs for the Galaksija and other home computers, like the ZX Spectrum and Commodore 64. Programs could be loaded on to the Galaksija via an audio cassette tape, so the idea was that Modli could play the beeps and squawks of a program on his show, then listeners could tape the broadcast and load the transmitted program into their machine. It was essentially a kind of wireless downloading long before the advent of wifi, or even the internet as we know it.

Computers exploded in popularity in Yugoslavia over the next few years. Ironically, the success of the Galaksija media campaign ended up being to the detriment of the computer itself. It was so successful that it highlighted the pressing need for Yugoslavians to have access to computers, and around a year after the first Racunari magazine was published, the authorities altered the regulations that prevented the legal import of foreign microcomputers. The Galaksija had done its job of introducing computers to a whole generation so well that it became outmoded almost immediately.

The government raised the 50 Deutsche Mark import limit in 1985, and the new import cap “was just enough to buy one Spectrum computer,” says Antonić. So did his invention of the Galaksija directly lead to this change in the law? “I believe so,” he says, “but I cannot prove that. It’s just my opinion.”

Now that the Yugoslavian public had access to more powerful machines like the Sinclair ZX Spectrum, the humble Galaksija seemed less appealing. “Galaksija was doomed as a project,” laments Antonić. “The only reaction amongst people was to laugh at it. They just said, ‘Now I have a computer which is 1,000 times more powerful than Galaksija.’” It didn’t help that the Galaksija had only a limited software library, which was mostly produced by enthusiastic amateurs. (If you’d like to play some Galaksija games yourself, you can find a handful of browser-based ones at https://galaksija.net.)

“Soon after [the] Galaksija computer, the war times started in Yugoslavia,” says Antonić. “And no one was interested in anything but pure survival.” The violent break-up of Yugoslavia at the start of the 1990s engulfed the Balkans in a horrific war that raged, on and off, for much of the decade. At around the same time, the economy began to collapse as the country entered a period of hyperinflation, which led to the necessity for printing a 2 million dinara bill in 1989, and eventually a 500 billion dinara bill in 1993 – which was worth just a few cents.

Antonić wrote anti-war articles, and kept tinkering with the Galaksija and other computer projects. “I just did it as my hobby,” he says. “I was working just for me. I was very poor at that time, and I couldn’t earn much from doing that. But I just was doing it as my hobby, and I was pleased with it, I was happy with it.” Amid the upheaval of war, the Galaksija had been all but forgotten. It was during this time that Antonić threw away all of the original Galaksija prototypes and documentation, thinking no one would be interested in them.

But in the late 2000s and 2010s, things began to change. Antonić found that people were rediscovering the Galaksija. “The new century started something which I call the ‘renaissance of hardware’,” he says. “People started being interested in old computers. I’m not a sociologist, I cannot explain that, but somehow they started to be interested. And what’s now happening [with the Galaksija] is amazing for me. I cannot explain that either!”

Computers like the Galaksija not only provoke nostalgia in people who remember them when they were new, they also teach new generations about computer history, and the many experiments and innovations that led us to where we are today. The Galaksija is particularly special, since it provides a connection to a country and a particular set of social circumstances that no longer exist.

The revival of interest in the Galaksija has been particularly moving for Antonić. “It’s healing,” he says. “If I was hurt in the 90s, then I was healed after that. Now I receive a lot of emails from people in the US, from Germany, from Australia, from Serbian people who just want to thank me for defining their life, for making them interested in digital computers at the right moment of their lives, so that they could switch to some area which triggered some interest in them. And they became mostly software programmers, but some of them even are dealing with hardware, and they all want to thank me for that.”

Antonić moved to Pasadena in California around five years ago, and he has been welcomed as a hero by the tech enthusiasts of Silicon Valley. He donated a Galaksija computer to the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, and is a regular contributor to the hardware hacking website Hackaday. Even when I spoke to him at the age of 69, he had no plans to retire. “I’m still active, I’m working, I’m employed here in Pasadena,” he said. “I’m not thinking about retiring: I hope that I will not have to think about it for some time. Because I just feel like someone pays me for doing my hobby, the same thing that I was [doing] for free a few decades ago. Now I’m well paid for that! Not only well paid, but also well recognised.”

Such recognition is well deserved. By making such a brilliantly clever machine out of so little, Voja Antonić was able to introduce computers to an entire generation – changing countless lives in the process.

This is an edited extract from the book Curious Video Game Machines by Lewis Packwood, which explores the stories behind rare and unusual consoles, computers and coin-ops. Published by White Owl, an imprint of Pen and Sword, you can order a copy direct from Pen and Sword in the UK, or from Casemate in the US, as well as from Amazon and all good bookshops.