Soviet ZX Spectrum clones
Soviet ZX Spectrum clones were unofficial clones of the ZX Spectrum made in the Soviet Union, and well into the 1990s.
The most popular examples were the Pentagon (Пентагон) and Scorpion series. The Pentagon series was cheaper and therefore the most popular, while the Scorpion series was more reliable. This was much like the friendly ZX Spectrum vs. C64 rivalry back in the UK, only with disks instead of tapes.
The first generation clones were essentially the same as the 48K original, with the welcome improvement of having a regular keyboard.
The second generation clones were based on the ZX Spectrum 128, and included a clone of the third party Beta 128 Disk Interface and its TR-DOS firmware as a standard fixture, allowing the user to add floppy disk drives. The most popular of these was likely the Pentagon 128K 2+, released by ATM in the early 1990s.
Some clones greatly extended the ZX Spectrum's capabilities, in much the same way beige boxes extended the IBM PC's. Indeed, they were often housed in those very same beige mini tower cases. A much rarer fully decked out clone could go so far as to include a whopping 4 MB of RAM, a 7 MHz turbo mode, a mouse and external keyboard, as well as floppy, hard, and even CD-ROM drives via an IDE bus. You could even add a modem, to dial up ZX Net and FidoNet.
The software lineup was similarly extended to take advantage of this hardware. Operating systems offered started with modified and improved bootleg copies of Sinclair BASIC, then CP/M and TR-DOS, and eventually included an all-new alternative, iS-DOS. iS-DOS supported the afforementioned floppy, hard, and CD-ROM drives, had an orthodox file manager as its shell, and came with an assembler.
Just as American companies had turned the IBM PC into a standard for clones, Soviet computer enthusiasts had turned the ZX Spectrum into a similar standard that was compatible with an impressive range of hardware designed for IBM PC clones.
This made a lot of sense: the ZX Spectrum was much cheaper than the IBM PC, making it affordable for home use. It was also much simpler, making it easier to reverse engineer.
Using an IBM PC clone at work and a much cheaper ZX Spectrum clone at home was a sensible combination. It's a shame that news of this possibility didn't make its way back to the UK, where a good few people were still using unmodified 8-bit machines at home well into the 1990s, barely aware of their own country's Beta Disk Interface. Many of us eventually made a bold leap straight from tape to CD-ROMs and the Internet without any intermediate step.
External links
Deep dives
- "ZX Spectrum in the 21st Century?" Tarjan Richard Gabor
Home computers: Amiga | Beige box | PICO-8 | ST | Soviet ZX Spectrum clones | ZX Spectrum | ZX Spectrum 128
Sinclair: Soviet ZX Spectrum clones | ZX Spectrum | ZX Spectrum 128
ZX Spectrum: Music Machine | Soviet ZX Spectrum clones | ZX Spectrum 128
