The Galaksija (pronounced Galaxiya Serbo-Croatian: [galǎksija], meaning Galaxy ) was a build-it-yourself computer designed by Voja Antonić. It was featured in the special edition Računari u vašoj kući[1] ( Computers in your home , written by Dejan Ristanović) of a popular eponymous science magazine, published late December 1983 in Belgrade, Yugoslavia. Kits were available but not required as it could be built entirely out of standard off-the-shelf parts. It was later also available in complete form.
The “WHAT” “HOW” and “SORRY” error messages sound like they were inspired by Li Chen Wang’s Palo Alto Tiny BASIC - which I believe became Level 1 BASIC for the TRS-80.
There are pdf listings available for versions 2.0 and 3.0:
Voja Antonic, the author of this machine, is present on Hackaday and in a lengthy article about himself he gives a little more of the history of the machine.
In one of his Project entries, he explains how those three terse error messages are also used as machine code in generating video output.
Another mention of the Galaksija, this time on Metafilter, with a link to an article on eurogamer, which leads us to an Ultimate Talk by Tomaž Šolc at CCC:
also via this thread on mastodon, with pictures and further links.
I like the symmetric form factor more than the TRS-80 form factor. The text/pixel layout seems similar to the TRS-80, but with black grid lines between the fat pixels?
Obviously 3x2 fat pixels is more efficient than 2x2 (using 6 bits per byte rather than just 4 bits per byte), but the bit twiddling math is kind of ugly.
RCC Productions (Novi Sad, Serbia) are intending to produce a documentary about the Galaksija.
We want to piece together the complete story, interview all key people, and preserve this part of the history for future generations.
To get the complete picture, we will shoot a video in multiple countries: Serbia, Slovenia, Croatia, Montenegro, in scenic locations such as Belgrade, Novi Sad, Zagreb, Split, Ljubljana, Maribor, and Risan.
As a part of this project, we would like to bring the experience of soldering a Galaksija kit computer to more people. So we are producing a new Galaksija - in kit form.
