I’ve been looking for one of these for about a year now. I’ve got a contact (umm, eBay seller) in Bulgaria who qualifies as about 20% of the classiccmp scene over there. First he sent me a Pravetz 8M, a dual CPU machine that I exhibited at VCF-MW this year. But this is the beast I was after: the first of the Pravetz line, their clone of the Apple //+.
The build quality is definitely a step behind the 8M. The plastic is odd: flexible yet brittle and with a weird texture (which I tried to show in the pics.) The system ROMs are real Soviet chips, which I did not find in the 8M (I have yet to photograph that one in detail.) The PSU is downright scary and the input current is not switchable. The 8M’s PSU appears to be a clone of the ones Apple used. This one is definitely home-grown. I have a voltage converter from Fry’s which should do the job.
At VCF I used Apple-branded drives and an Apple Disk ][ controller in the 8M. This time I have real Bulgarian disk controllers (he was kind enough to send two this time to make up for the lack of one last time) and floppy drives. The drives don’t seem to have been made under the Pravetz label. Instead they are marked with the “Kocho Tsvetarov” name, which appears to be some sort of electronics factory.
Here’s a whole gallery of pics I took last night. And here’s an interesting document: a US Gov (financed, at least) report on Eastern Bloc tech circa 1984. I found it when googling the name on the back of the floppy drives I got with the Pravetz 82. I OCR’d it and rehosted it in case it goes away.
Uchitel. Institut, could it mean Uchitelite Institut – teacher's institute?
The disk drives are made in Bulgaria, the text on the label is in Bulgarian (not Russian at any rate)
The keyboard layout seems to be a Russian phonetic layout of some kond.