TIM-S, HC, COBRA, CIP...

First... there were magazines. Somewhere back in 1995. I think... Strange but attractive words and things in those publications: Processors, memory, hard disks.... Wait a second. Long before that!

1987 and 1988. In Communist Era, a small city in northern Romania. I was in high school, final 2 years before graduation day. I had the chance to use my first... computer. TIM S it was made in Timisoara by a romanian electronics company. It was destined to be compatible with ZX Spectrum. But it uses a romanian made processor a clone of a Z80 chip. A funny thing about that computer, but a very ergonomic one: It has a "Turbo" button, placed next to "Reset" switch. To much Turbo, followed by a necessary reset. If you want it, you can plug in an upgraded extensions board then you can connect peripherals like 5” inch floppy-disks, casette players... Yep, we load games from tape casettes, and I used to play fantastic titles: Saboteur, Dizzy, River Raid, Lode Runner, Bruce Lee, Dan Dare.

Specifications? Are you ready for this? U808 Processor – 3.5 MHz and 6 MHz, 16kb to 64 kb of RAM. 16kb ROM (Hard Disk!). Operating System: Basic(Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code
) Language. Nice.

There were severals personal computers on romanian markets back in that days: all sharing same specifications, all clones and therefore compatible with Spectrum, but assembled in different cities: HC, CoBra, CIP. Nice names? No. But great memories.

My first real computer with proper operating system, I remember it was a Packard Bell with Windows 3.11 pre-installed and motorised by an Intel 486 processor. I buy myself some books (For Dummies), and started to learn Dos 6.22, Office Suite and Windows.