[retrac]

Yes, but Yugoslavia wasn't behind the Iron Curtain. It wasn't aligned with the USSR. It wasn't under USSR control (after 1948 [1]). It was officially neutral during the Cold War (Yugoslavia founded the Non-Aligned Movement). Sometimes close to the USA, even receiving American military aid at times.

Relevantly for us and this topic, Yugoslavia was not subject to the Western bans on exporting sensitive technology to Communist countries. Western personal computers and semiconductors could be legally imported, in theory, assuming you could afford them and the unfavourable exchange rates.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tito%E2%80%93Stalin_split

[flohofwoe]

Technically, import was legal into all Eastern Bloc countries, it's the export from a western country which was illegal because of the COCOM embargo:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coordinating_Committee_for_Mul...

I actually don't know if Yugoslavia was embargoed too though (technically, Yugoslavia wasn't part of the "Eastern Bloc").

But of course even without embargo the markets were just not interesting for western companies, because of the worthless currencies (for instance, 8-bit home computers didn't fall under the embargo, but they were still not generally available in shops, only on the grey market).

[grujicd]

Import into Yugoslavia was not that open during (low-mid) eighties. There were limits on how valuable items you could import. Personal computers got some separate exemption, but limit was set in Yugoslav currency dinars. Because of deprecating dinar you could import let's say C64 with a disk drive and a monitor when these exemptions were introduced, but in a year it was not enough for a Spectrum. By the end of the decade these limits were slowly eliminated.

Of course, there was always smuggling and bribing custom officials, citizens who emigrated for work didn't have these limits when returning home, so there were ways to get computers.

But Galaksija was important at that time (1984) because it was cheap and because it was sold as a kit to be soldered by end user, so it wasn't affected by import limits.

[chx]

Import was way more complex than that.

At least into Hungary my parents literally needed to smuggle a ZX Spectrum they sourced in Munich from a bargain bin. That was in 1985. I learned programming then and haven't really stopped since :)

[thriftwy]

It's a surprising sight to see Western companies showing no interest in 25 million strong economy.

[flohofwoe]

Deals happened, but on a small scale.

For instance, East Germany had so called "Intershops" stuffed full with western consumer products (also home computers), but those were sold for hard currency only, and their main purpose was to siphon off the circulating D-Marks which were coming into the country via relatives from West Germany, or to directly sell to western visitors, because some prices were cheaper than in Western Germany.

From time to time Western companies also did one-time deals for industrial products (East Germany had a pretty good optics and mechanical engineering industry which could come up with competitive products from time to time, but usually such deals didn't benefit the general population).

[vasac]

In Yugoslavia, various companies 'produced' computers by essentially relabeling Western equipment, especially during the eighties when I was a child. For instance, the Electronic Industry in Niš (EI Niš) imported Honeywell computers. My father worked on a Honeywell DPS-6 imported from the U.S., which bore EI stickers. Surprisingly, sometimes they didn't even bother applying the EI stickers.

During my time at university we had VAX 11/785, MicroVAX 3100, and by the mid-'90s, we even had an SGI Indigo. Additionally, we had some IBM VM computer, though I can't recall the exact model. There was an IBM 1130 in the seventies.

As far as I can recall, the western parts of Yugoslavia had around 300 VAX machines deployed across various companies. Each republic developed its own computing ecosystem, resulting in a diverse landscape.

While there were some microcomputers in limited production, such as the Orao, Pecom, and Oric Nova, the ZX Spectrum and C-64 enjoyed far more popularity. Later, the Atari ST and Amiga took their place.

In the late eighties, my high school had a collection of original Apple II computers, along with IRIS 8 clones.

[throwaway50182]

It's not surprising when you count the worthless currencies with state-mandated exchange rates into the calculation. If you wanted to do things legally as a western company then you had to price everyone of the 25 million out. It was done precisely for that reason - to protect the uncompetitive internal market from western competition.

Only the richest of the rich (literally few hundreds of people) could buy legally imported western electronics. It was available, even in the Eastern Bloc, but nobody had the money.