The
TK90X Brazilian clone of the
British Sinclair
ZX Spectrum computer, from the early
80´s. Built by a company called
microdigital,which also made a whole family of other clones, all under the brand TK.
Built just like a ZX Spectrum on the outside, it came
in models with 16KB and 48KB of RAM. In the inside
it was almost the same but for these modifications:
-
Error messages in the built in basic interpreter were
translated into Portuguese.
-
A fancy color bar was added on the startup screen, which showed the computer color capabilities.
-
The keywords trace and UDG were added
to the basic (these were the source of some incompatibilities).
This UDG keyword provided high level
operation for Portuguese and Spanish accentuated
characters, and provided a graphical interface for
design your custom User Defined Graphics. In the original designed this had to be achieved through peeks and pokes.
The TK preceding these
microdigital computers referred to Thomas Kovaris, microdgital''s founder.
Other microdigital models were the TK82, TK82C, TK85,
all clones of previous Sinclair ZX machines. The TK95 was
a TK90X with an improved keyboard, but none of the other
advances on the original ZX Spectrum line. The
TK2000 was, I think, the only original computer design from
microdigital: an striped down Apple II, not fully compatible with it. And finally, the TK3000 was an
Apple IIe clone. I am not sure if microdigital ever made
it into the boring era of the 80x86 IBM PC´s clones, and if it did, it changed its name.
All this computer cloning was made possible because of a Brazilian legislation on informatics that made it
illegal to import any informatics merchandise, hardware or software, for which existed a national ¨equivalent¨ . Thus you could reverse enginneer a software piece or a computer and prevent its original manufacturer from selling it on Brazil.