Testing the 8-bit computer Puldin
Last weekend I visited TuxCon in Plovdiv and<br>was very happy to meet and talk to some of the creators of the Puldin<br>computer! On the picture above are (left to right) Dimitar Georgiev<br>- wrote the text editor, Ivo Nenov - BIOS, DOS and core OS developer,<br>Nedyalko Todorov - director of the vendor company and Orlin Shopov -<br>BIOS, DOS, compiler and core OS developer.
Puldin is 100% pure Bulgarian development, while the “Pravetz” brand<br>was copy of Apple ][ (Pravetz 8A, 8C, 8M), Oric (Pravets 8D) and IBM-PC<br>(Pravetz 16). The Puldin computers were build from scratch both hardware<br>and software and were produced in Plovdiv in the late 80s and early 90s.<br>50000 pieces were made, at least 35000 of them have been exported to Russia<br>and paid for. A typical configuration in a Russian class room consisted of<br>several Puldin computers and a single Pravetz 16. According to Russian sources<br>the last usage of these computers was in 2003 serving as Linux terminals<br>and being maintained without any support from the vendor<br>(b/c it ceased to exist).
One of the main objectives of Puldin was full compatibility with IBM-PC.<br>At the time IBM had been releasing extensive documentation about how their<br>software and hardware works which has been used by Puldin's creators as<br>their software specs. Despite IBM-PC using faster CPU the Puldin 601 had<br>a comparable performance due to aggressive software and compiler optimizations.
Testing wise the guys used to compare Puldin's functionality with that of IBM-PC.<br>It was a hard requirement to have full compatibility on the file storage layer,<br>that means floppy disks written on Puldin had to be readable on IBM-PC and vice<br>versa. Same goes for programs compiled on Puldin - they had to execute on IBM-PC.
Everything of course had been tested manually and on top of that all the software<br>had to be burned to ROM before you can do anything with it. As you can imagine the<br>testing process had been quite slow and painful compared to today's standards.<br>I've asked the guys if they'd happened to find a bug in IBM-PC which wasn't present<br>in their code but they couldn't remember.
What was interesting for me on the hardware side was the fact that you can plug<br>the computer directly to a cheap TV set and that it's been one of the first computers<br>which could operate on 12V DC, powered directly from a car battery.
There was also a fully functional Pravetz 8 with an additional VGA port to<br>connect it to the LCD monitor as well as a SD card reader wired to function as a<br>floppy disk reader (the small black dot behind the joystick).
For those who missed it (and understand Bulgarian) I have a<br>video recording on YouTube.<br>For more info about the history and the hardware please check-out<br>Olimex post on Puldin<br>(in English). For more info on Puldin and Pravetz please visit<br>pyldin.info (in Russian) and<br>pravetz8.com (in Bulgarian)<br>using Google translate if need be.
tags: QA, fedora.planet, events
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