Buttski Ugli

Some of the Eastern European (mostly) ZX Spectrum clones I’ve picked up have some interesting characteristic or other redeeming features. Some are just fugly. Feast your eyes on the NTK Systems Technician.

Thanks again to my Twitter pal Marina Epelman (@marinaepelman) with her dad, some Soviet engineers, and a Soviet linguist, I can tell you that NTK stands for Science and Technology Cooperative. It hails from Obninsk a Russian city whose sister city is Oak Ridge, Tennessee. If you read the Wikipedia article on Obninsk, you’ll see why that’s quite appropriate.

The NTK ST, as I’ll call it from now on, is a fairly large computer (think Vic 20, or original Commodore 64) and it weighs a fairly robust 3 lbs 4 oz, or 1500 grams. It has none of the rounded corners of the Commodore machines. It’s all pretty angular. It’s made of what feels like quite a brittle plastic, which is mostly shiny but textured in the area around the keyboard.

There are ventilation grilles, or possibly speaker grilles on either side of the keyboard. I didn’t see a speaker inside the machine so it’s most likely for ventilation. In the upper left, there’s another ventilation grille with a (power?) LED above it. The top right has a “ZX Spectrum” label with a Cm brand logo. I wasn’t able to turn up any information on the brand online.

The keyboard is a bit unusual. The keys themselves are full travel keys that actually feel reasonably good to type on, although a bit wobbly. Typing would be a bit of a challenge since it’s another 4 x 10 grid of keys with no staggering between rows, and the Space button is just a regular-sized key in the bottom right of the keyboard.

The unusual thing about the keyboard is that each key pokes through a separate hole in the upper case, which is fairly common for chiclet-style keys, but not something I’ve seen with a full travel keyboard before.

The keys have labels on top of the keycaps. The regular keys have a lot of separate items on them (as most Spectrum-like keyboards have to). The choice of colors and fonts doesn’t do much to aid readability so I think it would be a challenge to use in anything other than a well-lit room. The labels are also split with light areas top and bottom, with a black bar in the middle which although it helps to separate the various key functions, I can’t help feeling wastes space on the label. The keys have a significant taper towards the keycap so it’s already a relatively small space to work with.

The right hand side of the machine has no connectors or buttons.

The left-hand side has a rocker-style switch, which feels nice and chunky. I’d initially thought this was a power switch, but since there’s a more likely candidate for that on the back of the machine, I’m not sure what it is. I suppose it could be a voltage selector, but I’m not sure if the Soviet Union had different mains voltage in different regions.

All the connectivity is on the back of the machine. On the left, there’s a lots-of-pins connector (I believe it’s 64 pins but I may have miscounted, and I’m too lazy to check). Next to that is what’s probably a reset button. Then there’s a tap connection, a joystick port, and an I-don-know-because-the-label-has-been-scratched-off port. To the right of the ports is another button, which is a latching-type, so I assume it’s the power switch. Finally, there’s a fixed power cable.

The bottom of the case has even more ventilation slots, so this thing must have been pretty toasty when it was running. There’s a piece of copper in the top right held in with some kind of plastic plug. I have no idea what that’s there for. Underneath that, there are some holes in the case that again could be a speaker grille, but I wasn’t able to find the speaker.

The bottom of the machine also has a printed label with some handwritten details, as well as the embossed “label” which Marina translated for me.

When I opened the case, my initial reaction was, “how nicer to include a donut with the computer!”. Then, I froze. Had I been unwittingly made a link in an international donut smuggling ring? Turns out it’s not a donut, after all, just some kind of electrical thingy.

The power converter being inside the box I suspect accounts for the large number of ventilation grilles.

If I had to guess, the large chip right next to the expansion port is the CPU since it’s around the size of a Z80a. Under the ribbon cable for the keyboard, there’s another chip with some black tape over it.

As I suspected, the black tape was protecting an EPROM which probably held the Spectrum ROM or some variation thereof. I realize that the black tape was in place to protect the exposed chip with can be erased with UV light even from daylight, but since this machine probably has had its final boot, I’m prepared to take the chance, for you, the reader.

I’m not sure why I find the NTK ST so unappealing. If I had to guess, I think it’s because it feels (physically) like a piece of cheap and nasty ‘70s or ‘80s telecommunications equipment. But it’s also fugly.