Hobbit

This page is a modest memorial to the good old days of my first professional (i.e. paid) programming. That was for a Spectrum (Z80-based) clone, a Soviet computer Hobbit.

If you have any materials or personal impressions regarding the Hobbit computer, please e-mail me! I'll be happy to publish these here, and/or link to your pages, dependant on your wish.

Photos of the hardware and of the InterCompex people are especially welcome!

People

(Incomplete. Only friends and close affiliates listed.)

Dmitrii Mikhailov

The Inventor. Hardware, greater part of all the system software (except for the CP/M mode). Forth, FFS, Forth Assembler, etc.

Mikhail Osetinskii

The Co-Inventor. LOGO operating environment (which was produced as an extension EEPROM, marketed as an alternative to Forth, mostly for educational institutions)

Slava Trubinov

Shadow routines, CP/M.

Peter Trubinov

CP/M

Oleg Kozlov

Applications (notably the database and disk repair utilities) for the Forth-system/FFS.

Elena A. Leibson

My Very First Boss. Headed the "Heuristica" research and development group. Marketing.

Valery Vainer

The Repairs Guru.

Victor Krym

Modem driver and BBS software.

Vassilii Khachaturov (that's me)

Graphics, Forth-LOGO and Forth-LISP, drivers, games and demos for FORTH/FFS, Forth EEPROM and FFS hacking, and more...

Sergei Stepanov

Mark Frenkel

The "Pravda" TR-DOS disk utility, TR-DOS/FORTH hybrid environment.

Dima Lebedev

Graphics editor for the Forth-system.

Sasha Agranov

Heuristica Hobbit/PC finance application, apps for the Forth-system/FFS.

Press

The following two articles were published about Hobbit in the Your Sinclair magazine back in the early 1990s:

1. Rage Hard! Sep/1990
2. Rage Hard! Jan/1991

Hobbit is also briefly mentioned in this article from the ISSUE 98 APRIL 1992 of the CRASH online edition.

ZX fonts

This page uses a freeware ZX-Spectrum font by WhoAmI Design, taken from the Sinclair ZX Fonts Pack. If your browser doesn't support dynamic fonts, you can install the font manually to boost up the nostalgic feelings. FORTH and CP/M 8x4 fonts yet to come :)

Links

The Home Computer Museum in its Soviet home computer section contains the Hobbit reference card, which is also the source of the Hobbit computer photo! The photo is © copyrighted by the Home Computer Museum.

A much more elaborate description (although to date still no news on more recent developments, like LOGO and FORTH/FFS), along with more photos, is featured by the Sinclair nostalgia products site.

Dmitrii Sibarov built ZX-Spectrum nostalgia pages, with a Hobbit section. It contains the scanned manuals (in Russian) for the computer architecture and its operation in the 100% ZX compatible and extended (TR-DOS, network, shadow routine, Russian extensions etc.) BASIC modes. Even if you don't read in Russian, you might appreciate the logo (for those frustrated of you who came to this page searching for the Tolkien character talks).

Several non-Hobbit-related ZX Spectrum nostalgia links are available off my jump page.

There is also a Java(tm) Spectrum emulator "Hob". Although "Hob" means "Hobbit", the author originally meant the Spectrum game with that name. That emulator does not provide any of the special Hobbit computer features.

See also the Mozilla Open Directory Sinclair ZX-Spectrum category.