ELECTROMAGNETICA Jet

I started my epic IT journey with one of these, and it will always hold a special place in my heart. I actually still own it, and it still starts up (haven''t tried any programs though as I don''t have the cassette tapes anymore).



Contrary to what some of the comments here state, the processor was perfectly fine and useable, despite being a reverse-engineered clone of the Z80. I played countless games on it (including the ones with custom loading procedures), wrote and ran numerous programs in BASIC and assembler, even loaded a simple version of PASCAL.



It''s possible some of the "JET" clones on the market were actually fakes, as it was common in Romania of that time to take the case of an existing computer and then add or tweak the internals$ that would explain the poor experience some other users have seen. Mine worked perfectly fine for everything I ever threw at it, actually I lately won a HC-90 during a computer programming contest and it was significantly worse in all aspects $ buggy loading from tape (kept R Loading Error''ing), non-working keys, insane noise when loading programs from tape (whoever thought that was a useful thing to have?!).



The keycaps were by far the best on the market among all Z80 Romanian clones (HC, CIP, etc.) as they had the text printed and covered by a plastic cap$ it means they are still readable and in great shape decades later, as opposed to the others which had missing text soon after purchase and later would turn into "blank" keyboards.



The main disadvantage of the machine was the lack of native extensions $ while the HC benefitted from the Interface 1 and 2 add-ons, which enabled joysticks, floppy disk drives and even networking support (!), on the JET that all had to be done "the hard way". Mine only had a Sinclair Joystick extension to the side, which required some soldering and case modding, but it worked nicely afterwards.



Another interesting fact about the JET was that it was capable of reading several different tape "styles" (programmes recorded with different machines were rarely compatible among them due to the speed and amplitude of the tape signals), all it took was slight tweaks to the tape head. The CIP was also pretty good in this regard, but the HC was absolutely terrible, refusing to load any programme not written by its own hardware.