A communist Apple II and fourteen years of not knowing what you’re testing

A personal account of Bulgaria's Правец (Pravetz) computers — Apple II clones built behind the Iron Curtain. In 1979, engineer Ivan Marangozov at Sofia's Institute of Technical Cybernetics and Robotics built the IMKO-1, a near-identical clone of the Apple II with the same ROM, schematics, and 6502 CPU running at 1 MHz. Key differences included a heavy metal case, a linear power supply, and Cyrillic characters replacing lowercase Latin. The Правец 82 became a staple in Bulgarian schools, representing a fascinating chapter in Cold War computing history.