The Pentagon (Пентагон)
home computer was a clone of the British-made
Sinclair ZX Spectrum 128
The ZX Spectrum () is an 8-bit home computer that was developed by Sinclair Research. It was released in the United Kingdom on 23 April 1982, and became Britain's best-selling microcomputer.
Referred to during development as the ''ZX81 Colour ...
.
It was manufactured by amateurs in the former
Soviet Union
The Soviet Union,. officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. (USSR),. was a List of former transcontinental countries#Since 1700, transcontinental country that spanned much of Eurasia from 1922 to 1991. A flagship communist state, ...
, following freely distributable documentation. Its
PCB
PCB may refer to:
Science and technology
* Polychlorinated biphenyl, an organic chlorine compound, now recognized as an environmental toxin and classified as a persistent organic pollutant
* Printed circuit board, a board used in electronics
* ...
was copied all over the ex-USSR in 1991-1996, which made it a widespread ZX Spectrum clone.
The name "Pentagon" derives from the shape of the original PCB (Pentagon 48), with a diagonal cut in one of the corners.
Many simple devices (upgrades) were invented to connect to the Pentagon with some soldering.
Versions
*Pentagon 48K (1989 by Vladimir Drozdov)
*Pentagon 128K (1991)
*Pentagon 128K 2+ (1991 by ATM)
*Pentagon 128K 3+ (1993 by Solon)
*Pentagon 1024SL v1.x (2005 by Alex Zhabin)
*Pentagon-1024SL v2.x (2006 by Alex Zhabin)
*Pentagon ver.2.666 (2009 by Alex Zhabin)
The Pentagon 1024SL v2.3 included most of the upgrades of the standard Spectrum architecture, including 1024
KB RAM,
Beta 128 Disk Interface and ZX-BUS slots (especially for
IDE and General Sound cards). This model also featured a "turbo" mode (7 MHz instead of the original's 3.50 MHz).
Upgrades from the original ZX Spectrum
* Extra RAM ranging from 256 KB to 4 MB
* Several
sound card
A sound card (also known as an audio card) is an internal expansion card that provides input and output of audio signals to and from a computer under the control of computer programs. The term ''sound card'' is also applied to external au ...
possibilities such as
Covox
The Covox Speech Thing is an external audio device attached to the c