The radio market: how memory, boards and pirated cassettes were bought

A market, not a shop

In the previous article we showed that behind the Iron Curtain the Spectrum was made cheap not by a production line but by ingenuity: reverse-engineering, discrete logic and self-assembly. But to build a machine yourself, you first have to get the parts from somewhere. And here a question arises that is easy to miss amid the talk of circuit design: where exactly did a person get the chips, the board, a flashed ROM and the programs for a new computer?

The answer is the radio market. The thesis of this piece is simple: the radio market was not a shop but a distribution hub for hardware and software. It was here that scarce parts, firmware and pirated cassettes changed hands — and it was this infrastructure that made a mass-market Spectrum technically possible. Without the market, clones like the Robik, the Ikar-64 or the Orel would have remained isolated laboratory pieces rather than a people’s machine.

Rozsyp: chips one by one

The key word of the parts market is “rozsyp” — loose: individual chips bought one by one, not in factory kits. The radio market grew out of exactly this need. By the account of the Kyiv radio market at Karavaievi Dachi, it arose from informal meetings of radio amateurs who at first simply swapped scarce components and later settled at a permanent venue. In other words, the market was a natural extension of the amateur milieu, not a trading network handed down from above.

The logic of “rozsyp” follows directly from the design of the clones. As we explained in the piece on the architecture, the post-Soviet machines had no proprietary ULA chip — its functions were reproduced with a set of ordinary logic chips. And so the builder needed not one or two rare components but dozens of ordinary logic packages, a crystal, memory, connectors. The radio market was the only place where all of this could be gathered in a single trip — often from parts that came from stripped-down instruments or from enterprise warehouses.

Not to be confused. A “radio market” is a type of venue, not a single specific place: in different cities it had its own name and location. And “rozsyp” means individual chips one by one, not ready-made factory kits. Both notions are easy to mix up with today’s electronics retail, but this was a spontaneous secondary economy of parts.

Firmware as a commodity: ROM

A separate line of the market was flashed ROM chips. A Spectrum without a burned-in BASIC and input/output routines is dead hardware: it is the ROM that brings the machine to life once it is switched on. A clone needed a read-only memory chip with the right firmware, and the market traded not only in “blank” chips but in already-written ones.

This turned firmware into a separate commodity and a separate service: some sold ROMs, others wrote the required content to order. Here we deliberately keep to caution. The general logic — that ROMs and programmers were part of the market’s circulation — fits the nature of self-assembly, but the specifics (where exactly, for how much, who did the flashing) are poorly documented in reliable sources. So the details of this sub-section we set aside for verification rather than present them as hard facts.

Cassettes: pirated compilations and swapping

If hardware was bought as “rozsyp”, software came on reels and cassettes. For the Spectrum the standard medium was an ordinary audio cassette, and this is exactly what shaped the way programs spread. Copying a cassette game was trivial: two cassette decks, a blank tape — and a copy was ready. Museum researchers of piracy describe this mechanism directly: games were re-recorded on home audio equipment, and several programs were fitted onto a single tape at once.

Hence the characteristic format of post-Soviet cassette piracy: compilations, where a dozen games were recorded on one cassette in a row. The National Videogame Museum notes that the buyer often received a cassette with no labels or titles, sometimes not even knowing in advance what was on it or whether it would run at all. The cassette market was part of the same secondary economy: here programs were traded and swapped just like parts.

The legal side was blurred. By the estimate of reference works, in 1991–1998 the Spectrum held about 90% of the market across the former USSR — and a huge share of this software circulated outside any licensing, in a grey zone where copyright effectively did not apply. We do not idealise this practice: for the museum it is a subject of study, not an occasion for nostalgia.

What it cost

The question of prices is the most tempting and at the same time the most unreliable. It is tempting to name a specific sum for a memory chip or a compilation cassette, but here it is easy to be led by isolated recollections, which are not a source. The matter is complicated by the fact that we are talking about the late 1980s and the 1990s: a period of hyperinflation and changing currencies, when any “price” without a tie to an exact date and place means almost nothing.

What can be said with grounds: the market set prices dynamically, they depended on the scarcity of a particular part, and it was the availability of the component base — not the wishes of amateurs — that determined when self-assembly became mass. The specific figures we leave for the museum’s documentary verification.

What we are checking. The most delicate part of this topic is the local specifics: the names and addresses of radio markets in Ukrainian cities, the prices of “rozsyp”, ROMs and cassettes by specific years, the names of those who flashed and copied. Forums and recollections are not, by themselves, a sufficient source here. If you have kept compilation cassettes, specialist magazines, price tags, photographs of the market rows or boards — send them to the museum: it is from such evidence that a verified history of the Ukrainian Spectrum is built.

Distribution hubs: the Ukrainian radio markets

The radio market was not a phenomenon of one city. In Kyiv one such hub was Karavaievi Dachi — a locality in the Solomianskyi district, where the radio market is remembered as an established landmark. By the accounts, in the 1990s this venue grew into a large bazaar that sold “everything”: from the first mobile phones and pirated discs to electronics from collapsing factories. Retro-computing distribution was part of this wider flow of second-hand and scarce hardware.

Similar venues operated in other Ukrainian cities too, feeding local circles of builders. Here it is worth stressing our focus: what interests us is precisely the Ukrainian network of markets and the Ukrainian machines it fed — the Robik from Cherkasy, the Ikar-64 from Kharkiv, the Orel from Dnipro. The radio market was the link that joined the factory, the amateur builder and the end user into a single system — and it did so from below, without central planning.

Infrastructure inheritance. The market outlived the machines it served. The same Kyiv radio market that once traded “rozsyp” for Spectrum clones later turned into a hub for repairing electronics — from laptops to modern devices. The infrastructure of amateur hardware proved more durable than any one platform.

The market in the museum’s collection

You cannot put a radio market in a display case — it is a process rather than an object. But its traces are material: cassettes with game compilations, specialist magazines of those years, individual parts and boards. It is exactly such objects that the museum collects to document this topic; they are not currently on physical display in the permanent exhibition, and the museum’s own photograph for this piece is still being prepared.

The radio market is the connecting link of our block on the post-Soviet Spectrum. It stands between the history of the clones and the culture of self-assembly, the subject of the next piece: when parts from the market were brought home and a computer was, quite literally, soldered together on a kitchen table. And the full list of machines that lived off this market is in the clones catalogue, where each one comes with sources and notes on the level of certainty.