The IQ-151 was a Czechoslovakian home computer manufactured by ZPA Novy Bor (Novy Bor being the town where ZPA was based). It was mainly intended for educational purpose and was actually supplied to all types of Czech schools.
The main peripheral was a standard cassette recorder, but several modules could be connected to 5 built-in expansion slots: VIDEO (display), BASIC (interpreter), BASIC G (graphic Basic interpreter), GRAFIK (256 x 512 graphics), STAPER (printer), MINIGRAF (plotter)
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More information from Martin:
There were also two expansion cards for pascal (pascal was probaly too big to fit in one card - project AMOS) and a network card. We used them in our school. One IQ151 was set as a server with a big floppy disk (8", unknown capacity but not more than 360KB). The teacher was able to display any student's screen on his monitor, but the student noticed temporary stop response of his computer :-)
Jakub remembers:
We were using IQ 151 in the school. Its keyboard was probably the worst keyboard ever invented (at least I cannot imagine worse keyboard) and it was very difficult to type. The computer produced lots of heat (people say that they put coffee cup on it to keep their drink warm). Hardware was VERY unreliable, often there were half of the computers in our school out of order. It was used widely in Czechoslovak schools together with Tesla PMD-85 which was better and more reliable but were hardly available.
Xaint's memories (Czech Republic):
We had this monster in school too. It had different graphics and text pages, so until you dont reset graphics, it was over the text you typed. Bad, bad computer. It produced A LOT of heat, when it was rainy day and some people came to school in wet clothes, put them on the back of this metal monster to dry it.
It had a primitive sound system, mono. Keyboard was membrane type, so after long using membrane was almost unable to use. The case was from real honest cast iron. Standard language was a clone of Basic.
Ugly machine, but memories are funny :-)
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My first owned computer. I got it sometime in nineties, from neigbour, one year before my first PC. It was painful to work on it, especially without any permanent storage. Later I managed to connect IQ 151 with tape recorder (not casette, but the magnetic tape rolling from one reel to another), so I didn't have to write my programs on paper :) One of the first things with my new-old heating machine was cuting of the speaker-wire and putting the on-off switch to it. The sound of every key pressed was just horrible, making the use of machine in the night impossible! Very high squeeky sound after every key pressed. In the end, I had made some games in basic, recorded on the tape. Snake and some sort of RPG made by characters. The biggest thing I did was probably a DOS-like system - it was able to create and edit text files in memory, had commands like MEM, DIR, CD, etc. In the winter, it was beautiful to sit by the computer, because the heat coming from the massive piece of metal in the back, serving as cooler, was warming the room by few degrees. I have beautiful memories on this orange thing. In fact it helped me a lot with starting to think as a programer.
I remember, that there was special sort of machine-code input, activated by key press when starting up the system.
I had also more cartridges, but they were probably defective, so I managed to use only Basic.
