Part of my series on national beginnings: Spain – Argentina – Uruguay – more to come
Apologies for the long delay, but after the holidays I had a few busy work weeks and then a benign but debilitating condition that prevented me from maintaining my almost-weekly schedule. Additionally, my planned “brief” article on Uruguay turned out longer and more complex than I expected – but well we’re back for good with the second part of our rioplatense duo.
Prologue: La máquina
While Uruguay is Argentina’s immediate neighbour, its history, as far as computing is concerned, went in a largely different direction. It had started, however, as a joint affair: back in the early 60s, the father of Argentinian computing Manuel Sadosky made sure that the first Uruguayan computer scientists could have free access to Clementina, Argentina’s first computer. When in 1966, Clementina suddenly became unavailable, Manuel Sadosky went in exile in Uruguay and joined a project to set up an IBM 360 Model 44 in the Carrasco (Montevideo) airport: la máquina, Unlike Clementina, la máquina was not the first computer in Uruguay, as researchers could loan the time of an IBM 1401 in the Plaza Independencia IBM HQ in the heart of Montevideo; however, it was the first one under national control.
Alas, just like the Clementina, the máquina was a victim of political instability. After the coup of 1973, the new government ordered operators (including Ida Holz) to print the content of the máquina‘s memory, hoping for some reason to find there the archives of the Tupamaros rebel movement. They obviously didn’t, but the suspicion remained, and the only access staff and students had to the machine was by passing punched cards to guards through a window. Unlike in Argentina, the government had limited interest in the technology, the maximum number of computer students was reduced to 250, with a low amount of teaching hours and an increasingly obsolete three-year curriculum that was never updated after 1974. The regime would hold until 1985 and it would take until 1987 before the University would finish its reform, long after the computer Revolution had started: unlike Argentina, Italy or even France, early home computing in Uruguay would come almost exclusively from individual initiatives.
The unexpected land of ADAM
Unlike its neighbours, Uruguay never developed an industrial base capable of producing computers and with fewer than 3 million people it was too small a market to attract exporters, except for its closest neighbors. However, its capital Montevideo concentrates almost half of that population (no other Uruguayan city passed 100 000 inhabitants at the time), making it a sizeable city and so a large enough market for computer shops to operate.
The first significant initiative, around 1982, was from Maico, a hearing aid company that branched into computers and imported ZX81 and then later ZX Spectrum directly from United Kingdom. Volume was quite low, even for the size of the country, but it was a beginning of a pattern where, in the following years, various entrepreneurs and shops would have their computers. To take one significant example, Grupo JADE (from the first names of its founders: Juan, Ángel, Denis and Eduardo) started by importing in 1983 several batches of Sinclair computers (around 500 in total) at a bargain thanks to “connections” in the shipping industry, before pivoting In 1985 to became the official importer of Amstrad, delivered by full containers – they sold a minimum of 1000 machines and most probably a lot more than that. Similarly, several shops tried to sell Atari computers with limited success and Commodore 64, with here again limited success due to its price, though apparently they did OK in private institutions or in schools, where they joined a batch of MSX (number unknown) given by the Republic of Korea.
One of those initiatives deserves a special mention at it gives an odd colour to personal computing in Uruguay: the presence of the Coleco ADAM. As the story goes, someone bought in the mid-80s a container worth of refuses and faulty ADAM parts (possibly after its production was discontinued in USA in 1985) and set up shop in Montevideo, assembling complete computers out of the parts that worked and raw ingeniosity. It’s hard to estimate how many working computers were thus cobbled together, but Gonzalo Frasca in Video Games around the World (2015) explains “thousands of malfunctioning Coleco ADAM computers that arrived in the country and were fixed or completed with local parts. The machines were very affordable, and this led to the popularity of the platform in Uruguay.” I don’t know how many malfunctioning Coleco ADAMs one needed to make a functioning Coleco ADAM and some sources dispute that the computer was ever more than a footnote in Uruguay, but whoever is right, it’s too good a story to be forgotten!
In any case, if the ADAM was significant, it was only for a very short time, as it would – like all other models – be eclipsed by the defining computer of Uruguay: the TK90X.
The TK90X in Uruguay
In 1978, two Uruguayan friends – Abraham Popovich and Óscar Gerwer – finished their engineering studies in Israel; Gerwer returned to Uruguay while Popovich went to Brazil where he first worked for the large electronics company CCE and then Prológica, an importer and later manufacturer of computers. In 1981, he associated with the Kovari brothers (Tomas & Gyorgy) to design a tool that would use calculators to control industrial ovens. The three of them soon realized that a small computer could do the job better, and their next logical breakthrough was that the money was in making computers, rather than software using computers that people mostly did not have in the first place. The three of them founded Microdigital with Popovich as the technical expert, and they started producing clones of Sinclair computers, first the TK80 (clone of the ZX80), then the TK82 (clone of the ZX81) and then everything they felt was worth cloning, including Apple computers, producing up to 20 000 computers a month.
Meanwhile, Gerwer had founded a software and office computer import company in Uruguay. His company was struggling, and eventually in 1982 Gewer took time off to ponder about his next move. In Brazil, he met with Abraham, who asked him whether he wanted to be the official representative of the TK brand in Uruguay. Gerwer accepted of course, and his company Ingenieria de Sistemas started importing TK85 (another ZX81 clone), starting with a batch of only 25 to 50 machines that he sold from his apartment. They sold well, and Gewer rapidly increased his import, also moving to Popovich’s latest clone: the TK90X, based on the ZX Spectrum.
Ingenieria de Sistemas and its TK clones were immensely successful in Uruguay in the 80s, for several reasons. Of course, Gerwer benefited from the proximity with Brazil, from his friendship with Popovich (other Uruguayan importers probably didn’t have a direct line with the technical heads of Sinclair, Amstrad or Commodore) and from the low price of the TK90X – the latter also explaining why the ZX Spectrum was (probably) the second most popular device in Uruguay in our period of interest. But there was something more: Gerwer created an ecosystem around the TK computers.
When the first TK90X arrived to Uruguay in 1985, there was little software for it: the Sinclair games were expensive, in English, frequently protected against piracy and not always compatible out of the box (joystick support seems to have been a common issue). Gerwer associated with Carlos Galucci and Roberto Eimer – two crackers who knew how to handle those problems – and created TK-Soft, the official “user club” of the TK. The initial plan for the club was simply to provide games and software support for the TK, but the project took a life of its own : one of the first software that Galucci cracked for TK-Soft was the educational programming language Logo, which he also translated from Portuguese (the version available to him) to Spanish. An effort to also translate the manual into Spanish turned into full-fledged programming courses organized by the club, and one thing leading to another TK-Soft became the place to go if you wanted to learn about computers. The impact of the Spanish Logo on sales was so significant that Gerwer asked Galucci to make sure the software would not work on a normal Spectrum – a rare case of a pirate adding a DRM on a cracked product!
Finally, Gerwer added the last brick to the ecosystem: the magazine. There were no Uruguyan computing magazines, instead enthusiasts had to read foreign publications like the Argentinian K64, the Spanish MicroHobby or, as it turns out, the Brazilian MicroHobby, unrelated to the Spanish one as it was the “revistas dos usarios dos TK” published by Microdigital. Gerwer copied the approach of TK in Brazil and created in 1987 Mundo de la Computación (director: Óscar Gerwer), according to which the eponymous world of computers started with the TK90X and ended with the TK3000.
Thanks to this complete ecosystem, in which you would read on the TK90X, learn on the TK90X and play on the TK90X – unlike its non-clone competitors, Ingeniera de Sistemas even provided you with a joystick when you bought a computer- the TK90X absolutely dominated the market. Gerwer testified in Generación TK90X that he sold between 18 000 and 20 000 TK machines in total, mostly TK90X and including a long-tail that ran until 1995. This matches the ads found in Mundo de la Computación, according to which there were 8000 TK90X sold by late 1987 and 13000 TK90X+TK95 sold by late 1988. I did some pretty hairy estimation of the number of domestic computers in Uruguay during the 80s (see at the end of this article), and based on this it is likely that between 30% and 55% of the household computers in 1988 were TK computers – and probably closer to 55% than to 30%!
The first Uruguyan (commercial) video games
As we’ve seen, Uruguay was, like Argentina or Italy, rife with piracy – and there were many shops whose only activity was to sell you cracked tapes of whatever game you wanted, usually with a nice custom intro/ad for them added in the game, memory allowing. Unlike Argentina or Italy, Uruguay did not have custom consoles nor magazines, so while there are testimonies of local creations being exchanged in TK-soft or elsewhere, the first commercial video games arrived late – in fact, not until 1988 or 1989, depending on your criteria.
Two companies are usually mentioned as contenders for “the first Uruguayan video game”: Iron Byte and Trilog Software. I reckon Iron Byte deserves the title slightly more, which is just as well because it ties much better to our story, because it makes us return to Galucci and Eimer, who had founded a company called Hilow so that Óscar Gerwer could pay them in an official fashion for their role in TK-Soft. Around 1988, Galucci and Eimer teamed up with three brothers (Juan, Ramiro, and Ricardo Arias) to create the Hilow Datadrive, an improved cassette reader for Sinclair machines created by cannibalizing Coleco ADAM parts. The Datadrive was better than Sinclair ever offered and allowed users to seamlessly browse the data on a cassette and thus was a massive improvement, but since building it required sacrificing a finite stock of Coleco parts, the business was neither scalable nor profitable. However, it gave this little team quite the reputation.
That reputation led to an unexpected commission: pharmaceutical company Glaxo contacted them to create a game for its convention booth, with a prize for the winners; Glaxo’s hope was that the doctors would leave their name to get the prize, and there was even a proposal to have an easier game for doctors compared to presumably more competitive but less interesting students. The result, an unnamed Space Invaders clone that replaced the spaceship with a syringe and the aliens with microbes, is reputedly the first Uruguayan video game that was officially sold. This emboldened Hilow to imagine making a game for Europe. After taking a more marketable name – Iron Byte, they managed to contact Nacho Ruiz of Dinamic (who we already met on this blog) and convinced him to publish their game in Europe. Nacho accepted, provided they used a Dinamic character for their next game. Iron Byte obliged, and so in 1989 Dinamic published Iron Byte’s Freddy Hardest in South Manhattan, the first Uruguayan game to be exported.
Iron Byte continued to be active for a few years, but ultimately folded when Dinamic ended its distribution agreement in 1992. Only a few years later, the software scene of Uruguay would rise again, with GeneXus making it one of the leaders of the (professional) Latam market – but now I should really be back to wargames, starting in the next article for the reasons I made all of these digressions into Argentina and Uruguay: Reyes y Castillos.
Source:
Una Historia en bit, Instituto de Computacion, 2013
Inicios de la computación en la Universidad de la República, 2022
Generación TK90X by Rodolfo Guerra (rodolfo.guerra@gmail.com), 2025 – certainly the most comprehensive source on Ingenieria de Sistemas.
Video Games around the World: Uruguay, Gonzalo Frasca, 2015
Video Juegos en Uruguay, Fabián “Vortihcex” Iglesias, 2024
ColecoVision ADAM Uruguay on the ColecoVision Adam reference site
La Era Dorada del Software Charrua in Replay, Sergio Andres Rondan, 2020 on Iron Byte,
The Amstrad in Uruguay [youtube] May 2024
Microdigital on the Marcos Velasco Software site, which confirms with official documents that Abraham Popovich as a co-founder of Microdigital even though he is ignored in most other sources (including Wikipedia)
Iron Byte profile, Abandonware France
Máquina legendaria: la Commodore 64 cumplió 40 vigentes años, Montevideo Portal, 2023
Also this AtariAge thread that ties everything ADAM together (check Sexton’s comment in the second page).
Special thanks Rodolfo Guerra and Ariel Genis who answered an awful lot of questions on Uruguay and corrected several of my initial “Argentinian-focused” misconceptions.
Nerdy addendum: how many computers in Uruguay?
I don’t have direct data on this and I don’t believe it exists, but I tried to bracket it in two ways:
- A report on computing in South America states there were 7622 computers in Uruguay in 1987, probably counting only public and professional computers in Uruguay in 1987 (page 18). The same document gives the volume for both the public/professional and the domestic computers for Chile. I use the same ratio for Uruguay (something only a non-Latin American could do!) and land at around 38 000 domestic computers, which seems incredibly high, so I am going to call it a upper bound, with the reality between that number and half that (so 19K to 38K). This is a terrible terrible way to do data, but I work with what I have.
- I have have a 1996 Uruguayan census saying that 6% of households had a computer in 1996, and that there were 960 000 households then – which means 58 000 households with computers and let’s say 86 000 computers in total (I took 1.5 computers ever by family with at least one as an upper bound). Assuming a perfectly linear growth from 1982 (it should probably be a S-curve, but a linear growth gives us another upper bracket), I land at 31 000 domestic computers in 1987 (remarkably close to my first estimation) and 43 000 domestic computers for all of the 80s. I end up with too many upper bounds, so it’s certainly too high, but “better” than the previous method so I would have a final bracket of 20K-31K by 1987 and 28K-43K home computers for the entirety of the 80s.
If anyone wants to make another estimation, using the same or other benchmarks, I would love to read it – it’s a fun exercise and I believe in the wisdom of the crowd.