In 1990, a friend and I learned from the Radio magazine about the possibility of assembling a pretty decent Orion-128 computer ourselves, which was quite decent for that time. 128 is not gigabytes, and not even megabytes. That’s how many kilobytes the PC had of RAM. And with the ability to expand to 256 KB. Today, it seems funny, but back then it was really cool. A separate song is the purchase of a printed circuit board and microcircuits. I bought the board by cash on delivery from some company in another city. Microcircuits were also partly by mail, and partly at the radio market. But in the end, we assembled Orions for ourselves.
The Orion did not have a monitor – it was connected to a TV.
Later we met other owners of the same Orions. We got a kind of club of interests. As many as 5 Orionists. At first, the programs were filled with dumps from the same Radio magazine. They were published in several issues. One dictates — the other enters the codes. Then it was all saved on a tape recorder. After some time, corrections to the codes would appear in the next issues of the magazine. Those were romantic times! :)
Then we started buying some programs (mostly games). They were also sent by cash on delivery by mail — and also on tape cassettes. And of course, we programmed ourselves. We had assembler and BASIC among the languages. Mostly in assembler.
Over time, we bought and installed disk drives.
One friend bought a DVK keyboard at the Mitino radio market. It was very cool, with a controller. Of course, it was not suitable for Orion. We got a book on this controller, studied assembler, reprogrammed it, reflashed the ROM. As a result, the keyboard and Orion became friends.
I had a very big sad moment when lightning struck a power line near my house and my Orion burned down. How much effort was spent looking for problems! Sleepless nights. Any parts that could be removed were tested. In the end, the computer was fixed. All the memory and ports burned out.
It should be said that the most popular computers at that time were Sinclairs. There were more programs for them and it was easier to buy one. But here it is necessary to assemble it yourself, with your own hands. This is a slightly different topic.
By the end of the 90s, IBM PCs were widely used. And our Orion became irrelevant. However, enthusiasts continue to assemble such computers and write programs.
Here is the address of such a community. http://rdk.regionsv.ru/orion128-radio.htm
Here is another interesting publication on the topic. https://pikabu.ru/story/orion128_4596032 There is even a link to the Orion browser emulator.