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Voja Antonić

Galaksija designer

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A Belgrade television film editor who designed the Galaksija, the Z80 computer that thousands of Yugoslavs built from a magazine's instructions in 1984. He went on to write hardware columns for Svet kompjutera and, decades later, to design conference badges for Hackaday.

Voja Antonić designed the Galaksija, the computer a Belgrade magazine taught its readers to build in January 1984. He was not an engineer by trade. When Svet kompjutera introduced him to its readers in October 1984, it gave his profession as film editor, with ten years at the mixing desk in TV Belgrade’s editing rooms, and added that he was “much better known as the designer of the first domestic computer to enter people’s homes”. The Galaksija, it said, “grew out of a hobby”.

Fast facts

  • Born: 1952 (he was 32 in October 1984).
  • Day job in 1984: film editor at TV Belgrade.
  • Known for: the Galaksija, published in Računari u vašoj kući, January 1984.
  • Wrote for: Računari and Svet kompjutera, where he ran the hardware column “Zlatne ruke” (“Golden hands”).
  • Later: designer of Hackaday conference badges, 2016 to 2022.

A hobby since 1975

Svet kompjutera said Antonić had been studying microprocessors since 1975, and that the knowledge let him design complex automatic data-processing systems on his own as well as microcomputers. Later accounts add that he studied at Belgrade’s Faculty of Dramatic Arts in the late 1970s, and that one of his first microprocessor projects was a machine that played Conway’s Game of Life on a 16×16 grid of red LEDs.

The Galaksija

In the summer of 1983 the popular-science magazine Galaksija commissioned Dejan Ristanović to write a special edition about home computers. Ristanović later recalled that by the end of August the chance arose to add a computer readers could build themselves, “designed by Voja Antonić”. The edition, Računari u vašoj kući (“Computers in Your Home”), reached kiosks in the last days of December 1983, dated January 1984. Its editorial said the Galaksija had been designed by “one man, Voja Antonić, in a little over a month”, and that barely more than six months had passed between the first idea and the first machines appearing.

The design used a Zilog Z80A and a handful of common chips, and had no video chip: the processor drew the 32×16 text screen itself, as Sinclair’s ZX81 did. Antonić’s own assembly listing of the ROM, version 28, is dated 3 January 1984. His build article set out the schematic, the board and a network of Yugoslav and Austrian suppliers for the parts, and it was translated into English in 2018 for PoC||GTFO Volume 2.

Readers took him up on it. By October 1984 Svet kompjutera reported nearly 6,000 Galaksijas in Yugoslav homes. Ristanović’s own later count is that more than 8,000 readers built one. The Galaksija entry tells the machine’s story in full.

Writing about hardware

Antonić was one of the group Ristanović names as starting Svet kompjutera in the autumn of 1984, and its first issue, in October, introduced him alongside Stanko Popović and Andrija Kolundžić on its “who’s who” page. His name appears on its masthead as a specialist contributor through the late 1980s. He wrote a Galaksija machine-code monitor for the magazine in April 1985, and a run of hardware articles on logic chips, memory maps and the Z80’s input and output. By the end of 1986 they appeared under the heading “Zlatne ruke” (“Golden hands”), a do-it-yourself hardware column. In December 1986 it built an EPROM emulator, and in June 1987 the magazine announced that “after a short break, Voja Antonić again brings you Zlatne ruke”.

Badges and later work

Antonić kept designing small, programmable hardware. He designed the badge for the Hackaday Belgrade conference in 2016, and then the badge for that year’s Hackaday Superconference: a PIC18 microcontroller driving a matrix of 128 surface-mounted LEDs, which he described himself in a Hackaday article. He designed the retro-computing badge for Hackaday Belgrade 2018, and the virtual 4-bit machine inside the 2022 Superconference badge, a computer whose lights show its registers and memory as it runs.

He also went back to the Galaksija. He released a revised two-layer circuit board with modern key-switch connectors and an extra 5 nF capacitor on the Z80’s refresh line, which the picture circuit depends on. He has also written books, among them a guide to critical thinking.

Sources

  • Svet kompjutera, October 1984, p. 3, “Ko je ko”: age 32; film editor with ten years at TV Belgrade; “mnogo je poznatiji kao konstruktor prvog domaćeg kompjutera koji je ušao u kuće”; the Galaksija “nastala iz hobija”; studying microprocessors since 1975.
  • Svet kompjutera, October 1984, p. 6, “Svi YU računari”: the Galaksija the most popular domestic computer, “blizu 6.000 mašina” in Yugoslav homes.
  • Svet kompjutera, April 1985 (Galaksija monitor program), December 1986 (“Zlatne ruke”, EPROM emulator, part two) and June 1987, p. 5 (“Nakon kraće pauze, Voja Antonić vam ponovo daruje ‘Zlatne ruke’”); mastheads April 1985 to March 1988 list him among the specialist contributors (“stručni saradnici”).
  • Računari u vašoj kući, special edition of Galaksija, January 1984, editorial: “Računar ‘galaksija’ je projektovao jedan jedini čovek, Voja Antonić, za nešto više od mesec dana, a od prve ideje do pojave prvih primeraka na tržištu prošlo je jedva nešto više od šest meseci.”
  • Voja Antonić, “The Galaksija Home Computer”, English translation by Travis Goodspeed and Aleks Nikolić in PoC||GTFO Volume 2 (No Starch Press, 2018).
  • Voja Antonić, Galaksija ROM A assembly listing, version 28, dated 3 January 1984, and the mejs/galaksija repository README on his revised two-layer board (GitHub, accessed September 2026) (web, secondary). https://github.com/mejs/galaksija
  • Dejan Ristanović, “Računari u vašoj kući”, dejanristanovic.com (accessed September 2026) (web, secondary; a participant’s recollection): the commission, the Galaksija added at the end of August 1983, the late-December 1983 release, more than 8,000 builders, and the founders of Svet kompjutera. http://www.dejanristanovic.com/rac1.htm
  • Voja Antonić, “Design and Hacking Drilldown: SuperCon Badge”, Hackaday, 17 October 2016 (web, secondary): the Belgrade 2016 badge and the Supercon 2016 badge’s PIC18 and 128 LEDs. https://hackaday.com/2016/10/17/design-and-hacking-drilldown-supercon-badge/
  • Hackaday, “Voja Antonic: Designing The Cube”, 7 February 2019 (web, secondary): the Hackaday Belgrade 2018 badge. https://hackaday.com/tag/voja-antonic/
  • Elliot Williams, “Why Learn Ancient Tech?”, Hackaday, 15 October 2022 (web, secondary): “Voja Antonic designed the virtual 4-bit machine” in the 2022 Supercon badge. https://hackaday.com/2022/10/15/why-learn-ancient-tech/
  • Wikipedia, “Voja Antonić” (accessed September 2026) (web, secondary): birth date, the Faculty of Dramatic Arts, the Game of Life machine, and his books. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voja_Antoni%C4%87

See also

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