>Well; on the case; it just says "Zenith"; I believe. It's a square design;
>with two horizontally-located 5 1/2" bays; occupied by some kind of black
>disk drive. One of the computers IS a Zenith 286; w/ 20MB HDD; 2 FDDs; etc.
>and a CGA (EGA?) monitor.
Yeh, that's a Zenith 248. The monitor should be a EGA, either mono or
colour assuming it's one of the Zenith ones. The colour ones were kinda
cool, they're the type that let you switch between mono green, mono amber,
and colour (I can't even remember how many colours EGA is 8 or 16). The
CPU is on a daughterboard, and in the early 90's there was an upgrade to
386, but good luck finding them. If I remember correctly the RAM is on
another board, which plugs into a slot and used ram chips to upgrade. DOS
3.2 or 3.3 and Windows 1 came with them, needless to say the Windows didn't
really get used, and a mouse didn't come with them. The version of MS-DOS
was customized by Zenith. WP 5.0/1 was almost a given on these as it was
the DOD standard, but Enable was also common. The standard printer was a
hidious Alps widecarrage thing, very prone to paper jams in my experience
(I really despised that printer).
One interesting card that was available enabled the Zenith 248 to act as a
terminal to a Harris Minicomputer. Needless to say the Harris was the
cooler of the two systems.
> But the HDD is just DEAD; from what I can tell. I'd just want to
>replace that; hardware-transparently if possible; but if not.... I've got
>all my life.
Well, it is about ten years old, the first one I saw was in '87.
Considering the fact this machine has probably been on a LOT, and used a
LOT, that's pretty good I think.
Zane
| Zane H. Healy | UNIX Systems Adminstrator |
| healyzh_at_ix.netcom.com (primary) | Linux Enthusiast |
| healyzh_at_holonet.net (alternate) | Classic Computer Collector |
+----------------------------------+----------------------------+
| For Empire of the Petal Throne and Traveller Role Playing, |
| see
http://www.dragonfire.net/~healyzh/ |
| For the collecting of Classic Computers with info on them. |
| see
http://www.dragonfire.net/~healyzh/museum.html |
Received on Fri Dec 12 1997 - 00:19:17 GMT