Charles E. Fox wrote:
>
> Turned up one of these on Friday. It has a 21 meg HD, an 8088, and is
> about like having a flat bed scanner on your lap!
> No power supply and battery pack (10 size "D" nicads) shot, but got it
> working off my bench power supply. It appears to be working normally and I
> think I can rig up a power supply from a Sony version for a portable VTR.
> Is anyone familiar with this beast? It must be one of the earliest laptops.
The Z-183, IIRC, is vintage 1988, maybe as old as 1987. It was a
fairly straightforward XT/CGA-mono laptop in the days when there was
a two or more year lag between implementation of a CPU in a desktop
and its implementation in a portable. During the 1988 television
writers' strike, I'd swear that at least half the writers in LA
county came into the store I worked at in Sherman Oaks and bought
new Zenith laptops to replace their aging Kaypros -- though my
specialty was Xenix and Unix, I must have spent most of three months
Laplinking Wordstar documents from Kaypro disks to Zenith 181 and 183
laptops (using appropriate utilities to read the Kaypro floppies in
desktop PCs).
For its time, the Zenith laptops were among the nicest looking
laptops around -- a long way from the butt-ugly desktop boxes Zenith
built.
--
Ward Griffiths
They say that politics makes strange bedfellows.
Of course, the main reason they cuddle up is to screw somebody else.
Michael Flynn, _Rogue Star_
Received on Sun Apr 19 1998 - 09:43:11 BST