Zenith-PC was (World's Crappiest Drives)

From: Lawrence Walker <lgwalker_at_look.ca>
Date: Mon Dec 11 10:57:25 2000

> In a message dated 12/10/2000 8:49:23 PM Eastern Standard Time,
> ajp166_at_bellatlantic.net writes:
>
> > ST225 is a good one, the 251 and 4096 were junk. The ST251
> > was far to hot running to survive unless cooled with great effort.
>
> Well, at least one survives:
>
> Last week a frantic woman brought a Zenith Data Systems DOS-based PC
> into our shop. It wouldn't boot and she was in desperate need of
> retrieving some 1-2-3 files from the drive -- an ST251. Turns out the
> system battery had died, and once replaced we were able to get the
> system going and the drive looked healthy (as healthy as a Seagate MFM
> drive ever looks).
>
> Since it was in and out of the shop so quickly we didn't get much of a
> chance to check out the system (Z200? S200?) but it looked as if the
> mainboard was pretty much just a backplane, with the 10MHz AMD 286 CPU
> on an ISA card.
>
> Anyone familiar with this beast? It looked pretty cool. Could cards
> with faster CPUs be installed in place of the 286 card?
>
> Glen Goodwin
> 0/0
>
 I have a ZFA-161 which was an 8088 luggable. Passive backplane
and 2 cool pop-up floppies on top.I think the Z-100 models only
went up to m.150 altho you could put a Z80 card in the PCs. Don't
know how you would switch systems with both cards installed.
They had a nice built-in monitor system which was accessed by
control,alt,ins on startup.
 The Nec V30 and V40 were common upgrades and I've heard
they would accept a hardcard. If it could be upgraded to a 286 or
higher with a processer complex that would be neat.
 Reminds you of the IBM PS/2s with the processors on a card
(m.90-95's) that IBM calls planars as they did the earlier PS/2
mother-boards, altho the backplane is considerably more complex.
(non-passive backplane ?)

ciao larry




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Received on Mon Dec 11 2000 - 10:57:25 GMT