New find: Headstart Explorer

From: Russ Blakeman <rhblake_at_bigfoot.com>
Date: Wed Apr 11 17:17:21 2001

Yup, they were 8088 or 8086 but came out around the time of the PS/2 and
were essentially a cheap Eduquest. (Nothing wrong with Eduquest, my daughter
runs a 35 w/95 on our network). They came with a sound card, cdrom (1x or 2,
can't remember) and I believe they also had a 286 model. They ran on DOS
with a GEM-like GUI and came with all sorts of neat programs and had lo-res
VGA as well. I just called the guy that I worked on it for and he had given
it away to a collector after he popped $4500 for a PIII-800 laptop and his
kids got tired of the thing. He even remebered the CD it had and the fun he
had restoring it without the cdrom driver, and having to look all over the
net then for it. I believe it had a Mitsumi interface drive linked to the
sound card.

>From what I gathered they were expensive for what you got but schools,
daycare, mom & pop and others blindly bought them in the name of
"education".

> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-classiccmp_at_classiccmp.org
> [mailto:owner-classiccmp_at_classiccmp.org]On Behalf Of Mark Gregory
> Sent: Wednesday, April 11, 2001 3:20 PM
> To: classiccmp_at_classiccmp.org
> Subject: Re: New find: Headstart Explorer
>
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Russ Blakeman" <rhblake_at_bigfoot.com>
> To: <classiccmp_at_classiccmp.org>
> Sent: Wednesday, April 11, 2001 2:23 PM
> Subject: RE: New find: Headstart Explorer
>
>
> > Headstart had a cd to load it with and most people neither have the CD
> nor
> > do they have the boot floppy for the cdrom. I retored one back
> to factory
> > load about 3 yrs ago but I've since lost all ties with where the
> Headstart
> > links have gone.
> >
>
> Russ, are you sure we're talking about the same computer? 8088-based XT
> clone by Vendex? CD drives were pretty expensive in the mid-to-late 1980s,
> and it wasn't at all common for software to come on a CD. Additionally, I
> didn't see anything like a CD-ROM connector when I took the beast apart.
>
> Maybe you're thinking of a [Compaq,Dell,Gateway] "Headstart"
> program, where
> the OS and software (usually MS-Works) were pre-loaded at the factory, as
> an aid to newbies?
>
> Cheers,
> Mark.
>
Received on Wed Apr 11 2001 - 17:17:21 BST