Morrow Designs Pivot

On Fri, 10 Apr 1998, Marty wrote: Mine says "Model 2522 VB", "Serial Number 31-0001135". We're practically related :-) My calculator button brings up a calculator. I'd also like to find a manual, but I can give you a couple of historical blurbs I snarfed from the net after acquiring my machine. The first blurb is about the Pivot II. I don't yet know how the Pivot II differs from the Pivot, but a Pivot II is on the way to me. The Pivot and/or Pivot II was apparently OEM'd by Zenith, Sperry, and even Osborne. THE MORROW/IRS ANGLE: 1986 March 04 (NB) -- Zenith Electronics Corporation won the Internal Revenue Service award for $28 million in portables--meaning up to 18,000 of them will be in the agency's field auditors' hands, but more importantly, a significant boost for the portable industry in general. Especially delighted is George Morrow, chairman of Morrow Designs, whose firm licensed the technology with which Zenith made its winning Z-171. The Z-171 is identical to Morrow' Pivot II with the exception of the color of the case and the screen. "We designed that machine and everyone is justly proud," said Morrow to NEWSBYTES. He says Sperry, which was bidding Pivot IIs under its own label, came in second. "It's damn nice to come in one and two!" << Subject: Re: Osborne From: "Arthur N. Borg" &lt;anborg(a)ksts.seed.net.tw&gt; Date: 1997/05/09 Message-ID: &lt;33735019.168E(a)ksts.seed.net.tw&gt; Newsgroups: comp.os.cpm You are correct up to a point. The lunch box was designed by Vadem. I did not get a full explanation from Morrow but I think that both Osborne and Morrow backed Vadem to design this machine. The earliest Morrow Pivot machines had a display of only 12 lines. I don't know if they built any 25 line models before they went under. Their manuals were written with the expectation that 25 lines would be there almost instantly. Zenith bought some additional rights from Morrow to build that machine. My boss at that time wanted to build that product in 'his' factory in Taiwan. It was built in the Heath factory in Benton Harbor. After Morrow ended, Zenith hired the fellow who had been president of Morrow to be the head of ZDS. Under his reign, He had Vadem design the computer part of the EZ-PC which was the little XT all in one that Zenith made. That computer was probably the first IBM-PC clone that did not use an Intel microprocessor. It had a NEC V-20. George Morrow wrote a column in some magazine at the time telling how clever Vadem was to get the V-20 to emulate the 8088. I still have one of these and from time to time, it will come up with a message "Illegal V-20 instruction trapped". This design caused some internal hostility. A follow on computer was designed using an 8088 and a more conventional design. That computer never was developed to production. I always felt that the EZ-PC was handicapped by the MS-DOS software that came with the machine. This was a thing called MS-DOS Manager. It was an attempt to do some of the things that Windows does but in a non graphic environment. The instruction manual was so bad that no one that I met could ever figure out how to use this program. Even Jerry Pournelle of Byte magazine was turned off by it. Best regards, Art Borg -- Doug