On Wednesday 26 December 2007 00:20, Barry Watzman wrote:
The H-120 was a generic designation for the
"all-in-one" version of the
Heathkit / Zenith Data Systems Z-100 series of personal computers (actual
units had a slightly different model number depending on their
configuration). It was a dual processor system, 8085 and 8088, could run
both CP/M and MS-DOS (but it was not PC compatible at the hardware level).
It had a large motherboard that included a 5-slot S-100 expansion backplane
at the rear. The system was available both in kit form and assembled, the
assembled models carried Zenith Data Systems rather than Heathkit labels
but were identical. The kit was mostly pre-assembled, only the floppy disk
controller and video monitor deflection boards were actually build by the
buyer, otherwise the kit was just a final assembly task of factory
assembled & tested boards.
The system had a floppy disk controller that could support both 8" and 5"
drives simultaneously (I think four 8" and three 5" drives). A hard drive
controller was also offered that could support two MFM hard drives.
Video came from a dedicated video board that was, for it's time, quite
sophisticated (the PC had nothing better until the EGA cards came out). It
was pure bit-mapped color graphics, 640x225 resolution.
Thinking back on that stuff, wasn't it one of those machines that used some
rather odd memory parts for either the main RAM or the video? The ones I'm
thinking of were half the normal capacity, presumably chips that failed on
one side or the other but still had half a chip usable. I'm vaguely
recalling something about how you had to match the ones you had so that they
were all responding to the same addresses, either "upper" or "lower",
something like that.
--
Member of the toughest, meanest, deadliest, most unrelenting -- and
ablest -- form of life in this section of space, ?a critter that can
be killed but can't be tamed. ?--Robert A. Heinlein, "The Puppet Masters"
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Information is more dangerous than cannon to a society ruled by lies. --James
M Dakin