20 Mar
1997
20 Mar
'97
4:57 p.m.
Captain Napalm sez:
At an auction this past Saturday, I picked up a
Zenith Z386-20 (okay, it
might, just might, be 10 years old). It looks to be a decent system, and
today is the first day I've been able to play around with it, as I had to
scrape up some 72-pin SIMMS for memory.
Wow. 72 pin? Are you certain? In any case, ISTR older Zeniths taking proprietary
memory.
Upon turning the unit on, I get (if I recall - it
doesn't stay very long
on the screen):
Bad CMOS configuration blah blah yada
yada
Then the screen goes blank and the system just sits
there, fans spinning.
How long? I mean, how long have you let it wait? If it's mis-configured on the
hard disk, it could take simply ages to time out.
I have some questions about the unit I figure I'd
through out here before
going to alt.folklore.computers.
1. It doesn't seem to even look at the keyboard.
Do Zeniths use
a proprietary keyboard, or is the POST routine not getting past
the bad CMOS?
Zeniths were, ISTR, slightly touchy about keyboards, but they didn't have to be
proprietary. Odds are something else is hanging it.
2. The computer itself has a daughter board that
contains the
ROMs, a SmartBattery (DALLAS - DS1260-100 / 9816 / 3V
Lithium battery), an Intel 8742 (Universal Peripheral Interface
8-bit Slave uController) and other neat features (the 8 LEDs
are a nice touch). The Smart battery can be removed, but I'm
wondering if it's a common item and is easily replaced.
Depends on how you define "common" and "easily," but yeah, you should
be able to
find it and replace it. They last a long time, though; I'd resolve the config
issue before replacing it.
--
Christopher D. Heer ORACLE Corporation
Network Engineer III 203 N. La Salle Avenue #2000
Work: (312) 704-1676 Chicago, IL 60601
Fax: (312) 726-4635
Email: cheer(a)us.oracle.com Visualize Whirled Peas
20 Mar
20 Mar
2:41 p.m.
It was thus said that the Great Christopher Heer once stated:
Oh, two minutes maybe. Nothing very long.
Well, keyboards aren't a problem - I have several IBM ones. They set the
standard, after all 8-)
That is, if I can get it to say something other than bad CMOS.
-spc (Sigh. Back to work)
Captain Napalm sez:
Yup. Without any SIMMS, the system just sits there producing vast amounts
of nothing quite fast. With memory installed, I get the bad CMOS error,
then vast amounts of nothing quite fast.
There are eight banks for memory. I have enough to fill two (2 4M 72 pin
SIMMS from IBM). I don't think the memory is bad. I installed the simms
starting from the wrong end the first time (hard to tell which end to start
filling from). When I started from the other end, I got the error message.
At an auction this past Saturday, I picked up a
Zenith Z386-20 (okay, it
might, just might, be 10 years old). It looks to be a decent system, and
today is the first day I've been able to play around with it, as I had to
scrape up some 72-pin SIMMS for memory.
Wow. 72 pin? Are you certain? In any case, ISTR older Zeniths taking proprietary
memory. Upon turning
the unit on, I get (if I recall - it doesn't stay very long
on the screen):
Bad CMOS configuration blah blah
yada yada
Then the screen goes blank and the system just
sits there, fans spinning.
How long? I mean, how long have you let it wait? If it's mis-configured on the
hard disk, it could take simply ages to time out. I have some
questions about the unit I figure I'd through out here before
going to alt.folklore.computers.
1. It doesn't seem to even look at the
keyboard. Do Zeniths use
a proprietary keyboard, or is the POST routine not getting past
the bad CMOS?
Zeniths were, ISTR, slightly touchy about keyboards, but they didn't have to be
proprietary. Odds are something else is hanging it. 2. The
computer itself has a daughter board that contains the
ROMs, a SmartBattery (DALLAS - DS1260-100 / 9816 / 3V
Lithium battery), an Intel 8742 (Universal Peripheral Interface
8-bit Slave uController) and other neat features (the 8 LEDs
are a nice touch). The Smart battery can be removed, but I'm
wondering if it's a common item and is easily replaced.
Depends on how you define "common" and "easily," but yeah, you should
be able to
find it and replace it. They last a long time, though; I'd resolve the config
issue before replacing it. 
2:53 p.m.
At 01:57 PM 3/20/97 -0800, you wrote:
to be
Captain Napalm sez:
proprietary
At an auction this past Saturday, I picked up a
Zenith Z386-20 (okay, it
might, just might, be 10 years old). It looks to be a decent system, and
today is the first day I've been able to play around with it, as I had to
scrape up some 72-pin SIMMS for memory.
Wow. 72 pin? Are you certain? In any
case, ISTR older Zeniths taking memory.
Well, I dunno about the rest of the world, but my geezer '286 Zenith took
standard 30-pin parity memory. I did try non-parity memory... the monitor
(over and over) just kept spitting up "Parity Error..."
I have 3Megs in 'er now, looking to go to 6 (someday)...
1. It
doesn't seem to even look at the keyboard. Do Zeniths use
a proprietary keyboard, or is the POST routine not getting past
the bad CMOS?
Zeniths were, ISTR, slightly touchy about keyboards, but they didn't have proprietary. Odds are something else is hanging it.
I got what I thought was a bad keyboard with my Z... so I put el-cheapo on
it and it works fine... Then when I tore apart my Z keyboard I found a
little switch called "XT - AT".. If you have a switchable keyboard (on my Z
there's a small removeable panel in the upper left corner [i believe...
keyboard home, me work]) double-check it's on AT.
Hope this helps!
Roger "Merch" Merchberger
--
Roger Merchberger | Everyone complained to me to change my .sig,
Programmer, NorthernWay | but no-one could recommend something better.
zmerch(a)northernway.net | So you'll have to put up with this *junk*
| until I find some new wisdom to share.
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