I know this is getting 'way off topic and extended, but I have been very
interested in how pervasive the Heathkit experience is among the Elecraft
community, so I'll add my own experience with Heath.
I built an AR-15 stereo receiver while I was in the Navy, on an ammunition ship
in the South China Sea during the Vietnam war. I can't tell you what a thrill
it was to fire it up and pick up an FM station from Manila as we were heading
back into port to the Naval Station at Subic Bay.
Some years later, I built a Z-89 "all in one" computer, primarily for use as a
word processor. Its Z80 processor addressed 64K of memory (yes, K, not M). The
entire CP/M OS was 31K, and it had a BASIC interpreter. It had space to
install two 5" floppy drive units, which was a big advance, at the time, over
the RadioShack TRS-80, which used a cassette tape recorder for storage. Later,
a third party came out with a memory-based "hard drive" that replaced one of
the floppy drives, predating the recent trend toward silicon-based storage by
three decades. This served me very well as a line-oriented word processor,
using a program called WRITE ("Writer's Really Incredible Text Editor"), which
was developed by sci-fi writer and Byte magazine columnist Jerry Pournelle.
For its time, the Z-80 was The Best. Even better, in many respects, than
something called an Apple. (There was a competitor called Orange, too.)
Lew K6LMP
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