Heathkit was at the forefront of the personal computer revolution. Their H-8 was one of the earliest 8-bit computers, and the H-89 one of the first Z-80 machines, as well as being the first “all in one” computer that combined the keyboard, monitor, and processor into a single enclosure. I used an H-89 as a word processor for a number of years, upgrading it with aftermarket products (which were plentiful) to the first-ever silicon drive, in lieu of a 5 inch floppy. It didn’t have “permanent” memory, so you had to copy files a a floppy before shutting down, but it sure accelerated the word processing speed. The Z-80 (an enhanced 8080 chip made by Zilog) addressed 64K of memory, and the operating system (CP/M) used about 39K, which didn’t leave much space for the word processing app and the document file. There was a lot of swapping of chunks of instruction in and out of memory.
They didn’t keep up with the advances in technology forever, but I think that was due more to a lack of capital than a lack of focus. Their 16-bit machines never caught on in the face of the IBM PC onslaught. Lew N6LEW > On Aug 8, 2016, at 12:47 PM, Dauer, Edward <[email protected]> wrote: > > It may be that Heath’s demise came less from a lack of entrepreneurship than > from a lack of focus on the market where it had mastered its route to > success. The introduction of personal computers at around the same time > probably played a role as well. Lew Phelps N6LEW Pasadena, CA DM04wd Elecraft K3-10 / KXV144 / XV432 Yaesu FT-7800 [email protected] www.n6lew.us Generalized Law of Entropy: Sooner or later, everything that has been put together will fall apart. ______________________________________________________________ Elecraft mailing list Home: http://mailman.qth.net/mailman/listinfo/elecraft Help: http://mailman.qth.net/mmfaq.htm Post: mailto:[email protected] This list hosted by: http://www.qsl.net Please help support this email list: http://www.qsl.net/donate.html Message delivered to [email protected]
