Lew and All,
Heath wasn't the only casualty of the tech explosion. There were dead
bodies all over the place! Even Microsoft might have cratered if IBM hadn't
failed to recognize the importance of DOS!
It's really amazing what we have seen in just 25 years or so. I paid a
small fortune in late '89 for a Zenith laptop, and since then, I haven't
spent more than a fraction of that for a laptop. We've gone from big
floppies to no floppies--from hard drives that only held a few MB's, to
ones now that hold many TB's. RAM was only a few KB's, and now it is many
GB's, and that's just what we use at home on our desks.
It reminds me of the thought provoking comment I read some time back--it
says something like--"You receive a birthday card--one that plays the song
Happy Birthday" to you. You listen to it, admire the card a while, and then
soon casually toss it into the waste basket, thereby throwing away more
computing power than existed in the world in 1948!!!
Dave W7AQK
From: Lewis Phelps <[email protected]>
To: "[email protected]" <[email protected]>
Subject: Re: [Elecraft] Heath kit and the Lazarus Loop
Message-ID: <[email protected]>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8
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
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