Pete wrote:
> Well, OK, here it is: The mother board is a card that
> plugs into a slot board fixed to the bottom of the
> zenith's case. The slot board has eight slots on it, three
> of them are system slots, meaning you can't plug in ISA
> cards in to them.
Ah, OK. That is not a mother board. A mother board is a
combination board with CPU etc where periferals also plug
into, such as we are used to in PC compatibles. What you
call a "slot board" is what is corectly called a
backplane. (Just for the sake of communication) <g>
Personally, I thing the backplane design is a better one
than that silly mother board thingy which has become so
popular. I think the only reason we have them is because
IBM started with that in order to make a cheap intergrated
computer for personal use. (Anyone else have any comments
on this?)
<snip>
> then three system slots, mother board, then vidio board
> then flopy controller board. The cards have to remain in
> this order. The mother board has the keyboard plug on it
> and the case has a hole in it for the keyboard plug.
I have two of these units and some extra cards, but it is
a couple of years since I played with them. I didn't
realize that the three system slots were different.
Luckily (as you mention) the CPU card won't fit in the
others anyway.
<snip>
> When I try to boot the zenith I get a line or two of
> characters across the midle of the screen, and that's it.
> I may need a setup disk for it or some thing, I don't
I don't recall needing a setup disk but maby it would have
been useful. If I remember correctly, I just booted it
normally. There were some problems though, that is why I
abandoned them for the time being. I do think they're cool
machines though, that is why I still have them sitting
around.
> know. I have a plus hardcard 40 I can put in it. It is a
> 40 MB hard drive built on an 8 bit ISA card. Also I would
Those are really useful. Just plug them in and away you
go. I'm not sure how it works, but I just plugged one into
my "new" 486 tester and it showed up as drive C and D (it
has a small partition). Then, I installed a regular HDD as
the C drive, and by golly ..... the hard card shows up as
D and E. No fussing about. It's great!
> like to add memory to it if I ever get it working, now it
> has 640 K ram. and two 360 K flopys and uses an AMD 8088
> CPU. I would also like to plugin an 8087 math co
> processor. I am not sure what I can do about the drives
> yet, I geus when I accumulate more parts I can try adding
> a 3.5 inch flopy.
Hmmm, I don't think the bios will support anything other
than double density. Those 720K drives are not all that
useful IMHO, but it does help in transfering files. For
anything more than a few files I normally just use an
interlink cable for that though.
Cheers,
Ole Juul
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