wyle@ethz.UUCP (Mitchell Wyle) (07/25/88)
Does anyone have any experience with the company ZEOS? Zeos International 530 5th Ave NW Suite 1000 St. Paul MN 55112 They advertise an AT clone for $1300 complete with HD, 512K 80 nSec RAM, 12 MHz 0-Wait-state, etc. Any experience (service, deliv. times, availability, etc) would be greatly appreciated. E-mail: probst@ifi.ethz.ch@relay.cs.net or probst@solaris.uucp or ...!cernvax!ethz!solaris!probst Thanks in advance, -- Mitchell F. Wyle | csnet or arpa: wyle%ifi.ethz.ch@relay.cs.net Institut fuer Informatik | uucp: wyle@ethz.uucp ETH Zentrum / SOT | Telephone: 011 41 1 256 5237 8092 Zuerich, Switzerland
pm@harry.CES.CWRU.Edu (Prabhaker Mateti) (07/27/88)
I, and a friend of mine, bought their machines. They arrived in about
14 days after we placed the order by phone. So, far (about 3 months)
we have not had any problems.
prabhaker mateti, case western reserve university, cleveland, oh 44106
{decvax,cbosgd,sun}!alpha!pm pm@alpha.cwru.edu (216) 368-2816stevel@eleazar.dartmouth.edu (Steve Ligett) (10/18/88)
I have a second-hand report on Zeos. Executive summary: they sold a
computer to my brother. It works.
My brother has a small software company. He used to do all his software
development on an IBM XT. The XT took 2 hours and 20 minutes to compile
and link his program. (It was 10% faster with a V20 instead of the 8088.)
To speed this up, he ordered a 20MHz 80286 system from Zeos. For roughly
$2600, he got
1. the 20 MHz motherboard, with 1 Megabyte of 80ns 256k rams (interleaved,
but no cache) The ram sockets have 4 rows of pins, 16 for 256k rams, and
18 for 1 mb rams! The socket holes are arranged like
o o o o o o o o o the 1 mb rams use the rows of 9 pins
o o o o o o o o the 256k use the rows of 8 pins
o o o o o o o o o other side of 1 mbs
o o o o o o o o other side of 256ks
The motherboard says "JATO" on it. The machine was running when I saw it,
so I didn't take it apart to see if there were more legends on the other
side. It had the NEAT chipset on it, and Pheonix BIOS. There was one
special slot, which might be for fast memory. The motherboard can run at
20 or 6 MHz.
2. the standard WD Hard/floppy controller. wd1003xxx, I believe.
3. a Seagate 4096 80 meg drive.
4. a 1.44 meg 2.5" floppy drive, and a 360kb 5.25" floppy drive.
5. a case and power supply. I think there's a little led display on the
front of the case.
6. a 101-key keyboard. He has no strong feelings about the touch.
7. MSDOS 3.30 from Pheonix.
(He supplied his own video - a QuadRam EGA card and monitor.)
They promised the system 3 weeks after he placed the order, and
delivered it in 4 weeks. That was no big surprise. The system arrived
in good shape; not dinged up or squashed, and all the right pieces in the
right places. The keyboard didn't work when the system arrived. Aside
from the MSDOS manuals, there was no other documentation. The hard disk
had low-level formatting done, I forget if high-level had been done. It
didn't arrive with any special software to make the full 80 megs easy to
use.
He called them up about the keyboard, and they sent out a new one by UPS
ground. And had UPS pick up the old keyboard. They also promised to send
out some technical documentation. They haven't yet - several weeks later.
The BIOS has a setup program in it. The easiest way to get into it is to
hold down a key on the keyboard while booting, causing an error. (I read
about that trick in PC Tech Journal in regard to some AST computer, ZEOS
didn't know about it...) I'm afraid that I don't remember much about the
SETUP program, except that my brother managed set up ram addressing and rom
shadowing such that the machine wouldn't boot reliably. Hey, it wasn't my
fault, just a suggestion that I made. He uses it with the extra 384kb as
extended memory now.
Compatibility - the Zeos runs MSDOS, the compilers and editor he uses,
Norton, and his program. I broke the shrink-wrap on a copy of PC-DOS 1.1,
and booted that fine. I also ran some of the programs from Paul Mace's
yucky Htest/Hformat suite. That pointed up one deficency - the wd1003
controller won't run with 1:1 interleave. The disk is formatted at 2:1, so
he gets about 250kb/second transfer rate. A couple other things I tried
worked. Nothing we've tried has failed.
Speed - well, Norton says it's twice as fast as my 10 MHz PS/2 model 50.
That sounds reasonable. His compile and link takes 18 minutes, which is as
fast as an IBM PS/2 model 70 (16 MHz, I'd guess) that he had been
borrowing. After putting some compiler temporary files on a ram disk in
extended memory, the time was down to 16 minutes.
Any questions? Mail them to me if possible. I'll answer them, and post
them w answers if it seems reasonable.
If you know who makes those neat ram sockets, drop me a line!
Steve Ligett steve.ligett@dartmouth.edu or
(decvax harvard ihnp4 linus)!dartvax!steve.ligett