GUBBINS@TOPS20.RADC.AF.MIL (Gern) (02/03/90)
The Z-100 is a very powerful machine cabable of running five different operating systems (at least, several persons are porting MIMIX to it now as well). It is an 8085/8088 S-100 Bus system. Depending on the year made it ran the 8088 at 5 or 8MHz, with most current users running at 10MHz. The 8085 side, which runs at 5MHz, has mostly been ignored by most users. The Zenith supported OSes for the 8085 are CP/M-85 (V3?), and even HDOS. The Zenith supported OSes for the 8088 are CP/M-86, MS-DOS V1-3 (Version 1 of MS-DOS was called Z-DOS), CCP/M, MP/M (multiuser or multitasking, neither caught on). CP/M+ was available from a 3rd party. In spite of the ignorance of one poster, the Zenith Z-100 ran True MS-DOS, not the kludged version maimed to operate in the PC and clones. The Z-100 design did not put limits on MS-DOS, so if you want 768K of MS-DOS RAM, and with a S-100 RAM expansion card - 1MByte of RAM, MS-DOS was more than happy to use all of it. The Z-100, as was the Tandy 2000, and TI Professional - Superior systems in all respects to the PClones that ran MS-DOS : Better hardware, CPU speed, better graphics, easier programming. But, because of the superior features, they are not PC hardware compatible. A program written for MS-DOS (or CP/M for that matter) will operate on any system with MS-DOS (or CP/M). Programs that violate this (Like most PClone programs, all programs that use graphics, programs that directly use hardware/ports/etc will usually blow up on a system that it was not written to run on. The Z-100 can, in fact, run a lot of PClone programs directly (Norton, ARC, PKARC, MS languages, Borland languages, etc), even more with a compatibility software patch (INT 10 handler). A lot of popular software has Z-100 versions that make use of the Z-100s features (Lotus 123, Dbase, MS-MULTIPLAN, Turbo Pascal, Wordstar, Autocad, Word Perfect, etc.). There is an active net group on the Z-100 at INFO-HZ100[-REQUEST]@ TOPS20.RADC.AF.MIL I can send you boot and diagnostics disks for the Z-100 if you are desparate and I can try to dig up some spare Z-100, MS-DOS, CP/M-85 manuals. Cheers, Gern -------