Zenith Laptop Modding
by: dosman
9-2002
I did this a looooong time
ago. An uncle of mine gave me two of these babies. The hard drive in one died
right after I got it, and the other became this mod. It was my best computer at
the time and I used it to create most of
DOS
HeadQuarters. It's an 8088 based system made by Zenith. I don't have
any pictures of what it looked like before the paint job, it was just a yellowed
cream/white.
Additional info: It came
with ZDOS 3.3, a custom coded DOS. I don't know who made it, I could only guess
Zenith bought it off Digital Research or possibly customized it themselves. It
included some advanced tools for the time, including a hard disk surface
checker. However, it was a destructive scan, it essentially formatted the disk.
It has an internal 20MB hard drive, the floppy is a 720KB, and it has 512KB of
RAM. The hard drive interface looks proprietary, if anyone out there has some
info on it please send it to me! I've wondered if it's a custom ST-506 cable,
since that was a popular interface at the time of this things inception. I also have the
nice Zenith laptop bag and the external number pad. Since the other one died, I
also have two battery packs.
And one last thing for the
curious, no I haven't actually done anything to the internal hardware, it's
still just a basic 8088 system. But, it's certainly a stylin' 8088 system ;-)
My fancy new labels for the lights &
adjustments ;-)
Don't let that logo fool you, it's a PC
system running DOS!
A nice touch on the floppy drive I do
believe ;-)
My system didn't have the modem. I saw
one for sale once but I couldn't afford it... hehe, that was a long time ago.
On
the bottom you can see the red cover for the coprocessor socket. I also made
sure the FCC & serial number foil tags where preserved.
The back without the battery pack. The
battery bumped a lot of the paint off, oh well. And hey, the battery still
works! It holds an hour charge still, which is almost on par with my Thinkpad
T21!
