Zenith Laptops

Donors: Brenda Taylor (Model ZWL-184-97)
Dennis Huntsman and the Idaho Falls Salvation Army (Model ZWL-1183-92)
Location: Williamsburg, VA

Like your nice clamshell laptop? Thank Zenith, as they helped establish this design with a series of laptops. These machines signal a change away from the CP/M based luggables to DOS based laptops. Nice big screens replace the little bitty screens of the luggables. Truly portable cases replace the sewing machines. 3.5 inch drives replace 5.25. And batteries come as standard equipment. Quite an advance over the days of the luggable. These laptops are XT clones, usually with 640k. Modems were available as internal add-ons.

Be sure to check out Scott Peterson's SuperSport 286 below.

Model ZWL-184-97

• Socket for an 8087 math co-processor.
• View of left side, showing phone jacks for the internal modem.
• Rear of the unit with the battery attached. Notice how the battery is shaped to allow access to the ports.
• View of right side, showing disk drive.
• Front view of the unit
• Rear of the unit
• Zenith Nameplate, Model ZWL-184-97, Serial Number 8611136901
• Rear of the unit with the battery detached. Two curved metal prongs act as a hinge with a latch on the near end securing the battery.

Model ZWL-1183-92

• Front view.
• Front view showing the pop-up floppy drive. The bay on the right holds a hard drive, which is not well.
• Side, showing where the phone jacks would be if this one had an internal modem.
• Back of the unit, with the standard PC-type ports.
• Zenith Nameplate, Model ZWL-1183-92, Serial Number 8371218014

Zenith SuperSport 286

This may not strictly fit into the museum's idea of an obsolete computer, but it is notable as one of the early "real" laptops. It uses a 20 Meg ESDI hard drive, 1.44 Meg floppy, 2400 baud internal factory modem, 640K of RAM, and has a CGA "color" LCD display. All ports are accessible via a door in the back.

As it came the hard drive had been wiped clean so I don't know what software was on it, but the keyboard layout suggests some type of word processing. Now it has DOS and WordPerfect 5.1. It doesn't have any capability to use batteries, instead needing to be plugged in via the rather large converter to the right. I have not been able to find any documentation or any way to access the CMOS, so I've avoided tinkering on it.

It's fairly light compared to contemporary machines, but heavy compared to modern notebooks. The two biggest drawbacks it has are the need to be plugged in and the "color" display that shows everything as shades of blue and really only seems able to show about 16 shades, if that many.

A rather serious design flaw is that the CGA display is built onto the power supply, so electrical interference and overheating are problems to contend with.

• Darker photo showing to effect the blue color of the screen.

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