[Elecraft] Heath kit and the Lazarus Loop

[Lewis Phelps]

Heathkit was at the forefront of the personal computer revolution.  Their H-8 was one of the earliest 8-bit computers, and the H-89 one of the first Z-80 machines, as well as being the first “all in one” computer that combined the keyboard, monitor, and processor into a single enclosure.  I used an H-89 as a word processor for a number of years, upgrading it with aftermarket products (which were plentiful) to the first-ever silicon drive, in lieu of a 5 inch floppy. It didn’t have “permanent” memory, so you had to copy files a a floppy before shutting down, but it sure accelerated the word processing speed.  The Z-80 (an enhanced 8080 chip made by Zilog) addressed 64K of memory, and the operating system (CP/M) used about 39K, which didn’t leave much space for the word processing app and the document file.  There was a lot of swapping of chunks of instruction in and out of memory.  

They didn’t keep up with the advances in technology forever, but I think that was due more to a lack of capital than a lack of focus. Their 16-bit machines never caught on in the face of the IBM PC onslaught.

Lew N6LEW



> On Aug 8, 2016, at 12:47 PM, Dauer, Edward <edauer at law.du.edu> wrote:
> 
> It may be that Heath’s demise came less from a lack of entrepreneurship than from a lack of focus on the market where it had mastered its route to success.  The introduction of personal computers at around the same time probably played a role as well. 

Lew Phelps N6LEW
Pasadena, CA DM04wd
Elecraft K3-10 / KXV144 / XV432
Yaesu FT-7800 
Lew at N6LEW.US
www.n6lew.us

Generalized Law of Entropy: Sooner or later, everything that has been put together will fall apart.