[Elecraft] Heath kit and the Lazarus Loop

w7aqk w7aqk at cox.net
Wed Aug 10 13:52:03 EDT 2016


Lew and All,

Heath wasn't the only casualty of the tech explosion.  There were dead 
bodies all over the place!  Even Microsoft might have cratered if IBM hadn't 
failed to recognize the importance of DOS!

It's really amazing what we have seen in just 25 years or so.  I paid a 
small fortune in late '89 for a Zenith laptop, and since then, I haven't 
spent more than a fraction of that for a laptop.  We've gone from big 
floppies to no floppies--from hard drives that only held  a few MB's, to 
ones now that hold many TB's.  RAM was only a few KB's, and now it is many 
GB's, and that's just what we use at home on our desks.

It reminds me of the thought provoking comment I read some time back--it 
says something like--"You receive a birthday card--one that plays the song 
Happy Birthday" to you.  You listen to it, admire the card a while, and then 
soon casually toss it into the waste basket, thereby throwing away more 
computing power than existed in the world in 1948!!!

Dave W7AQK



From: Lewis Phelps <lew at n6lew.us>
To: "elecraft at mailman.qth.net" <elecraft at mailman.qth.net>
Subject: Re: [Elecraft] Heath kit and the Lazarus Loop
Message-ID: <40076FAD-3207-43B0-821C-61766D7BC91A at n6lew.us>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8

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 



More information about the Elecraft mailing list