> The PC XT came out in '83, and the Heath/Zenith kit later,
> so he must have built a HeathKit EC-1 (Electronic
> Computer 1) ...
Computers like the EC-1 were for ham radio/electronics enthusiasts and the
hands-on component for correspondence electronics courses popular with people
in the US military.
In 1978, contemporary with the first Apple II and Radio Shack TRS-80 Heath
brought out two computers, the H-8 and H-11. The H-11 was an authorized clone
of a DEC PDP-11 16-bit minicomputer. Between degraded performance compared to
the DEC version, and reliability problems, it went nowhere. The H-8 used an
8-bit Intel CPU chip similar to what was in the TRS-80. All three systems
initially ran off audio cassette tape players, with floppy disk drives arriving
later. The H-8 required a computer terminal - as opposed to a TV set - for its
display.
A couple years later, Heath shrunk the computer circuitry of the H-8 onto a
single card, and fit it, with a floppy drive, into the Heath terminal case,
creating the H-89. This was the first business-class desktop computer on the
market, though it still used Heath's idiosyncratic H-DOS OS. When the more
standard CP/M operating system was ported to the H-89, an unanticipated new
market for appliance computers opened up, and Heath, started selling assembled
H-89s rather than just kits.
Zenith saw the success of the H-89, and bought the entire Heath company to get
into the computer business.
By 1981, new 16-bit CPU chips were becoming available, and the folks at Heath
introduced the H-100/Z-100 series of home computers. IBM introduced the PC at
the same time, and it swept away everything it competed with, including the
H-100.
A couple of years later, when engineering and legality issues for making PC
clones had been straightened out, Heath/Zenith introduced its own PC clones. I
built an H-148 in 1986, but it was very different from my H-8 kit. The H-8
used discrete components that I soldered. With the H-148 I assembled the
chassis, but just plugged in the circuit cards. Surface mounted components and
offshore manufacturing made the old-style electronics kit obsolete.
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