Donor: Anonymous
Zenith Data Systems (ZDS) was a division of Zenith founded in 1979. This laptop was used by Marna Montgomery to write minutes of school board meetings in 1998 and 1999 and was given to the college on June 11, 2007. The ZWL-0326-08 laptop contains an 80386SL microprocessor. It was built with a miniature 2.5-inch hard disk drive and contains 2M of memory. This laptop operates under either AC or battery power, and it provides approximately three hours of battery-powered computing with each rechargeable battery pack.
The laptop offers all the functions and features of a full-size keyboard. The Zenith Data Systems laptop reads data from 3.5-inch 1.4MB and 720K floppy disks on the right of the cabinet, but the machine does not include a built-in mouse; rather an external mouse is connected through a socket on the right (next to the disk drive). It outputs video information to either the built-in 640 x 480 pixel LCD display, or a VGA-type external video monitor.
This laptop also provides connectors for serial and parallel peripherals. It supports a standard serial mouse and provides an auxiliary connector for an external keyboard or pointing device.
During the late 1980s, Zenith Data Systems was the largest maker of laptops, partnering with Japanese suppliers to fill a contract for 200,000 laptops for the United States Air Force.
Reference: ZDS User's Guide.
