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Zenith Z-171 schematics

T

Twospruces

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Joined
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...have been found and are available as scans! In fact the entire Tech reference manual was found, but it is many pages.
 
PDF is too large for the forum @3+MB. If there is a good place to store this so it can be accessible please make a suggestion. Thanks
 
I store my scanned docs and disk images on mediafire.

You can choose to share your files with a link you can publish to say........ here!

It's free too with a reasonable limit on total storage. Of course going over that limit will require a fee.
 
Twospruces said:
If there is a good place to store this so it can be accessible please make a suggestion. Thanks
Click to expand...

I store my docs and disk images files on mediafire.

You can share files and folders to the public with a link you can publish to places like ...... here!

It's free with a reasonable limit on total storage. After that you will be charged a fee.
 
Please put them onto any cloud service so I can add them into my extensive collection. on amaus.net mirror is amaus.org

Unfortunately I am travelling for a few weeks, but place a link here and I'll immediately grab them for future placing onto the website.

Due to being constantly overloaded by *****oles who are trying to continuously download the entire website, access to anything now requires frequent refresh at your browser end.
However eventually it will go somewhere like this

https://amaus.org/static/S100/HeathZenith/schematic/

So again, place them on a cloud service and give me the URL here and I will download for immortalisation on the website.


regards mb.
 
Twospruces said:
PDF is too large for the forum @3+MB. If there is a good place to store this so it can be accessible please make a suggestion. Thanks
Click to expand...


Mediafire is quite popular, but I hope more people start putting old documentation like this on archive.org. Make an account and you can upload for free, people can download for free, and their business model doesn't rely on trying to convince people to upgrade to premium. Also, other mediafire-type sites have been popular in the past and then gone down or they've deleted the file after a period of inactivity. Archive.org will probably be around for a long time, and when it disappears, its data will live on via mirroring for --- I'm guessing here --- roughly the rest of humanity's existence. :)
 
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hackerb9 said:
Archive.org will probably be around for a long time, and when it disappears, its data will live on via mirroring for --- I'm guessing here --- roughly the rest of humanity's existence. :)
Click to expand...

Please tell me WHERE ANYONE mirrors ALL of archive.org other than the barely sustainable Internet Archive?

it is currently 60 PETA bytes and Brewster has no interest in anyone else mirroring his precious
 
Also, they actually DON'T promise to preserve everything that you sent them.
They HAVE and will continue to loose files.
 
Hi Al,

You clearly have more experience than I do. I've never had anything deleted from archive.org. What was it you lost and did they explain why (like a DMCA claim)?

When I say that archive.org will live on in the future as mirrors, I am not saying we have an exact duplicate now. But, 60 petabytes? Were you around when Simtel was a massive archive, probably over a thousand megabytes? It was crazy huge at the time, but laughable now. There is no reason to think that petabyte storage isn't coming to mainstream computers.

As for the chair of the board not wanting archive.org mirrored, my impression was it has grown beyond the whims of one person. I could be wrong, but I've never seen anything on archive.org that says to not mirror it. I hit it regularly with wget to download stuff I want and have never been throttled, much less blocked. If archive.org had such a bizarre "it's okay for me to copy you, but not you to copy me" mentality, then why would so many libraries and foundations partner with them?

Of course, please correct me if I'm wrong, but even if I am, archive.org still seems worthwhile. It has proven more stable than megaupload-type sites and it has archives that are indexed and discoverable.

I do think amaus.org would be even better, as the website will then get indexed by Google and eventually backed up by Alexa and Archive.org. However, twospruces cannot upload the file directly there, so we're back to why not just use archive.org for the upload?
 
Twospruces said:
...have been found and are available as scans! In fact the entire Tech reference manual was found, but it is many pages.
Click to expand...

Update.. the schematics (only) have been posted at minuszero, and I think that's a great solution!

The entire manual was not scanned.
 
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Too bad about not having the entire manual, but the schematics should be useful. Thank you for uploading them, Twospruces. What's the URL for downloading?
 
This is great! Thanks for taking the time to upload the schematics, Twospruces. I'll be poking around in my Z-171 tonight!

Is there any chance you could run the pdf through an OCR program? There's not much text, and some of it is handwritten, but even a crummy OCR could be useful for tracking down a part on the sprawling map.

By the way, Minus Zero looks like a good place to host it: GoogleBot friendly, backed up on archive.org, plenty fast connection.
 
I dont have the originals, sorry. The source of the file is from a nice guy who dug it out of storage for me, and scanned the schematic only. I think the schematics is about all, at least for now.

I was able to finish my 1MB SRAM card last night so the schematic, even with the odd error, is a huge help.
 
Twospruces said:
I dont have the originals, sorry. The source of the file is from a nice guy who dug it out of storage for me, and scanned the schematic only. I think the schematics is about all, at least for now.

I was able to finish my 1MB SRAM card last night so the schematic, even with the odd error, is a huge help.
Click to expand...

That sounds like an intriguing project. Are you talking about the non-volatile RAM that was used to store settings for the builtin applications ("world clock", "calculator", etc.)? Are you expanding it to use it for something else (like a bootable RAM drive?) I didn't know that was possible. ☻
 
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hackerb9 said:
That sounds like an intriguing project. Are you talking about the non-volatile RAM that was used to store settings for the builtin applications ("world clock", "calculator", etc.)? Are you expanding it to use it for something else (like a bootable RAM drive?) I didn't know that was possible. ☻
Click to expand...

My Z-171 started life as a stock 640K (DRAM) machine with two 5.25 Floppies, but no Video card and no Modem. I have no plans to add that hardware into my unit, either.

In total, here are the changes I have made.
1) created a custom XT-CF card (thanks to Mr. Pearce), which adds the ability to use a compact flash card as an HDD. I currently have a 1GB drive with 3 partitions C: D: E:
2) removed the 640K Dynamic RAM card that is standard issue, and replaced it with a custom 1MB Static RAM card, which provides all of the base ram to 640kB, adds additional ram from A0000-B0000 (raising the DOS RAM to 704kB), and adds UMBs from CC000 to F0000 (usable to load high using USE!UMBS and DOSMAX)
3) added an 8087 co-processor card (actually a card that plugs into the 80C88 socket, and provides both 80C88 and 8087)
4) swapped out a 5.25 360kB drive for a 720kB 3.5 inch drive
5) and for fun I added an "HDD Activity" LED.

The original non-volatile static RAM is still there; I left it alone even though my 1MB card had the ability to replace it. My SRAM card simply ignores that memory space.

The XT-CF card is of a quality that I would be comfortable making available. It plugs into the expansion socket. I had to patch the XUB firmware to solve a few problems, and I would be happy to provide both the working binary I use of course, but also the patch codes applied to XUB source.

As it stands now, the SRAM card and the 8087 card are very much prototypes, and not of a quality ready to share. More of a proof of concept using PCBs I had on hand, hacked to do what I needed. I may lay out a real board at some point.

My Z-171 has come a long way. I'm now running MS-DOS 6.22, have Windows 2.1 installed, I have added a serial mouse, installed Turbo-C, Turbo Pascal, Lotus 1-2-3, PCMATLAB and various other applications.

Final thoughts...
If I were to eliminate the other 5.25 Floppy, I think the entire machine could be made to run on +5V. Why this is interesting is that the battery solution could be essentially a modern LiNbO3 power pack, USB chargeable... as opposed to a big heavy Ni-Cd pack.
In a stretch I had an idea that I could also speed up the machine. But, reading about this in some detail it seems the DMA controller 8237 is really unable to run faster than 5MHz. So such a change might be a step too far.
 
Twospruces said:
If I were to eliminate the other 5.25 Floppy, I think the entire machine could be made to run on +5V. Why this is interesting is that the battery solution could be essentially a modern LiNbO3 power pack, USB chargeable... as opposed to a big heavy Ni-Cd pack.
Click to expand...

For serial ports to work reliably you probably still need a source of +12/-12v. Granted you could probably provide that with a very low-current boost converter.
 
yah I probably missed that. If there is anything hanging off of +12V then I won't bother with that change. I don't want to use NiCd, but then again I don't really need battery operation at all! I didn't think there was -12V. Now I am curious..
 
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