I think Windows 3.0 on a 8088 is a gimmick from today's standpoint. However my first Windows and PC experience was Windows 3.0 on a 10Mhz 8088 with CGA. Althought it looks slow to a 2018 person, myself included, I remember just taking that for granted as what a computer must be. It was faster than my typewriter and nobody else had a computer on our street at all. It's hard to get back to that place now but it is the honest truth. I was amazed by everything it did in 1990. It booted faster than my typewriter. It was a good enough computer to have me watching these nostalgia videos today. Maybe that's the best compliment I can give the 8088 and CGA.
25 seconds to boot in this video.... I think almost every typewriter I've ever seen is faster then that. My memory is that word processors are faster then that too. ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-eRLy4VqKGiM.html makes it look like I remember right, clocking it at about 5 seconds. What's wrong with your typewriter? :-p Good points though.
@@MontieMongoose it was slow but usable. In fact when it came out I remember calling Microsoft support because i tried to run it with a VGA card and they said it would only run at that resolution on 386 or better. That got me to upgrade. 😁 I was like 13 years old!!
A budget system, without the budget price. Apparently it was still successful enough to be sold for a couple of years, although you'd think be late eighties most PC users would be expecting a 286, a colour monitor and some kind of sound card. I worked in computer retail in the early nineties, and by that time you couldn't give away XTs anymore.
This was my first PC! My Dad bought it in 1988 (I think it was manufactured in Oct 1987) to write his diploma thesis and I got it later when he bought a new PC. It is the EZ-3 Model with the 20/21MB HDD. Haven't turned it on for a long time (I wonder if it still works...). The only issue I had with it, was the serial port. I couldn't get a mouse to work, but serial communication with another PC worked without any problems. Here in Germany I have never seen any expansion modules on ebay. Was looking for a serial/RAM expansion and a RTC. Played some games on it, wrote programs in QuickBasic 4.5 and used Norton Commander. I've always used MS-DOS 3.21D, didn't know it could run Windows 3.
There used to be a BBS hosted by ZDS called ZUG/ HUG (Zenith users group / Heath users group) and they had a section for selling off discounted surplus items. I recall seeing boxes of these in the warehouse, but knew very little about them. Zenith made a well engineered product, but their sales staff overlooked the home consumer market in favor of large volume sales to the federal government and major corporations.
I saw one of these new in box at a local computer reseller a few years ago. I think they wanted $80, but I couldn't even justify buying it at that price!
Paperwhite greyscale is surely better than amber or green (or orange plasma), though? We used to play a few games on the monochrome laptops that our parents brought home, with black and white (or navyblue on weird greyish off-white in one case) and they worked well enough. Doing similar with a tinted mono display would have looked much weirder, even though that would have been rather more comfortable for text editing and using Windows in B/W...
I actually owned one of these pieces of crap. It had two 720K floppy drives.. and NO HARD DRIVE... it solely worked off 720K floppy disks. Very slow, crappy graphics and display. I got it in 1989 (I believe) One of the first IBM compatible computers I owned. Couldn't even support 1.44MB disks. It played some games with disk swapping, had MS-DOS on it, and I did some programming on it. It works better as a boat anchor than a useable computer :)
@@Caseytify My first computer was a TRS 80 colour computer 2 when I actually wanted to Commodore 64. I have used those older crappy computers when I was in high school but the Zenith was the second computer that I got for Christmas.
*You're *I'm Apparently you have anger issues or are just possessed by the devil. Now, I have better things to do than to talk to a 5 year old on the internet. Have a great life and try not to let your anger rule over you.
9:41 That ridiculously bulky hump, screwed on the outside of the computer case, just for housing a measly 128K RAM expansion is such a terrible design... And yet, it's what's makes a video like this worth watching.
It was amazing how much those old computers could accomplish with such little memory. The one in this video looks similar to the first PC I had in the early 90s That was about nine computers ago. The desktop I have now is super light. I found it discarded with a missing hard drive. I installed a 500 GB sata. When I found it, it was so light I thought it was an empty case When I opened it I was surprised to see all the works inside had been compressed to about the size two thick paperback books. 64-bit system with a dual-core processor and 4 GB of DDR3. It's still has a few problems but I'm working on it.
I remember looking through the Damark catalogs, and if memory serves, almost everything they sold was refurbished or reconditioned. I don't ever remember seeing this computer, though. That keyboard was made by Alps and bundled with some other Zenith computers offered earlier in the 1980s. The monitor has an excellent display, but monochrome seems like the wrong choice for any home computer from the late 80s. I'd be very surprised if a color model hadn't been considered. At half the price and with a color display, maybe it would have done better. Around these parts, XT-class systems held on surprisingly well into the early 1990s, as did their competition (such as the Apple II and Commodore 64). Didn't the box mention an RTC being included?
The box lists the real-time clock as an option. The monochrome CRT may have been intended to help Zenith use up remaining stock of black & white TV picture tubes.
+Flac Or Gtfo Was standard for quite a while though. XP ran fine on 512mb for most of it's realistic life span and Windows 7-10 runs great on 4GB to this day.
I remember getting the Damark catalog back in the 80's or 90's. I eventually bought a Packard Bell pc. Lot of learning on that pc and that was fun times.
I bought this computer in 1988 or 89 from Montgomery Wards. It lasted me many years and I learned DOS on it. I had 512 MB ram and upgraded to 640K with the 1200 baud modem attachment. It was also the first computer I used to access Prodigy through which I did online banking in 1990. Thanks for the memories.
That's a pretty neat, if lackluster PC. I thought at first that the ugly box on the back might be the power supply! That thing was pretty smashed up in shipping; props to you for getting it back together so well. What kind of hard drive was originally in it?
The keyboards of these things are worth more than the entire unit, so it's a shame they'll probably throw away everything else, including the CRTs, which are starting to become more and more rare outside the US.
My first real computer was a Zenith laptop from nearly the same time period, with grayscale CGA screen, 20MB hard drive, MS-DOS 3.21 and Microsoft Works for DOS. Virtually identical in experience to this. Brings back some memories.
I had such keyboard and it was wonderful for Mortal Kombat two players mode, because it was allowing to press even twelve or more keys at the same time. :) Modern keyboards cannot do this.
+Michał Górka My Sidewinder X4 USB keyboard can have all buttons pressed at the same time without any issues! Most "gaming" keyboards can do this but the markup price for them is ridiculous. Not everyone cares about stupid lights.
That is a good keyboard then. :) Congratulations. If I want to play Mortal Kombat 4 with my sister i just plugging two keyboards at the same time and it works good. :)
The Hard disk results are particularly interesting to compare them to modern mechanical hard disks ... 73ms for this, when a WD black HD today can do around 8-10ms. The capacity also has skyrocketed of course. Impressive improvements in technology when you think about it :)
The WD93028 was actually a Tandon design. In the late '80s Western Digital bought out Tandon and carried over their old drives until they could start designing their own new hard drives -- the Caviar series, which were a massive improvement in performance and reliability.
A pleasant little system, and a nice addition to the Zenith collector. Alas, I don't have the money or the space to get one these days. The styling reminds me of the Zenith Z-148 pizza box. I have one with 1 360k floppy and a 40Mb hard drive. It has a physical turbo switch on the front to swap between 4.77Mz & 8Mz. And, yes, those old Zenith keyboards are nice. I have one XT model F style, and one AT model F (84 key) style. In fact the XT layout is very close to the AT model F layout. Much better than the original PC/XT layout. That double scan monitor is very nice for a text monitor.
Thanks for the review. I had this EaZy PC with the dual drives as my first computer in 1995. I wish I knew more about PCs back then, it would have made my 8 year old life a lot easier if I installed windows 3.0! Having to learn DOS (or whatever it was) at a young age wasnt so bad I guess. Thanks again for the memories!
I remember the Damark catalog. If they got you on their mailing list you'd get those things forever it seemed. Plus they used to buy up big sections of advertising in magazines to put mini versions of the catalog in all sorts of publications. They generally sold low-quality stuff, but as a lover of electronics I always looked through them to see what they had ;-)
My very first PC. I got mine in Sept 1987 and I still have it today, much to the chagrin of everyone in my family! Great for playing games that were programmed to run off the processor rather than the RTC.
Excellent video as always! That stinks about that eBay seller, but this was still a great find. I've looked for Leading Edge computers on eBay; they also made IBM clones, and they sponsored some episodes of The Computer Chronicles. I haven't had any luck, though. The company was based in the Boston area, so people back there probably have an easier time finding one of their computers.
@@vwestlife my first computer was a Packard bell. I don't have it anymore but I kind of miss it. It was one of those desktop pizza box style computers. When it was new it had windows 3.11 even though windows 95 had come out 6 months prior to that. People crap on Packard bell but I never had any problems with mine. It was a Packard bell legend.
I used to have one. I got the piggyback modem/128k memory module. My Dad got if fr me in 1988 from Mont. Wards. Mine had 2x3.5 floppy drives and MS-DOS 3.20 and GW Basic. I used to connect to Prodigy back then. Before this one, i had a 1983 TI-99/4A home computer.
I find it interesting that despite that expansion box not being the version with the modem in it, it's still labeled with the FCC Part 68 compliance notice, ringer equivalence, etc. as if it did have the modem...
To fix the rest of the cracks on the case you could try Elmer's Wood Filler. I used it to fix my dropped Chromebook 😀. The Wood Filler sounds strange but actually it works very nice in my opinion 😀. The keyboard is very nice 😀. It looks like a Model M 😀. I have a Unicomp Model M which is very nice to type on even though I'm not a great typist but I do type better with it 😀. Nice reviews as always 😀.
I restored one of these, Model 1 though and European in my temporary work as "Computer guy" for a recycling center. While the boss did not believe in retro computing after getting right 720k disks written for the zenith and booting stuff like space invaders clone and alley cat in CGA mode the system was sold to some retro computing enthusiast extremely quickly, and I was proud about handling stuff like opening the system getting it dusted and everything. That black and white/grey monochrome monitor made most CGA games it could run look better in my opinion, like high grade gameboy games. It was a real fun system to learn about hard drive free life of a IBM clone. While bosses or "the boss" did not like me playing around with "retro toys" a lot, to me I think it was fair nice deal. I got to play around with a retro tech just about as long as I wanted to, along troubleshooting it up to even grabbing soldering iron etc. I restored/Tested Commodore amigas to IBM AT's and PS/2's and I got really offended when boss said "we do not do personal 'for me' projects on work time" since I had only interest in playing around; not owning any of these PC's - I had no space nor time, and he clearly did not appreciate the prices these things potentially brought in and how fast too - Retro in the place sold much better even if it was priced high than any of their "usable modern" laptops or desktops that took weeks or months to sell... Oh well, salt and fondness both in my memories for this type of job, which sadly is temporary in nature.
Thanks for this trip down memory lane. $1600 brand new! Wow! Commodore 64s were about $600 brand new bare bones; no drives or modem just the bread box. I bought my first 486 DX 33mhz with SVGA monitor for $1200 in '94.
I wonder if the increasing repeat rate would be considered an unfair advantage for certain games, yet a nuisance for others. At least it can be toggled on and off (though sometimes not without ending your game!) The monochrome CGA is really rare, at least in the paper white variety. I'm surprised bricks ran on it that well. Would be kind of funny to program in BASIC on that machine, even to the point of writing a program that would display text with various "colors" on the screen, then copying it to a floppy and bringing it to a friend's house, and seeing it in color, finding out those weren't the colors you were expecting.
The grayscales go in linear order from dim to bright, which don't necessarily match up with which colors are brighter than others. In some programs this causes odd effects such as when text that is supposed to be highlighted actually appears dimmer than the rest of the text!
I hope I will be the owner of one of these come next Wednesday. There's one at a local shop that I negotiated for $150 and it comes with a keyboard and mouse as well. I dearly hope it works as I can't seem to get a working 80s PC to save my life.
I watched this video bunches of times and tonight when you were showing off the box and the back of the monitor I just noticed that the address was St. Joesph, Michigan which is interesting because it’s in my home area of Michiana. After doing some research I found out that Zenith Data Systems was based in St. Joesph/Benton Harbor, Michigan which is pretty cool.
I grew up with one of these as a kid in the late 80s / early 90s. Learned to program on it, took it apart.. Got me into computers and I miss mine dearly. Would give bits of my reproductive anatomy to get my hands on another one.
I'm actually looking to sell my EaZy PC at a reasonable price. Contact me via the "for business inquiries" e-mail link on the About page of my RU-vid channel if you're interested.
Nice, a brand-new Z-150 keyboard! Normally these came with a black metal ZDS badge and they often had green Alps instead which are highly rated. I haven't tried yellow Alps though; if you want tot sell the keyboard let me know :) .
I think your computer reviews are getting better and better as time goes on, they just seem more professional and informative. As for the PC itself, I really don't think having the monitor permanently attached to the case was a good design choice at all, can you rotate or tilt the monitor? You say this computer was expensive considering its specifications, how does it compare in terms of price to, say, the Tandy 1000 SL? If the monitor and the system unit weren't bonded together like that, the plastic may not have suffered that bad damage.
Yes, the monitor does have a tilt/swivel base. The Tandy 1000SL originally cost $899, plus the monitor (ranging from $129 for a monochrome monitor to $399 for a hi-res color CGA monitor).
thanks for some information i recently found one of these in the wild. mine is the 2nd modle (dual 720k flopy drives 512kb ram). unfortunately i didnt get the keyboard for it however i got the box with it too. its unfortunate thats yours got smashed like it did but im glade you fixed it and got it running again
Do you know anything about the "IBM PC Radio"? Saw it on eBay fairly recently, and despite being an IBM fan/collector I'd never heard of that laptop before ;) (in the middle of restoring a 765D and a PS/Note 386)
If you turn off the key click and then later turn off the PC, will the status of the key click setting be remembered between sessions, or will the key click default to on each time the computer is turned on and the keyboard gets power? When did Zenith Data Systems stop making PCs?
The key click defaults to on every time the computer is turned on. Zenith Data Systems was bought out by Groupe Bull and stopped making PCs around 1996 - 1997.
I think the problem with the floppy drive is leaky capacitors. The floppy in my IBM P70 died because of them leaking all over the board, so i removed them, cleaned the board and fitted new. Good for next 25 years in service.
Definitely. The best trick for any item like that is to use a lot of bubble wrap. I sometimes sell vinyl records online and have a habit of using a lot of it.
Since pins are missing from the serial port, do you know if it would work with external speech synthesisers like the Artec Transport or DECTalk or DoubleTalk or others?
+Skawo But it wasn't very powerful even for the era as there were computers in the same price range that were much more powerful such as the Amiga 500 and Atari ST.
6 year old review/test of a PC that was regarded as unacceptable, very nicely done! When I saw the Windows 3.0 screen it reminded me of my Windows 1.0 on a monochrome PC AT clone with a Hercules graphics card, trying to run PageMaker... 🤣😂 oh what a time!
Greetings. Even though I know you've since sold your EaZy PC I'm wondering if you played around with changing out the XT-IDE drive with a different model or even trying newer SD-IDE adapters. I'm about to open mine to see if I can add a drive replacement solution for my -2. Thanks in advance. Your XT-IDE video is fabulous BTW.
I wasn't a computer owner then so none of this makes any sense to me, I went with an Amiga 1200 in 92 the an Amiga 2000, I didn't even touch a PC until 1997 so this time period of PC is unknown for me Its kinda strange and interesting to me
I was wondering about two things, the bonding of the plastics and the 720k floppies. I have a desktop tower which has its front fascia loosely in place because the plastic tabs are broken. I wondered if the MEK can bond the plastic tabs onto the fascia itself. Secondly, I have a 286 which has a 720k floppy drive, but in my stack, I only have four 720k floppy disks, and it was filled with Lotus 1-2-3. I wondered if it is actually possible to convert a usual 1.44MB High density to a 720k floppy, since formatting it doesn't really work.
In order to format a 1.44 MB disk to 720K you need to cover the hole opposite of the write protect hole with black tape. That is the "media sense" hole which tells the drive you're using a 1.44 MB disk.
I was given an XT clone when I was 5 years old (in the mid 90s) that I never really used for anything because the only program I got with it was WordStar. No printer either.
This reminds me of the first PC's we had in a telco, pretty much all company computing needs was handled by a mainframe or two, with a few mini's to flesh it out. These first PC's were used as serial terminals only. Very similar specs to this one, the main difference being no hard drive and the floppy drive not being user accessible. They had some terminal software on a floppy that booted on power on, and that's all they did. You may wonder why?, well this setup was way cheaper than 'proper' serial terminals of the time. I went looking on ebay, yes there is one, $679.99 US, (in 2023) but over a thousand dollars landed in my country, so that can just stay where it is. I wouldn't mind one, but there's no way I'm forking out that much.
This was my first computer…. It helped me through high school with writing essays and putting together charts for science class…. But the thing was garbage for playing games… also , I could expand it with the goodie pc hardware ( joysticks, sound cards, video cards) that were becoming popular in this era
Shame about the plastic case during shipping, though at least you were able to fix it somewhat. Not perfect. I'd say it gives it a little character. On the flip side, I've an 8088 system with an all metal case. Talk about hefty!
A good Epoxy Plastic Welder will do quiet well in bringing broken plastic that is resistant to most glues together.. I use it often with repairing old Transformers with great success where other Epoxies or Glues wouldn't hold or be to brittle..
Ah, my first computer (and only pre-built unless you count the laptops I've owned). I believe the original HD was a Conner Technologies hard drive (at least that's what mine was equipped with). The NEC V40 CPU was pretty good - it did allow some 286 software to be run it that actually won't run on an IBM or clone 808x based system. But for sure there was some incompatibilities (once in a while I'd hit a program that would set off an V20 opcode miss-match error). The mouse port is just a stripped down com port, and yes one can use a modem on it (COM port 2) - believe the issue your experiencing is the line detect is missing and does require some work around else the modem would disconnect because of the missing line detect pin. I ran a Supra 2400 then a Hayes based 9600 baud modem on it with out issue (once I figured out how to work around that little issue). Never found an accessory that would allow one to use standard ISA cards though - I'd be a little hesitant on trying anything. The keyboard was very nice to type on, and there is a way to turn off the clicker (I don't remember how off hand - been waaaaaaay too long ago). For an all in one, it wasn't a bad system for the day... It just wasn't good either (too quirky and very limited expansion option as you put it).
