My Zenith Data Systems Z-248 286 from 1986

[J.B. Langston]

Apropos of the posting about Zenith Data Systems manuals, I recently got a ZDS Z-248 system from eBay and I've been collecting photos and documentation about it here: https://github.com/jblang/retro-notes/blob/main/computers/Zenith-Z-248/README.md.

It's kind of a neat old system because it has a passive backplane, and everything is using the original Intel chipset, PALs, and discrete logic... no VLSI here! According to some Byte articles I found, it was quite fast for its time because it had zero wait states. Speaking of Byte, Jerry Pournelle of the long-running Chaos Manor column also had a Z-248 for a while, which he named Zelda after Zelda Fitzgerald (his words, not mine: F. Scott Fitzgerald's fast and sometimes flaky wife).  He writes about it a few different times in his column from 1986.