Net 2000 Plus

Zenith 180 PC Series Laptop Computers

That's a mouthful isn't it. That is the way Zenith worded the owner's manual. The Model designation is ZFL-181-93 on the I.D. tag on the computer itself. These are pretty nice machines, especially when compared to most other portables made in the same years. The copyright date of the manual is 1987. The copyright holder is Zenith Data Systems Corporation of St. Joseph Michigan.

The best feature of these computers was probably the screen. The screen is a fairly large backlit supertwist LCD unit. It has a vivid blue color and displays CGA graphics at up to 640 x 200 resolution. The computer also has a built in interface to hook up a standard RGB color monitor.

This view shows the diskette drives in their open position.

The two units I have both have two 3.5 in. 720K diskette drives. It is possible to add up to two 5.25 in 360k diskette drives and a 10 MB or 20 MB hard disk to the computer externally. That would have been quite a powerful setup in 1987.

These computers use an Intel 80C88 CMOS processor and also have provision to add an 8087 math coprocessor chip. Also worthy of note is the option to clock the machine at 8 MHz, or the slower "standard" speed of 4.77 MHz.

Rear view. A small cover protects the ports when they aren't being used.

The computer also has a parallel port, 25 pin rs 232-C serial port, external bus connector and the external floppy disk drive connector.

I think the standard equipment for these machines may vary according to when they were built. One of my machines has an internal 1200 baud modem while the other doesn't. The one without a modem also is lacking a battery, but works on a.c. The battery in the other one still works, but holds about half a charge. Both of my machines have 640K RAM. The manual states there is only 128K on the system board. It is possible there are some units that don't have 640K RAM installed.

Unlike some early portables, these computers have an internal battery rated for 3 hrs. use. The computer uses an external power supply to run off A.C. and recharge the battery.

The weight of the computer w/ 640K, two drives, modem and battery is listed as 11.8 lbs. You can add a pound or two if you bring the a.c. adapter along with you. And since there is no internal hard drive, don't forget program and data diskettes.

I got both of these machines from my good friend Terry Y. and am glad to have them. They are very nice for running most of your older MS-DOS applications. If you find one at a fair price you should consider picking it up.

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