Their computer stuff was pretty decent, except they had to come up with their own bus for the H8 instead of using the then-standard S-100 bus. I was not much of a fan because I learned on a processor that was hex based, compared to the 8080's octal based instructions set. What I always wanted was the LSI-11 based machine. The H89 wasn't a bad CP/M machine, all in one design. But by that time the writing was on the wall and MSDOS was the future. This is around the time Zenith bought them, and they started selling aseembled stuff under the Zenith name, with Heath reserved for the kits. Computers it seemed were dual branded. The first DOS machine, the Z_151, was questionable, but the followup, the Z-158, is what I had as my first DOS computer. With various upgrades, it served me right up to the 386 era, and I never ever owned a 286. What kept them alive was deals with colleges and universities - we exclusively sold Heat/Zenith computers at my school, and we also had a repair shop that supported both the campus-owned equipment as well units purchased from the store. Every faculty and staff office had one, plus all the public sites were equipped with banks of them. It really was a rugged machine, heavy and solid chassis and everything was on cards - the backplane was just a passive XT bus, there was one card with the CPU and CGA, and another with memory. I think. Definitely 2 cards. Switchable 4.77MHz/8MHz operation and it was rock solid - as in you could blip the switch in the back like a Morse key and the thing would never hang or crash.
I sort of lie - I DID BRIEFLY have a 286. I forget the name of it, but a company came out with a 286 upgrade board. It plugged in to an empty card slot and had a 40 pin ribbon cable with a header on it that you plugged in place of the 8088. It was horribly unreliable, mostly seeming like issues with the 40 pin flat unshielded ribbon cable. It improved slightly with some makeshift shielding added, but in the end I just returned it and went back to my stable 8088 (actually replaced with a NEC V20).
They were very solid pieces. Since our campus network at the time was part of the phone system, with an RS232 port on th room's phone terminal, after every major electrical storm we usually had a dozen or so machine that blew the serial line drivers, we had tubes of them in stock in the shop. 99.9% of the time, swap the 1488 and 1489 and the machine was as good as new.
Problem was, you paid for that build quality. About that time, the cheap clones started appearing - first Gateway, later Dell. Friend of mien had a Gateway, one day he had an issue and had to call their support line. He got put on hold, and then comes running for me to come to his room, I had to hear something. They had no actual hold on their phones, someone just put the receiver down on a desk. In the background you could hear the cows mooing - when they say they started in half a cattle barn on the farm of the one founder's parents, they were't joking. This is the difference - he paid a lot less for his Gateway machine, but it took a month of fiddling before it finally was reliable. My Z-158 cost more, but I used it nearly 7 years completely trouble-free. We know how the general consumer market went, though.
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