Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!clyde.concordia.ca!uunet!aplcen!samsung!cs.utexas.edu!sun-barr!newstop!sundc!sundc.East.Sun.COM!tgsmith From: tgsmith@sundc.East.Sun.COM (Tim Smith - Consultant Sun Baltimore) Newsgroups: comp.sys.zenith Subject: Zenith Z-248 Serial & Disk & Compatibility info Message-ID: <10826@sundc.East.Sun.COM> Date: 22 Dec 89 02:30:00 GMT Sender: news@sundc.East.Sun.COM Reply-To: tgsmith@sundc.East.Sun.COM (Tim Smith - Consultant Sun Baltimore) Distribution: na Organization: Sun Microsystems, Vienna, VA Lines: 80 References: Anyone out there want to answer a few questions for me? I have a good old government issue Z-248 that I am beginning to get sick of and thought I would ask around and see how other folks feel about their machines before I dump mine. I have spent a fair amount of time working with Zeniths and have always had problems with the serial hardware. I have never been able to convince myself that the serial ports were worth a damn. My favorite gripe is the COM3 boondoggle that Zenith perpetrated on the government - the machine had to have 2 serial ports so Zenith provided COM1 and LPT1 on one card and COM3 and LPT2 on another card. Sounded great except for no one I know of has ever been able to get the COM3 port to work. Of course Zenith was more than happy to sell the govt. a COM2 card for about $30.00 which seemed pretty reasonable until you got the COM2 and noticed that it had a chip count of about 2 and must have cost Zenith a whole $5.00 to make. Most of the folks I worked with when I was with the Navy just pulled the COM3/LPT2 to save real estate and BTUs. Has anyone ever been able to get COM3 to work? COM1 was no work of art either. I never could get the FOSSIL serial drivers to work nor could I get any of the SLIP packet drivers for the ka9q package to work. I also had more than one occasion when code that ran absolutely fine on the serial ports of a true blue IBM AT crashed and burned on the Z-248. One problem was so bad my former boss shipped a Z-248 to a vendor so that they could figure out what the heck was busted and fix it- I have not heard if the problem ever got fixed. Has anyone else had serial problems like this? Anyone find a way to fix them? Anyone using the new NS serial chips in a Z-248? I also had similar problems with Ethernet cards. Cards and drivers that worked fine in the old TB IBM AT were strictly crash city on the Z-248. Now for disks... I had a very nice Fujitsu 327MB SCSI disk that came with a host adaptor. Worked AOK on a true blue IBM AT. Of course on the Zenith it was cold boot time as soon as the machine woke up and saw the SCSI host adaptor. Anyone else out there using any SCSI devices on a Z-248? I would really like to get a SCSI host adaptor and a CDROM unit that I can use on my Zenith so that I can use the MS Bookshelf but I am not about to shell out a kilobuck for the drive, controller, and disk only to have the Zenith live up to its old reputation. So can anyone tell me this will work? I also had lots of fun getting my Zenith to get along nicely with a telebit tb+. I can't prove that my touble was with the Zenith as tb+'s are a bit flakey but with the Z-248's history of being "sorta AT compatible" I blamed the trouble on the Z-248. Maybe I am being a bit hard on the Z-248 but it was brought to us by those wonderful folks at Heath/Zenith who also were responsible for the WWV receiver that was "almost RS232 compatible". While I am bothering you all... Has anyone used Zenith's MS-DOS 3.3+? Is it worth the price? (I seem to recall being quoted $149.00 for it since I did not send in $49.00 upgrade offer card that Zenith supposedly sent me in March but that I, of course, never received.) Has anyone been tracking the ROM releases? I stopped wasting my time after about 4 replacements with no noticable improvements. So what do you all think? Is my Z-248 about ready to become a doorstop? Has anyone else had this much "fun" with there Z-248s. I am really beginning to think that it is time to pitch the Z-248 and hope that I have been a good enough boy this year that Santa will bring me a SPARCstationI for Xmas (or least a 386i) and I will be able to put my Zenith out of my misery as all it is good for is to run Telix so I can log into a computer that works. Any and all flames, sympathy notes, hints, RTFM's, or whatever will be appreciated. Tim Smith - Technical Consultant US mail:Sun Microsystems E-mail: 6797 Dorsey Road internet:tgsmith@east.sun.com Suite 4 uucp :sundc!tgsmith Baltimore, MD 21227 MaBell :(301)379-5000