Zenith 248 SX

The Zenith 248 was a desktop computer with two 5¼ inch floppy drives and no hard drive, released in 1986. It came with Windows operating system on floppies. It was manufactured by Zenith Data Systems. This model was delivered to all incoming cadets at West Point, NY in 1986 for the class of 1990 along with the other service academies.

The 248 continued to be produced thru 1990, it contained a passive backplane containing only a small number of diodes. Daughter cards include a CPU board and an I/O board for parallel port, serial port and disk IO ports. The systems commonly were purchased with Seagate 20MB MFM or Hitachi 40MB MFM hard disk (the Hitachi design included an external mounted CAM, one of very hard disks for microcomputer ever design with external moving parts) and contained 1 MB of RAM. Upgrades were available by adding additional daughter cards for an addition 1MB of RAM. Early programs includes Enable AO, Word Perfect and Harvard Graphics. 1MB memory upgrades were required to support advanced printing, such as using Sideways to print spreadsheets in landscape.

Common in the U.S. Navy 1989-1990 in part due to a design that allowed for easy repairs by stocking FRUs, field replaceable units of CPU and IO boards. The Navy also used a portable depot level repair machines called a VU-DATA. Using a LCD, the VU DATA instructed the operator to test high and low pins throughout a CPU or IO board then prompted to replace ICs to repair daughter boards. Spinrite was commonly used at this time to repair hard disks. The Seagate hard disks also had field replaceable circuit boards making the Zenith 248 a supportable system when deployed at sea.