As I've mentioned I recently aquired a Zenith Data Systems Z286LP Plus in a recent parts haul. After a bit of searching and a little help from VCF members I've determined it's 286/12 with one built in parrallel port, two built in com ports as well a 256k vga. The system came with 4 megs of ram on board and it would seem Zenith was one of the first OEMs to ship machines with Windows 3.0 peinstalled. The drive was an IDE 20meg conner but that was non usable. When I received this system the hdd had been removed from the system. Luckily I had a pre formatted Quantum 52 meg drive, which is set up in the bios as a type 5, laying about an was able to put the system thought it's paces by running CheckIt and a few games. Every thing checks out fine.
The Bios is accessible on start up by pressing the Esc key, not mentioned in any discusions I could find, then typing SETUP at the -> prompt and apparently you can access it by pressing the ctrl-alt-ins keys while in a dos program to do debugging using the commands in the Command summery screen. This is accessed by typing ? at the -> prompt. Typing TEST will bring up the built in hardware diagnostics tools. Ctl-alt-ins can also be used on start up. Why bother to use 3 keys though when one key press will do the same job.
Apparently Zeniths OEM hdds had been formatted slightly different most of x86 clone systems, having 1024 byte sectors instead of the normal 512 bytes, so the OEM win3.0 install had a different swap file driver. The OEM Dos that shipped with them had a couple of utilities to deal with this. There isn't really that much out there with regards to x86 Zenith systems that I could find but has been interesting looking non the less. One interesting snippet was Zenith had a flat screen crt available, the ZCM-1490 Flat Tension Mask VGA monitor, which I found very interesting. One other thing I noticed having gander at the Zenith adds I found was the over use of words innovate, innovation and innovative . On one usenet post I found the quote "Zenith: Compatability goes out before the name goes on!"
Primarily it appears Zenith targeted their systems to compete with Apple, shipping earlier versions of MS Windows (1.x and 2.x) 0n disks with all their earlier x86 systems.
Any one local who has had dealings with later 286 Zenith x86 systems?