Talk:Heathkit H8

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There are several errors and half-truths.

• The H-8 originally came with an 8080 processor. The H-89 was always Z-80 based. The H-8's optional Z-80 processor was actually introduced AFTER the H-89 was developed. The H-89 was NOT a re-packaged H-8; it was a Z-80 processor system whose design was intended to be software compatible to the H-8. But the application space eventually started drifting into Z-80 code, which created the demand for a Z-80-based retrofit.

• The H-8 commonly ran an operating system called HDOS, written by Heathkit and/or hired consultants (J. Gordon Letwin was the primary author, as far as I could tell from reading code and binaries at the time). CP/M was more common on the H-89, which Zenith Data Systems was, after all, selling in assembled form as a business system (and virtually all 8080-based business apps were written for CP/M).

• The front panel keyboard was originally DECIMAL (and used octal notation); the HEXADECIMAL keyboard (with a ROM BIOS change) bundled with the optional Z-80 processor board upgrade.

• The H89 was not based on the H-9, but rather the later H-19. The H-9 was only capable of upper case characters and used individual switches; the H-19 could do upper and lower case characters and some line-art glyphs and had a preassembled keyboard (with a much nicer feel). (An aside: the *nix termcap still has the H-89 as an entry, 30 years later.)

• Actually, the purchase of Heathkit by Zenith didn't kill their kit operation. It was the acquisition of Zenith Data Systems by Bull HN a few years later that closed them down.

-- Dave Wallace (wa1gsf at comcast dot net)

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New contributors are always welcome. You don't even need to log in (although there are many reasons why you might want to). Ghettoblaster (talk) 21:37, 11 February 2009 (UTC)[reply

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Actually, from the muse wiki it is clear that they are talking about the Hitachi H8 microcontroller, not the heathkit h8: "Using a microcomputer (Hitachi H8 / 3048F)" 68.109.163.112 (talk) 01:43, 16 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]