Zenith 100 Home Computer

Zenith Data Systems was founded in 1979 by Zenith Electronics Corporation, after acquiring Heathkit. The system runs both CPM and MS DOS, but was not yet the "PC compatible" machine.

The Zenith 100 Home Computer was developed in 1981 and the later, improved, the 100 uses a Z-80 processor chip and a 8088 chip. Introduced in 1979, it was bought out in late 1989 as Zenith exited the micro-computer market. This example was donated by Bob DiPippo of West Warwick, Rhode Island. Software includes the word processors Spellbinder from Lexisoft, Inc., and WordStar; the spreadsheet program Supercalc; Microsoft BASIC; and games, including Adventure and Zork.

Bob DiPippo's Story

The Zenith Z-100 computer was used in my early days of programming. I have written many programs in the Basic and Turbo Pascal language. It was also capable of running many other computer languages. Forth, Cobol, Fortran, etc. I also used the Z-100 for my electronic business, DiPippo’s Electronics. The Z-100 had served me well and I am glad that is now in a new home. The Z-100, as can be seen by the demo disk had better graphics than any other computer of the vintage. It is too bad that many were tattooed IBM when the Z-100 was a more superior computer. The Z-100 was the first PC to offer a dual processor for both 8 bit and 16 bit computing. It is capable of running both CPM85, CPM86, ZDOS, and MSDOS. It was not totally IBM compatible but you could run many programs such as Lotus 123, WordStar, Dbase II, etc.  Too many forget about the history of computer when knowing the history will bring to light the improvements that have been made. Hope it will be displayed for many years to come.

Thank you

Robert DiPippo