Features
Unique features:
- 2" floppy disk drive (720 kB double-sided, double-density). The 2" media was very expensive, typically $80 for a box of 10 floppies. Like many other laptops, an external 3.5" floppy drive was available as an accessory.
- Built-in FastLynx transfer software that could install itself on any other DOS computer over a serial cable without the need for any pre-existing software on the remote system. It relied on the user typing in a DOS Mode command on the other computer, which transferred control of that computer's command line to the Zenith over the serial line. The software then copied itself across, and the user could then move files. This to some extent compensated for the fact that no other computer ever used the 2" floppy disks, thus rendering floppy transfers impractical.
- The ability to set aside some of its upper memory (typically the 384k area between 640k and 1MB) as a battery-backed RAM disk; this was relatively unique in DOS-based laptops (others, like the Toshiba T1000 also supported RAM disks). The RAM disk appeared as C: in DOS and enabled the computer to run with no spinning disks, extending battery life and increasing reliability. Contents were preserved with the power off, though using a minuscule amount of current from the main battery.
- Later versions included an integral 20MB (Megabyte) hard disc. This was enough to run WordPerfect and associated programs, including spell-checkers and diagnostic programs.
Read more about this topic: Zenith Minisport
Famous quotes containing the word features:
“It is a tribute to the peculiar horror of contemporary life that it makes the worst features of earlier times—the stupefaction of the masses, the obsessed and driven lives of the bourgeoisie—seem attractive by comparison.”
—Christopher Lasch (b. 1932)
“However much we may differ in the choice of the measures which should guide the administration of the government, there can be but little doubt in the minds of those who are really friendly to the republican features of our system that one of its most important securities consists in the separation of the legislative and executive powers at the same time that each is acknowledged to be supreme, in the will of the people constitutionally expressed.”
—Andrew Jackson (1767–1845)
“All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks. But in each event—in the living act, the undoubted deed—there, some unknown but still reasoning thing puts forth the mouldings of its features from behind the unreasoning mask. If man will strike, strike through the mask!”
—Herman Melville (1819–1891)