Zenith Data Systems

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Zenith Data Systems Corporation (ZDS) was an American computer systems manufacturing company active from 1979 to 1996. It was originally a division of the Zenith Radio Company (later Zenith Electronics), after that company purchased the Heath Company and its Heathkit line of electronic kits and kit microcomputers, from Schlumberger in October 1979. ZDS originally operated from Heath's own headquarters in St. Joseph, Michigan. By the time Zenith acquired Heathkit, the Heathkit H8 kit computer already had an installed customer base of scientific engineers and computing enthusiasts. ZDS's first offerings were preassembled versions of existing Heathkit computers, but within a few years, the company began selling its own designs including the Zenith Z-100, a hybrid 8085- and 8088-based computer capable of running both CP/M and MS-DOS. ZDS largely avoided the retail consumer market, instead focusing on selling directly to businesses, educational institutions, and government agencies. By the late 1980s, the company won several lucrative government contracts worth several hundreds of millions of dollars combined, including a US$242-million contract with the United States Department of Defense, the largest such computer-related government contract up to that date. In 1986 the company made headlines when it beat out IBM for a contract with the Internal Revenue Service to supply a portable computer. By the mid-1980s ZDS's profits offset losses in Zenith's television sales. Its Zenith SupersPort laptop was released in 1988 to high demand, composing a quarter of the entire American laptop market that year. The company reached a peak in terms of revenue in 1988, generating US$1.4 billion that year. The following year saw ZDS floundering in multiple ways, including a cancelled contract with the United States Navy and a failed attempt to increase consumer desktop sales. In late 1989, ZDS was purchased by Groupe Bull of France for between $511 million and...