The profesionals - Zenith Data Systems

Only months after Zenith had purchased the Heath Company from Schlumberger - forming Zenith Data System - comes this advert for a terminal and two micros.

Actually, the Z89 micro is essentially the Z19 "intelligent terminal", available for £735 + VAT, or around [[845|1980]] in [[now]], with a floppy disk drive, 48K of memory and two Z80 CPUs crammed in - a method of building a computer that was quite common amongst terminal manufacturers.

Also shown is the Z11A 16-bit computer - a Zenith-rebranded version of Heathkit's H11, which was itself a licenced clone of DEC's famous PDP-11 built into a single chip - in this case the updated KD11-HA, also known as the LSI-11/2. 

This retailed for a hefty £4,359, or about [[5012|1980]] in [[now]]. That's more expensive than DEC's original LSI-11-based "PDP on a desktop" - the PDP-11/03, which sold for $3,000 in 1975[source: https://www.jcmit.net/cpu-performance.htm], or around [[2000|1975]] now.

The advert also mentions "software engineer" - a phrase coined in the early 1960s by Margaret Hamilton, a systems engineer on the Apollo space program. Despite the age of the term, its use in 1980 still wasn't that common, with perhaps "programmer" being the more popular form.


