![]() The following year saw ZDS floundering in multiple ways, including a cancelled contract with the Navy and a botched bid to increase its consumer desktop sales. The company reached a peak in terms of revenue in 1988, generating US$1.4 billion that year. ZDS' SupersPort laptop was released in 1988 to high demand, and it soon cornered roughly a quarter of the entire American laptop market that year. 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 late 1980s, the company had 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. ZDS avoided the retail consumer market, instead focusing on business and government customers, such as companies, universities, and government agencies. ZDS' first offerings were merely preassembled versions of existing Heathkit computers, but within a few years, the company began selling bespoke systems, including the Z-100, which was a hybrid Z80- and 8088-based computer capable of running both CP/M and MS-DOS. By the time Zenith acquired Heathkit, their H8 kit computer already had an installed fanbase of scientific engineers and computing enthusiasts. ZDS originally operated from Heath's own headquarters in St. It was originally a division of the Zenith Radio Company (later Zenith Electronics), after they had purchased the Heath Company and, by extension, their Heathkit line of electronic kits and kit microcomputers, from Schlumberger in October 1979. Zenith Data Systems Corporation ( ZDS), was an American computer systems manufacturing company active from 1979 to 1996.
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