KOYADO.COM

A web site dedicated to preserving my first Heathkit 8 bit computer into the future



Norberto’s H8 Restoration Project

    This Web page is about my original H8 Heath computer which I bought in 1978.  In 1986 I decided to put into storage my complete H8 Computer system and it was until 2006 that I decided to take it out from storage. I was concern about the H8 Heath Computer on not responding, but on power-on it worked fine; I was excited to see it working. 

    

The next step was to get new or restore floppy drives to read my floppy media which has been in storage since 1986. After acquiring several floppy drives from eBay, I was happy to at least be able to read about 98% of the floppy media. My main target was to recover the hard drive utilities to be able to add a new Winchester hard drive to the Xebec controller. I was lucky to recover all the CP/M utilities sold by Quikdata, but failed to recover the HDOS utilities as well.  Several years later, I was able to buy a QuikData hard drive which contained the HDOS drivers to boot HDOS from a hard drive or SSD. I joined the SEBHC.ORG group which inspired me to design a new H8-Z67 controller and the H8/H89-Z67-IDE+ SSD storage board. Also I’m working on updating the H89 boards as well. This is done to enable the entire Heath Computer hobbyist that are still preserving the Heath computer history and to be able to boot from the IDE hard drives or Solid States drives  that are still available at this time.


    As this writing (dated April 4th, 2021) the H8 Heath Computer and the H19 are still working as the day I bought them. The H8 is also booting CP/M and now HDOS from my SSD controller design. 

A complete set of replacement boards for the H-8/H89 computer can be found here. These are all new designs based on the original Heathkit schematics with improvements over the original design.


H8/H89 PCBS