The First Personal Computer That Almost Changed The World
September 14th, 2007After reading this, don’t forget to check out my other post
While at my favorite independent bookstore, Kepler’s in Menlo Park, I discovered a jewel of geekiness. The book in question was Core Memory: A History of Vintage Computers, and I thought it would be interesting to query my parents about some of the computing relics detailed in the tome. I was quite surprised to learn that not only were some of the computers used by my parents, both of whom had been living in Silicon Valley at its inception, but that some of this tech might be stashed in our attic.
With this discovery in hand, I embarked on an odyssey into the dark reaches of my crawlspace. (This is not hyperbole as you can see from the following picture.)
Lo and behold, what did I find in the dingy, dusty, and dreary recesses? Nothing less than two, TWO, original Osborne computers amid some precariously piled file cabinets. As I lugged them downstairs, the cogs inside my head were already spinning at the thought of exposing a whole new generation to this “tech pron”.
What Is Osborne? What did they make?
Osborne was a computer company founded by two young entrepreneurs in 1980. Adam Osborne and Lee Felsenstein combined their mind power to create computers that were not just personal, but portable as well.
They faced the obstacle of transitioning from computing monoliths that took up whole levels of office space to (relatively) luggable computers that could fit under a plane seat.
About the Osborne 1
Their first product was named the Osborne 1 (very humble of Mr. Osborne, huh?). It sold for an initial price of $1795, meaning that it was at least relatively accessible to the populace.
The Osborne 1 was the first computer to come bundled with applications, a pioneering idea at the time. All together, the software would have cost around $1500 by itself.
However, the design was not entirely original. The look borrowed heavily from the Xerox Notetaker, yet Xerox’s product was simply a prototype and not a production model.
My First Impressions
At first look, I didn’t know what to think of this old computer. I had passed by it multiple times in the attic, albeit in previous years. My interest was piqued by my reading of the vintage computer book I had picked up, and now I felt confident that I could get it working.
While trying to muscle it down the stairs, I did bump it into the wall more than once. Yet this old bird wouldn’t die. Even when I semi-dropped it onto the floor, it still managed to boot up.
After plugging it in, and seeing it startle to life, all I could feel was excitement. I had been daydreaming about this moment of truth, and now it was here.
As I pushed, or shoved more like it, the floppy into the drive, the dust began rising. Being the neatfreak that I am, I decide to put a towel under the computer, so as not to get my carpet dirty. In the pictures, you can probably see it.
Reaching around to the back, the switch was flicked, and the screen glimmered to life. My arm pump was cut short by a buzzing sound, followed by a long string of multiplying “BOOT ERROR”. The computer screeched at me. And glowed bright red? Was the computer broken? I considered the possibilities. It had been ravaged in an earthquake, it had been destroyed in a flood, it had overheated and taken a permanent vacation. I was feeling adventurous, and the excitement still hadn’t worn off. I put in another disk. The screeching seemed louder. I put in a different disc.
Same deal. I flipped the floppy over, and reinserted, trying every combination. Upside down. Sideways. Upside down and sideways.
I repeated this with five different floppies. It still didn’t work. What wasn’t I doing right? At this point I realized that I had committed a n00b error. From the pictures you probably can’t see it, but there is a latch that you have to flip down over the end of the floppy. I flipped it down. It worked.
This experience characterized my learning to use the obscenely complicated Osborne. Try, read the manual, try again. I don’t even want to know what this meant for people “back in the day”.
Cool, What is the technology behind it?
The Osborne 1 came bundled with around 10 programs, yet the number varied depending on when the computer was purchased (Seeing that more software was designed as time went on, this makes sense.) At the time of sale, the included programs were some of the best in their respective areas.
Consequently, most of their ideas were copied and are prevalent in computers today. For example: the idea of file extensions (.doc, .txt, .jpg) came from distinguishing between the items on this computer.
Although the operating system was incompatible with others of the time, it was not a problem. Osborne Computer Company made sure that all of the frequently executed business tasks were covered by programs pre-packaged with the Computer.
The package would be named CP/M or Control Program/Monitor (or Control Program for Microcomputers) and it would run many approved programs.
The list was as follows:
- WordStar (think Microsoft Word…in a terminal format. I tried hard to figure this out, which I eventually did, however you must memorize many commands and shortcuts for the program to be efficient.)
- SuperCalc (a precursor to Excel)
- CBasic/MBasic (BASIC: a basic programming language)
- dBase II (database management software made by Ashton Tate (which turned into Borland, another of my dad’s employers)
- The Ledger Programs (3 programs that are awesome and entertaining. Pie Graphs in a terminal.)
- Colossal Cave (first adventure computer game: download it here for PC, here for Mac, and here for Linux systems. The downloads are slow, so don’t be too impatient.)
- Deadline (one of the first mystery detective games)
You might have read about the problems I had earlier. Here is another harrowing tale of my battle with the “simple” WordStar.
Why can’t you just work?
For this problem I had to call in the big guns. My father.
“Dad? How the heck do you do this?”
Once again, I caught a lucky break. Not only did my Dad remember most of the commands, but he knew how to read the manual.
Now that we had the first hump over, I wanted to type something by myself. The commands were so arcane that I had to type 5 characters just to make something bold. Think about that. And there is no specific “Delete” key. Just a left backspace.
Everything about the word processor was so mind-numbing and tediously repetitive that I would have produced a draft on a typewriter more quickly. Once again, I felt a tinge of pity for the individuals who had to actually slog through the manuals.
Yet, this experience did not detract from my adrenaline rush of getting it to work. Obviously, pretty Graphical User Interfaces had made me jaded.
As Core Memory noted, selling of all of the programs separately would have cost more to the consumer than the computer itself. In turn, this move helped establish the Osborne 1 as the premier choice in its class…until the competitors caught on.
It was a technical marvel that all of this could run on a computer with so little in the way of electronic endowment. (No programming inefficiency here.) Read about the electronic endowment below.
Specifications:
- 20.5 inches wide, 14.5 inches deep, and 8.5 inches high
- Processor-Z80A, 4MHz CPU clock
- Memory size-64K bytes programmable (RAM) [4K read-only memory bank-switched and 60K of programmable memory available for software] (You couldn’t even type half a page in Vista with 64k)
- 5-inch display
- 69-key detachable keyboard, full-travel sloped keytops includes 12-key numeric keypad!
- Power on-off switch in rear, Reset pushbutton on front panel, Brightness and contrast controls on front panel.
- Program Execution Speed: Program in read-only memory executes without delay, Programmable memory adds average delay times as follows: first Ml cycle-188 nsec, Subsequent consecutive Ml cycles-0 sec, Non-Ml cycles-375 nsec
Unfortunately, Osborne Computer Company made a series of mistakes. Under mounting competition and demand, Adam Osborne boasted about new products that hadn’t been released yet, in addition to pointing out that they would be better than the Osborne 1.
Customers canceled their pending buys of Osborne 1’s in anticipation of the new release, however this caused OCC to begin bleeding money. By September 13, 1983 (24 years and 3 days ago from when this article was posted) the company had declared Chapter 11 Bankruptcy.
Some argue that tales of Osborne’s demise have been exaggerated. Read about it here.
I hope you have found this article exciting, or at least a little interesting, and that you will now not make jokes about floppy drives as paper weights.
In Conclusion
Feel free to answer these questions in comments:
What is the oldest computer that you have? How does it rate against this? What do you think the value of an Osborne 1 is?
Also, feel free to give me feedback, and words of encouragement. As always.
Awesome!
LOL! Simply amazing! These Pics brought back some memories. I used to own an Osborne 1!!! Companies ran businesses on them!!! I also had an Apple II and I used to own a KayPro II with a 10 MEG hard drive. I bought the Osborne as soon as it came out. I remember the CEO making a totally noob error with his bragging about the new Osborne that we never saw. I remember seeing a prototype, but it never made it to production. When the company went south, I bought a Leading Edge PC with a 30 Meg hard drive in it. At the time, my friends thought I was crazy to buy that much storage.
I have since sold both machines (the KayPro and the Osborne) in the late-80’s to a construction company for about $600 each. Boohoo! I wish now that I still had those old work horses. I would speculate that with the one you have, you could get much, much more for it. Possibly even more than the original cost, depending on who you sold it to.
I still remember WordStar keyboard combinations. I wrote many early database programs, including an inventory system in DBASE II. Thanks for the memories…
The oldest computer I own is an Osborne 1. :)
-j
Back then, I could only afford the Timex / Sinclair 1000 (only $100) typing was very painful :( not as fancy but much more portable :)
The oldest is a still running Compaq “luggable” similar to the Osborne and Kaypro. It runs DOS 6.22 with the file manager that would become Windows Explorer.
I wrote a pos system for retail liquor stores on the Osborne …..
That’s quite a nice find you have there with the packed attic. There’s probably a bunch of other tech treasures buried in all that crap. Oh what I wouldn’t give to have had parents who worked and raised me in Silicon Valley during those early years…
One of my favorite stories about the Osborne was when I used to do repairs on them. Osborne had an “80-column upgrade” that doubled the screen from 40×26 characters to 80×26 characters. The upgrade was intended to facilitate an externally attached monitor.
We installed one for this lady and she gets it home, turns it on, and calls us complaining that the characters are now too small on that little 5-inch screen. Yup, that they were.
@Micsaund: I don’t want to even think about what else is in that attic. It is pretty much the whole archives of our family.
@Todd: Wow, that is amazing. Did Osborne make that upgrade?
Well, this is actually not the first version of the Osborne. The first one had a tan vacuum formed case which was pretty crappy and did not close up very well. The pic you’ve got there is one of the later versions.
What killed them was their announcement of the new Osborne 4, code named Vixen… (BTW, which means something bad in German slang.) Adam Osborne did not know this, and was very embarrassed on stage during one of his announcements in Berlin.) Unfortunately, they announced it months ahead of its availability, their existing sales dried up while everyone waited for the latest version, the company basically died as a result.
I actually worked for a company called Drive C: that made a 128k! ram disk that fit into the neat little diskette pockets under the drive.
God you guys make me feel old…
@Drive C Dude: Yes, I was told by my father that this was actually the second version of the Osborne 1. My father found one that was going to be thrown away, and it was lying on the street. Yet, he decided that he didn’t need anymore old electronics in the attic.
I was ready to buy an osborne in 1981 when I heard about the IBM-PC. boy was I glad that I waited. Of course it cost over
$5000 for the dual 160k floppy with 64k of ram and a video decoder for my tv. Later I got the monochrome monitor and it was heaven. Then the $1000+ color monitors came out.
Wonderful times and I still use gwbasic to write programs in a cmd window under Vista Ultimate..
Rich
Forgot to add the $600 hayes 300bps modem and the $200 communications card. A real screamer..
Rich
I learned word processing using Word Star. It was a great program. In fact, it could do things, using text commands, and just a keyboard that we still can’t do today (think: can you select and copy text VERTICALLY?) I used to type my papers in WordStar, then take them to my dad’s office. They had a “daisy wheel” printer. This way, my word processed papers looked typed (back in the day, most people had dot-matrix printers). Fooled them every time…
I remember playing a Ninja game on a computer that looked much like this but had a larger screen and was white. Anybody have any clue what I’m talking about.
Since I used computers back then the problems you had are amusing to me. Floppy disk drives with levers on the doors were around until very recently. (Up until floppy disks were no longer floppy).
I was wondering what problems you would have had with the old Dec Rainbow. An IBM almost compatible. You would have had fun trying to figure out the floppy drives on that one. The disks were double desncity single sided, and the disk in the bottom drive had to be inserted up side down.
You have found out what LEARNING a computer was all about. You did need to know some things and learn some things, it was not just point and click.
The funny thing is the strange key combinations in MS Word and other MS programs come from the version of MS word they made in those days.
Sheesh, kids these days! Why, back in MY day we knew to close the door on the dang floppy drive!
Way back then, you pretty much expected a computer to be complicated and arcane, and you _started_ by reading the manual. There was no assumption that everything would work the same way– consider that in 1981, there was no DOS– CP/M was the way to go (and the story of why IBM decided to use MS-DOS over the far superior CP/M is an interesting one, but not one I’m going to tell here).
The GUI changed the world more than people who grew up with what we used to call the WIMP interface (Windows, Icons, Mouse Pointer)– now you can sit down at pretty much any PC (or MacOS, or, to some extent, Linux) program and figure out how to use it. Back then, you had manuals for everything… WordStar worked totally differently from WordPerfect and MS Word (which came along much later), and so on…
I owned the earlier version and loved it. Closed, it looked like a sewing machine case. Thought it was so cool with 64k of RAM and those big floppies. Brought it to meetings and took notes on it, impressing all other attendees with my early-adoptiveness.
If you’re researching early laptops, might want to recall GRID computers,, sinister black metallic with orange screens. Had one of those too. Very cool.
The oldest machine I have is a Fujitsu laptop.
Its nowhere near as old as this one, but I am pretty proud of what I’ve been able to do with it.
It has a 133Mhz Pentium 1 processor, only 32MB of RAM, and a tiny lil 1.6GB harddrive.
But using DamnSmallLinux, I was able to get it to hook up to my wireless network, browse the web, read ebooks, and listen to streaming music from Shoutcast (Internet Radio), and it has a pretty useful group of office utilities, such as spreadsheet, word processor, calculator, and an appointment book. Also it can edit photos or create art using the GNU Image Manipulation Program (GIMP) which is basically a free alternative to Photoshop. All in all, its quite a lot of usefulness for such an old machine and I’m very proud of how it has come along.
On the advice of the computer consultant he had at the time, my dad bought an Osbourne Executive. Right after it was delivered (he spent about 4k on it) said consultant disappeared on him, and at 17 I got the job that summer of setting it up, and getting him, and his company, running on it. After initially being frightened by the complexity of it (it came with about 5 HUGE three ring binders filled with floppy disks, and several very thick manuals!) he used it for a long time. I think he stopped, and upgraded sometime in the early nineties. I spent my whole summer that year reading those manuals!
Ah yes, I remember it well!
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The oldest computer I own is a CBM 4040 … back in the day I actually got to contribute some code to the original Waterloo Structured Basic 1.0 for PET.
If you remember RTFM you’ll have much more fun playing with other lost treasures ;)
Crazy that it still works - my parents have a couple of PC Juniors in their attic, but nothing as old as this.
Oh wonderful, our attic looks quite the same. :D
My dad collects all kinds of old electronics but nothing so interesting.
“The oldest machine I have is a Fujitsu laptop.”
God thats not old at all, its not even a 486
My oldest is an Amiga 500 (Bit more fancy than these things, and one of the first multitasking operating systems), weird dead or almost dead platforms are always going to be much more interesting than an old generic x86. Sad that the computer world has become such a monoculture
I bought my Osborne I in September 1981, before the IBM PC came out. It was the tan case, and had serial no. A01799. I still have it! And it still works! That’s because (1) it gets used very little, and (2) I built a fan cage that sits on top of the PC, covers the upper vent and pulls cool air through the unit.
In contrast to your experience, WordStar was considered to be a very good word processor (it was called “the touch-typist’s word processor). It was my favorite until Wordperfect came out.
yes an interesting find…now put it back in the attic where it belongs, or sell it on ebay.
Nah, admittedly, the laptop I mentioned is nowhere near as old as the machine(s) mentioned here, but the question was “Whats the oldest computer you have?”
Forgive me for answering.
Sheesh.
I just mentioned it because I’m proud that its still a viable system that is being used for more than just bragging rights and nostalgia.
Do you check your Gmail with your Amiga 500?
I thought not.
I wrote engineering computer programs in college on my friend’s osbourne. It looked just like the one in the picture.
I have the Osborne I bought in 1981 along with a bale of Foghorns, the magazine published by the First Osborne Group. I had several articles published in the Foghorn describing programing I had done on the Osborne and its Z80 CPU.
The Z80 CPU had main and alternate register sets so it was possible to have two programs in memory and jump between the two. It was sort of like jumping between two windows and was very useful. I wrote a program that allowed the Osborne to send Morse Code. I could jump between that and a text program that allowed me to log contacts while sending CW to my ham buddies.
I used to start programming before dawn, eat at the computer and not quit until late into the night until I could no longer remember the name of the program I was working on. One night my mind went blank and I could not remember one Z80 instruction. I had most of them memorized so it was a terrifying experience. I had to look up each instruction for over a week before I started to remember the opcodes. I felt like I had to do it or lose my mind.
I started programming in C when the IBM came along. In the early nineties my son-in-law tried to teach me Windows programming. It took thousands of lines of code just to open a window and after opening one window I decided “to hell with it” and moved on to music. You can see my group on YouTube. Just look for Annie and the Vets.
Hey, Wordstar was like classic MS Word.
That’s right, word originally was a text based processor on DOS. Into the 90s.
So lets repeat: Wordstar is just like MS Word of the same era.
The oldest machine I’ve got is an Apple II. It has 64KB of memory a floppy drive and a Z80 plugin card. If I remember right I think I got this in ‘78 or ‘79.
It has been a while.
Well, let’s see, Kids.
Back in the day, a friend of mine worked for a little startup company that was in competition with a company that produced key-to-tape machines. The new company was going to use disks instead of tapes. But that’s another story …
Anyway, Mark called me one day and asked me how hard it might be to resuscitate a computer that had had some of the lands burned on its motherboard. I told him that I might be able to, but I doubted anyone else had either the time or the interest to do it.
Well, he hung onto it for a while, but later decided to trade it to me for some other stuff. What I got was an original MITS Altair 8800, with an Intel 8080 CPU. The Z-80 you had was a considerable upgrade.- one I availed myself of as soon as possible. With it I acquired several boards that I later found useful.
First off, the 8800 was what was called an S-100 buss machine. That is, the motherboard had 100 lands across it, and those conducted signals from one board to the other, as well as power and ground. What the original owner had done was to short the 12 V + land to the ground land, vaporizing both of them. I hand-wired new connections to all 12 of the huge edge-connectors in which all other components mounted. I also added in-line connectors to the front panel and the power supply so a person could get the motherboard out and flip it over without having to unsolder everything, instead of the way the original design had it.
The first board was the CPU one. That plugged into one of the slots. It was not built in, like now, or even in a socket on the motherboard. It was its own board. You could upgrade this design just by unplugging the CPU board and putting in a different one. Basically, you could have turned an S-100 Buss machine into a Pentium, if you had wanted to.
The next board was a 2-board set. It took up two sockets, and the boards were further interconnected. It was a thing called Merlin, and Merlin was magical indeed. The original 8800 used toggle switches on the front panel to load all information, bit by bit, into each position in memory. You set the switches and then hit the LOAD button on the front panel. It loaded the settings, and advanced the memory position counter by +1. Then you did it all over again for the next memory position. You could go back and read the contents of memory by entering a memory location, hitting the READ switch, and reading the contents of memory from little LED panel lights that displayed the BINARY! value of the location.
Merlin was wonderful because it provided the means to attach a keyboard, and a monitor or TV. In addition it had a port for a connection to a tape recorder that could be used to record programs or data files. WOW! I could compute! And if memory serves me, I believe I paid the sum total of $12.50 for this wonder.
Of course, computing relies on something else … memory. The Altair was a very early machine. Memory chips were just beginning to be developed such that they had significant amounts of memory per chip. I am speaking of course of bits per chip. That’s right, Kids, bits. Not Kilobits or Megabits, or Gigabits, and certainly not anything like any number of bytes. BITS. The two memory boards that came with the Altair had space for enough chips to provide 1 Kbyte of memory on each board. It used, as I recall, about 64 chips to do this in an 8 x 8 pattern plus the controller chipset. It was the densest, most complex multilayer board I ever had seen up to that time, and I had worked for CDC during the 6600 and 7600 years. With these boards also came little instruction sheet that detailed how … when they became available … to add another bit to the controller chipset so the entire board could be repopulated with chips that would provide twice as much memory … 2 Kbyte per board. A huge improvement!
By the time I got this wonder, those chips were out and had been superseded long since. I was able to salvage enough chips from scrap boards bought at the local salvage shop (Yay, Axman!) to repopulate them, but finding the controller chip was problematic. I finally found two that functioned though, and installed them and the hand-wiring needed to make them work. Now I had a 4-K machine. With CPM and a little program called Nibble Basic, I could program this thing to do anything. Well, Sir!
My first foray into the world of personal computing was to start doing word processing. I acquired as scrap one of the derelict key-to-paper-tape machines as an output device and began doing so. It was fun. You typed the material for the page into the computer, then printed it on the Selectric (not Selectric 2 or 3, but THE SELECTRIC!) while simultaneously punching a paper tape. Then you had the option of making corrections by running the paper tape to print a new copy and stopping it to make the corrections like the old TTY pros did, or you could make corrections in the memory material and reprint from there. When you had it perfect in memory, you could cut a ‘perfect’ paper tape and from that reprint the page any number of times. Or at least until the paper tape tore, the reader jammed, the Selectric died (which it was prone to do over and over), or you blew a fuse.
Thanks for a trip down memory lane, guys.
Later -
‘Old’ John
BTW, here is a URL you might like to follow. It is to Wikipedia’s article on the MITS Altair 8800. Have fun!
“Old” John
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altair_8800
Oh, and years later i finally sold that Altair 8800 to a kid who wanted it for the Minnesota Computer History Museum. It is there now, happily running Nibble Basic and Mini-Dos. And if the guy who bought it from me wants it, I still have the tape copy of MCAS, which was the little program that allowed Merlin to run …
I think that at this point I would donate it to the museum. :)
Regards to all -
‘Old’ John
A few things:
1. As someone pointed out, this was the second Osborne 1 model. The first was in a brown vacuum-formed case.
2. The bundled software was CP/M, SuperCalc, WordStar, and MBASIC. The other software you mentioned was sold separately. There was one short period where dBase was included as a mail-in incentive.
3. File extensions weren’t new with the Osborne or even CP/M. Yet you are correct that there were many things that were copied from our implementations, including the simple thing of booting directly into the OS or an application (yep, there was always a startup sequence on previous CP/M computers). Spellchecking as you go also originated on the Osborne, BTW. As did many other things.
4. The myth that Osborne died because Adam pre-announced products perpetuates to this day, partly because Adam himself perpetuated that myth. The real story is actually much more interesting (and Adam comes off worse in that one which may be why he perpetuated the one that gets repeated). What most people don’t know is that when Osborne finally liquidated (many years after the doors closed), it had an excess of millions in assets that were mad-scrambled for by a host of frenzied money folk, few of which actually had real claims. What Adam announced was a product that I and my small development group had developed. It wouldn’t have actually caused sales to tank for the original product because it was simply a piggy-back board that went on the processor slot of the original models.
5. CP/M wasn’t “incompatible” as you indicate. It and the Apple II were the primary OS’s at the time the Osborne 1 was introduced. MS-DOS was introduced a year later with the IBM PC. What WAS incompatible were disk formats. At the time I remember more than a half dozen incompatible floppy formats in two different sizes. The Osborne 1 was also unique in that it tried to handle as many of those formats as possible (the Micropolis format wasn’t possible due to the physical presence of a registration hole our hardware didn’t recognize). I’d have to go look it up, but I remember that we had at least three of the major formats covered, and several others as well.
6. I’d have to argue with you about WordStar, as you obviously don’t have the experience with it. There most certainly is a keystroke for delete, and I’ll make you this wager: I can type faster and more accurately in WordStar than I can in today’s Word. WordStar was awash in shortcuts, and a skilled user never had to take their hands off the home row positions, even to move the cursor. We’ve lost a lot of that directness with all the GUI implementations that followed.
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