The O1 taught me to program (in Turbo Pascal and Z80 Assember), and was my pride and joy until I built a ‘286 box and succumbed to the dark side of DOS.

I remember that we bought a new IBM XT for the lab at work, and I brought in my O-1 for a performance test. We compiled and ran the same Turbo Pascal source code, and timed the two machines run time for the program. The Osborne 1 beat the PC by about 20%!

Then there’s the guy at work with the Kaypro. I fashioned a null-model cable, and we ran X-modem software to transfer files between the Ozzie and his ugly metal box. Of course our disk formats were totally incompatible, so that was the only way to share cool programs.

I did learn a big lesson though… NEVER buy a computer with a screen that is too small. Which is exactly the knock I had on the original Mac’s 9″ BW screen.

All’s well that ends well though. I now teach computer science for a community college, including PC repair. I hope to pick up an old O-1 and use it as a demo since they are nearly ‘antique’ computers now.

It has a red light on the LH side, an RCA socket labelled VIDEO plus 2 edge connectors.
The standard external video port is connected to one of them and the other exposes 2*13 lines.
The Drive C: device is also connected by (very neatly folded) external ribbon cable to the IEEE-488 socket.
Is this one of the RAM drives you referred to earlier ?
If so, I’d really appreciate a pointer to any info about it.
Cheers.

Rob
rob@bowkett.ca

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.

I think that at this point I would donate it to the museum. :)

Regards to all -

‘Old’ John

“Old” John

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altair_8800

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