First program was to replace one used on the Heathkit. No great problem there, just a learning curve.
Next a membership program to print labels each month. And then all the other things a membership list is nice to have. The data list required 3 floppies. No problem, just change the floppy when asked.

It travelled around the state many times for demonstrations of things to come. They did but on IBM main frames and remote stations. The Osborne made a few trips to the floor from table heights with no problems except the retainer for the flat connecting cable from the keyboard broke. Never fixed it. Now the display is off center and the War surplus knobs require a Bristol wrench to loosen the screws. Probably have to grind down an allen wrench. The remote green display works OK the last time I tried it.

Nick

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

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 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.