Happy 30th - Osborne 1
Very high geekdom -- 30 years ago tomorrow (April 4th) the Osborne 1 was released.
A whopping 64 Kilobytes of RAM, two floppy disks, a 50 Character wide screen and the CP/M operating system bundled with BASIC, WordStar, dBase II and the spreadsheet SuperCalc. Sold for $1,795. Amazing actually when you consider that an Apple IIe with CP/M, two disk drives, monitor, software, etc... sold for $3,500 and was not portable.
Harry McCracken has a wonderful history over at
Technologizer
An amazing machine and a fascinating history -- wish I had kept mine; donated a bunch of my old computer stuff to a Seattle tech recycler that also maintains a
small computer museum. My primary machine was an S-100 mainframe and I had WordStar tweaked to do true proportional type. Got a surplus CompuGraphic daisy-wheel printer and made a bunch of money printing out student theses. Had a computer store on University Avenue in Seattle at the time...
Posted by DaveH at April 2, 2011 9:33 PM