First Portable Computer Turns 30

[jimhelm]

from PC magazine






my Father's memory of it via email:

Some of you may remember my Ozzie. I bought it while I was back in Baltimore for a while, then when I moved up to Blue Bell to work for Mario and lived in Center Square, PA. The kids and I played a word game endlessly (I think it was called Adventure or Advent). It started with “You are standing… “ or something similar, and you’d eventually find yourself in a cave. We’d answer the game’s prompts by typing in whatever commands we could think of (it didn’t understand very many) like open, go east, get the lamp, kill the snake, feed the bird, etc. and it was pretty good at smartass responses to bogus commands. Here’s a screen shot that looks awfully familiar:

The front of the Osborne opened as the keyboard, and there was a little 5” screen that displayed green characters. There were no graphics back then. I remember it ran the C/PM operating system from a huge 5 ½ inch floppy disk on the left of the little screen, while the other floppy drive to the right was for programs and data. The absolute coolest things on the machine were the SuperCalc spreadsheet application and the Basic programming language. It also had Wordstar for a word processing app. All-in-all, for the time, a pretty spectacular bunch of computer power in a small little portable box. IBM’s first “IBM PC” rendered it instantly obsolete and made Bill Gates a freakin’ billionaire.



I guess it’s pretty near impossible for today’s cell-phone-obsessed kids to relate. Many, many waves of obsolescence have preceded all that power under their spoiled little thumbs, and they simply take it all for granted.