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in reply to My first computer was...

Good god, am I the ONLY one who bought an Osborne I? :)

If I remember right, I paid about $1700 for that thing and another $500 for the Okidata printer to go with it. However I do remember lugging that "suitcase" to college to program between classes and how excited I was when I was able to get double sided 5 1/4 drives in it. That and to get a pascal compiler that didn't rely on swapping floppies just to compile.

And yes it's still sitting in the garage, along with the service manual that I was able to pick up not long after I bought it.

The thing that really made me feel old is when I saw one on display in an exhibit in a museum down in Sydney .

There is no emoticon for what I'm feeling now.

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: Re: My first computer was...
by rob_au (Abbot) on Jul 05, 2003 at 13:45 UTC
    Good god, am I the ONLY one who bought an Osborne I?

    Ahhh, so you're the one ... :-)

     

    perl -le 'print+unpack"N",pack"B32","00000000000000000000001001110000"'

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[d/l]
      Well actually my brother did too, and I've still got his as well. But I think he picked his up at auction for about $200-300.

      To disagree, one doesn't have to be disagreeable - Barry Goldwater

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Re: Re: My first computer was...
by arturo (Vicar) on Jul 06, 2003 at 19:50 UTC

    You're probably not the only one who ever bought one, but you may be an instance of that extremely rare breed that had one as his or her first computer ... my gawd, given what those things cost, and how widely they were considered to be toys, you'd have to be adventurous, certain, or just plain loaded to have your first one be one of those. These days, I bet a laptop is pretty common as a first computer, but that's because "everybody needs one." Back in the Osborne days, that was emphatically not the case.

    If not P, what? Q maybe?
    "Sidney Morgenbesser"

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      Well believe me, I mowed a lot of lawns, washed a lot of cars and all that stuff just to pay for that sucker. Not that I regret having it, but it sure started a lifelong addiction. :)

      There is no emoticon for what I'm feeling now.

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Re: Re: My first computer was...
by Mr. Muskrat (Canon) on Jul 05, 2003 at 19:11 UTC
    Looks like it ;-)

    It wasn't my first computer but I bought an Osbourne II used for about $100 when I was in high school. Only thing I managed to figure out was how to format a floppy disk... turns out that I had told it the wrong drive and I formatted the system disk :o

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Re: Re: My first computer was...
by yosefm (Friar) on Jul 07, 2003 at 16:31 UTC
    Just a while ago my father threw away his Osborne 1, we couldn't convince him it was a piece of history...
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      A little bit of trivia about the Osbourne. If you wanted to upgrade the 'hard drive', you could shell out 500 dollars for an expansion unit installed by them, or pop off the cover and replace the floppy in the drive inside. There was no external access to this thing, and if you obeyed the 'no user serviceable parts inside' warning, you would never know the difference.

      oakbox

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Re: Re: My first computer was...
by Anonymous Monk on Jul 10, 2003 at 15:00 UTC
    O1, SD 84K floppies, 64K RAM (part of which lived in bank 2): ah, those were the days... as were those when DD 170K mod arrived; when the 80 column board allowed line len > 64 char; when per$onal wealth allowed purchase of external (13"???), green-screen monitor to ease the strain of trying to find typos on the built-in 5x4" (b&w)... The O1 didn't supplant my PDP11, but it sure cut my power bills -- the 20+A startup for the giant 5MB, 14", reefer-box HD or the RK-05s was a killer...
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Re^2: My first computer was...
by Your Mother (Archbishop) on Nov 22, 2008 at 07:03 UTC

    My grandfather let me use his Osborne before I got my own Trash 80.

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