Osborne

[Bethany K. Dumas]

On Sat, 18 May 2002, Luanne von Schneidemesser wrote:

>The Osborne was one of the first  personal computers.  It was termed
>portable; you could hook the part with the screen to the rest and I believe
>it had a handle.  My husband bought one; what I remember most vividly is
>that the tiny screen would not display the whole line -- you had to scroll
>back and forth to read each line and continue on with the document.  Drove
>me nuts.
>

Adam Osborne was a genius. The Osborne-1 was truly portable and would
operate off batteries. Also, Luanne, you could hook up an external monitor
and place that external monitor on top of the Orborne, thus avoiding the
tiny-screen problem. I saw my first Osborne when an engineering friend
serving a stint in the old UTCC called me over to see it. I told him I
would never work on a screen that size. He clued me about the external
monitor (cost: $100). I was about to buy an Apple for the Linguistics
Progrm. We got 2 Osbornes for the price of 1 Apple. I set up one in my UT
office, then asked who else on the Lx committee wanted the other one. No
one did. So I took the  other one home, and began (in 1981) to be able to
simply carry disks back and forth. There was a double-density drive
upgradde within a few months.

When I was in Law School (1981-1985), I decided to be the first law
student here to take an exam. on a computer - so I took my
Professional Responsbiility/Ethics exam on an Osborne-1 one summer.

I have very fond memories of those machines - each came with 5 software
packages - Wordstar, as Luanne says, and four others - a
spreadsheet etc.

Bethany, waxing nostalgic for a bygone toy