In the last two episodes I put my best effort into restoring this old Osborne, with some
questionable results, and if you haven’t watched that, you should.
So, as promised at the end of the last episode, I am here to tell the story of the Osborne
1.
In order to understand this computer, it’s important to understand the era in which it
came out.
It was released in 1981, about 3 months before the IBM PC.
So, obviously, it doesn’t run MS-DOS, because that didn’t even exist yet.
So what operating system did it run?
Well, it used CP/M. That stands for Control Program/Monitor, although later they changed
it to mean Control Program for Microcomputers.
CP/M was an operating system which came out in 1974.
It was designed primarily around the Z80 microprocessor and was meant to use a teletype or a dumb
terminal as a text-display.
It was very popular in the late 1970s, and if you look on Wikipedia you’ll see an enormous
number of computers that were designed to run this operating system.
However, some of the more popular machines you might have heard of were the Altair 8800,
the Kaypro, the Eagle series of computers, the TRS-80 line of computers, and of course
the Osborne.
If you’ve ever used MS-DOS, then CP/M should be fairly easy to understand because MS-DOS
was modeled after CP/Ms interface so they look and feel very similar.
CP/M does have one big annoyance, though.
While it is true that as a programmer you could write a program for CP/M and generally
expect it would run on a wide variety of computers, the problem was the disk format was not standardized.
Every manufacturer had their own format, in fact, some CP/Ms like the IMSAI 8080 such
as the one seen in WarGames, uses 8 inch floppies, while most machines used the 5 and a quarter
inch floppies.
So the problem was each program would need to be distributed on different formats.
As an example, I have this Osborne 1 and this Kaypro II.
Both machines run CP/M but they can’t read each others disks.
How annoying is that?
And, to make matters worse, not even all Osborne’s can read each other’s disks.
For example, the original machine shipped with a single density floppy controller.
Mine has this little upgraded controller inside that allows it to use double-density disks.
Which is great because it can store twice as much data on a disk.
But that means that your disks would no longer read in your buddy’s Osborne if he still
had the original controller.
So, how did the Osborne fit in?
Well, the key to the Osborne’s success is that it was a portable computer with 64K of
memory that could run CP/M. In fact, it’s widely considered to be the very first ever
portable computer.
They gave it two internal floppy drives.
The one on the left is the A: drive and the one on the right is B:.
And then they gave you this ridiculously small LCD screen.
In fact, check it out, my iPhone 6 actually has about the same size of screen, and this
is the small iPhone, not the larger 6P model.
They also give you two little pockets where you can store some disks to bring along with
you.
Now, today many people will scoff at this and say, well this doesn’t seem very portable.
But, it really was.
In fact, to help demonstrate how portable it was, The Obsolete Geek brought over his
IBM 5150, which was made around the same time as this Osborne.
Let’s see who can get their machine packed up and into the car faster.
Rob has a bunch of cables to deal with.
I just have the one, which packs neatly in the back.
And I’m off.
Rob’s going to try to cheat by carrying the entire thing at once.
I think most people would at least carry the monitor separately.
For all the good it ended up doing because he still had to go back for his box of disks.
So, I think it is safe to say that the Osborne was way more portable than other computers
in 1981.
Let’s talk about how the machine actually works.
When you first power it on, it displays this little box and asks you to insert a disk in
Drive A and press RETURN.
Of course, it can’t be just any disk, it needs to be a boot disk.
Once you do that, the disk drive will spin up and you’ll get this fancy Osborne logo,
and in a few seconds you’ll see this help screen.
At first you might think this screen is giving you the choice to load all of these different
programs, but it isn’t.
So, if I press M for Microsoft BASIC, it just gives me another screen telling me about Microsoft
BASIC.
In fact, most of these programs aren’t even on this disk at all.
If you press the escape key, it will drop you into CP/M and you’ll see a familiar
looking A: prompt.
DIR will list the directory of the drive.
I can type in B colon to go to the second drive, and list the directory there.
If this looks a lot like MS-DOS, like I said earlier in the video, that’s no coincidence.
So, I’m going to show you some of of the software you might have used on this machine
back in the day.
Now, this was not a gaming machine, it was a business machine, don’t get your hopes
up of seeing some really fantastic games, and NO, it won’t run Crysis so don’t ask.
The first thing I’ll show you here is Microsoft Basic.
Unlike most computers from the 80s, BASIC had to be loaded from disk on this machine.
But once you were in BASIC, it worked more or less as expected.
In fact, I’ll write a little program here, just to demonstrate.
So it’s going to ask for your name, and then just print your answer over and over
again.
So, my name is 8bits and there we go…
And I’ll hit control-C to stop the program.
There was a demo program on the disk, called 3D.
So I’m going to load that in and have a look.
So, it’s not very long, let’s see what it does.
OK, so it appears to just be plotting asterisks in sort of a 3D pattern.
So BASIC was very important in 1981 because if you couldn’t find a program to do what
you needed, you were expected to write your own.
And Microsoft BASIC was pretty powerful for writing specialized business or scientific
programs.
The next software I’m going to show you is Wordstar.
This was one of the most popular word processors of the time, and one thing interesting about
this disk is that it is bootable right on the Osborne.
That’s because Osborne actually supplied this software with the computer.
Besides being portable, that was another big advantage of the Osborne is that it was bundled
with several good productivity programs.
Anyway, so we’re in Wordstar now, and I’m going to create a new document.
I’ll call it 8Bit Guy.
Well, that won’t work, because just like MS-DOS, it uses that 8.3 character file name
restriction.
So I’ll just shorten it to 8Bit.
OK, so now I can start typing away.
I’ll be honest I ran into a problem that I couldn’t figure out how to delete or backspace.
You see, the Osborne keyboard doesn’t actually have a delete or backspace key.
It just has the 4 cursor keys.
In CP/M, the left cursor acts like a backspace.
But in Wordstar it acts like a cursor key.
So I would probably have to find the manual to figure out how to do that.
Anyway, moving on I’m going to show you another package called Supercalc.
It’s a spreadsheet program.
And, you know, it’s not mouse controlled so it probably does take a bit of learning
to figure out how to use.
For example, I couldn’t figure out how to type text in a field.
Fortunately, you can get help for the various commands by typing a question mark.
OK, so I think I have it figured out by changing the format of the cell to text, aligned left…
well, that still didn’t work.
Rats!
Well, on the bright side there’s an example spreadsheet on the disk, so I’ll just show
you that.
And you can scroll the screen just like in modern spreadsheets, although it’s a bit
slow.
Still, I can’t understate how important of a business tool this was in 1981.
Also, it came with this overlay you could put around the keys to help you remember what
keys did what.
There are hundreds, if not thousands of business applications that were written for CP/M, however,
I’m not going to show you all of those because, let’s face it, they wouldn’t be very exciting.
but, I will show you at least a few games that were made for the machine.
This game is called Invaders, and yes, it’s a clone of Space Invaders.
Now, like I said, the Osborne has no graphics capabilities.
This is made entirely from clever use of text characters.
But it’s surprisingly effective.
And you can hear the one little beep that the computer can make.
If you look really close, you can see little cursors following around everything that moves.
And that’s because CP/M was designed for dumb terminals where the only way to control
the screen is to send commands to move the cursor.
You couldn’t write directly to screen memory.
I mean, you could, but screen memory was in a different place on every CP/M machine so
it would break compatibility.
Another popular game was MyChess.
Again, this is all text characters.
I will point out that the bottom is supposed to be white and the top is supposed to be
gray.
Now, I’m capturing this from the Osborne’s composite video output and the gray is very
hard to see, no matter how I adjust it.
But if you look at the Osborne’s screen itself you can see there’s a good contrast
between the two.
The next game I’ll show you is called Ladder.
You play that little P character at the bottom and you can move and jump around, climb ladders,
etc.
I’m not sure exactly what the end goal is of the game, though.
The last arcade style game I’ll show you is called Catchum and It’s obviously a PacMan
clone.
One type of game that was popular on the system was text adventures, in fact, I have copies
here of Zork 1, 2, and 3.
Text adventures were actually quite popular in the late 70s and early 80s because they
were a type of interactive fiction sort of like reading a book, but you get to be in
control.
There are no graphics of any sort other than your imagination.
So, just as an example of how you play, I’ll tell it to GET LANTERN, then I’ll tell it
to turn on lantern.
Ok, that worked.
Now if I look, hopefully I can see something.
So yeah, that’s that’s how you play these.
So let’s talk about some other quirks of the Osborne’s hardware.
If you look real close at the disk drive, you’ll see this little hidden latch mechanism.
I’ve never seen anything quite like it.
I believe it is a sensor so it knows when you’ve changed the disk.
But the annoying thing is it makes it somewhat hard to get the disk inserted by the usual
method.
So Osborne users became accustomed to inserting the disk sort of sideways like this, so that
it goes in easier.
Another odd thing is the composite video output.
So, you might think you could just connect a television to your Osborne, but you’d
be wrong.
I mean, it does work, as you can see here.
I’ll connect the composite cable like so.. and power it on.
So far so good.
The trouble is there is a lot of overscan.
They are sending video into the parts of the composite signal that are usually outside
of the visible range.
So you lose several rows and columns of characters that you simply cannot see on a TV.
So, as an alternative, I wondered if I could get my Commodore 1084 monitor to work.
What’s even better is I can put this into LCA mode, where it will take a nice crisp
black and white image on this port here.
And yes, it works.. but as expected it is greatly overscanned.
Fortunately, this monitor has controls to allow me to adjust for that.
So, you can see I can shrink this down some.
And then move the whole picture over some.
And yeah, I can get the whole screen to show up.
And, I think the brightness is up too high, so let me turn that down.
Ok, check it out..
So I have a great picture here, it’s very clear.
Even the gray text shows up with nice contrast.
So yeah, you could run an external monitor if you got tired of looking at that tiny little
screen in the middle.
Oh, and see this button here, it’s a reset button.
The moment you press it, it goes straight back to the boot screen.
I guess that’s more convenient than having to press control-alt-delete.
Also, it was possible to install an after market internal modem into one of the disk
storage slots.
Thanks goes out to Brenden for sending me these photos of his unit.
Of course, the story of Osborne did not end with this machine.
While, this machine was very successful, they started touting their new Osborne Executive
model, way before it was ready for launch, thus killing sales of the current model.
And you can see why.
The executive had a much larger screen, and two half-height floppy drives in a much better
arrangement.
It had a cooling fan in the back.
And the screen also had a full 80-columns.
But they did recover from that, and even went on to briefly launch their last machine, known
as the Vixen.
It had a keyboard that folded out on a hinge, and the rest of the machine actually sat on
it.
It had two vertical disk drives on the right.
Thanks goes out to MacCollectorZ for sending me this footage of his units.
You can also see the executive being used in the movie the Philadelphia Experiment from
1984, along side a Commodore 64.
All right, so that about wraps up this three part series on the Osborne.
I will mention that I’ve had several offers from people who are experts with leather to
have me ship this handle to them and have them re-do it.
So, I’m probably going to take at least one person up on that offer and maybe in a
later episode I’ll show you the result when they’ve shipped it back to me.
I’m also going to be examining ways to better fix this case plastic, and not just for this
but for some other machines as well.
And, I have some interesting retrobriting techniques I’m experimenting with, which
I know I’ve mentioned that a few times.
But, I will get back to you on that.
So, you may see this computer again in a few months.
So anyway, stick around for that, and thanks for watching!