Thought I should correct this: the first follow-up, the Osborne Executive, did get released in 1982, at $2,500. It fixed issues with the 1, had a bigger screen, and even had a game bundled with it, but it was almost $1000 more than the similarly-configured competition. Osborne went bankrupt in 1983.
We had DM as a guest speaker for our local ACM student chapter. I got to run a bunch of stuff for that as well as being part of the group that went to dinner with him.
Fortran II on 1620s? Luzers. I did Fortran II on the brand spanking new 1130! I know, green with envy aren’t you?
Before that it was Model 33 Teletypes on acoustic coupling modems to an timeshare IBM 360 programing a PL/I variant. So the drop to batch mode, Fortran and card punching was a big step down.
Some interesting equipment I’ve used:
Xerox Altos: “The first computer that didn’t run faster at night.” Mouse, Ethernet, WISYIWYG and arcade style games. Printed on a Xerox copier converted into an early prototype laser printer.
Sending email over a thing called “Arpanet”. They used to publish, like with dead tree stuff, a book with all the Arpanet’s folks names, addresses, email addresses and stuff. 'Cause how else were you supposed to find someone’s email address?
First PC: 10MHz XT clone. 20MB HD. 360K floppy, but I later upgraded it to 1.44M which required a card with a BIOS to handle it. That same floppy drive was still in my main computer (frequently unconnected) until a couple weeks ago when I upgraded my computer. It had no floppy connector, so out it came.
(Now running 3.6GHz quad core with a TB HD.)
I remember taking on the department’s huge Kodak CD burner. Double speed writing! No one else wanted it because they didn’t know what it could do.
It could write CDs folks! Even music CDs. I remember telling students about it. “Someday, you’ll download music off the Internet and burn your own CDs. No, really.” (Well, I was right, for a while.)
That sounds about right. In my memory, I’m thinking it was a $4,000 machine (I didn’t buy it, I just wrote some custom programs for the owner, but he was kind enough to let me borrow it once!)
But using an 8085 seems like a step backwards from a Z80. I can’t confirm or deny which CPU was used in the Escort, but the Z80 was very common then (I helped develop a barcode reader using a Z80. I think I still have the prototype in the basement).
The higher-end Escorts did cost more; here’s a price list of MSRPs for 1983 portables; the C2150 was $3600.
Pretty much every CP/M system I ever used had a Z80 under the hood, which did seem to be an 8080 with extras. Can’t find 1983-era price lists for the various chips, but the 8085 looks like it would be a candidate for a more simply designed machine. Despite the Gucci carrying case for the Courier, perhaps Jonos was looking to tap into the sub-$1000 market. It is telling that the machine wasn’t given a spot in the Escort line.
In 1977 or 1978 my adviser organized a “Problems of the 1980s” conference on computing in the next decade. It resulted in proceedings and a special issue of IEEE Computer. I went back and reread it for a column some time back. Osborne and Portia Isaacsson participated, and their section on what was to become personal computing was quite prescient. There was a section on portable computing so Osborne was thinking about it even when he was still writing computer books. On the other hand there was a large contingent of IBMers who foresaw mainframes forever.
1130s were far more modern than 1620s. MIT had tons of them. I never used them, because they were used for non CS (course VI-3) majors learning programming. My first courses were on Multics and 360 mainframes.
The LGP-21 was hooked up to a Friden Flexiwriter, which made a model 33 look like a sportscar. (We had them hooked up to our PDP-11.) When I worked at Bell Labs I got to go to the Teletype factories in Skokie and Little Rock. The Skokie plant, which was also their design center, is now a mall.
And there was a contingent of computer-club hackers who said, “360? Shit, I got that much computing power on my workbench, and I’m building a bigger one next week for half the price.”
The first computer I ever saw was a Univac I. It had a memory that had 1000 double words of addressable storage. Each double word had 72 bits, 12 bytes, 6 bits each (it is simply not true that a byte was always 8 bits; it has varied from 6 to 9). The memory consisted of 100 mercury delay lines so that only one memory location in 10 was readable or writeable at any time and the machine inserted no-ops while waiting. As a result the programmers were required to use “minimal latency coding” with tables of op times to try to minimize these stalls by an adroit choice of memory locations. All addressing was to fixed locations. A couple of years later a primitive assembler appeared and they gave up on minimal latency. I never programmed this machine; I was a techie for a large analog computer that would eventually be superseded by the Univac. At least that was the theory; I left before I found out what actually happened. The machine itself was a monster. It occupied a very large room. Punch card readers, tape servos, a central console and a whole room containing 2000 electrolytic capacitors, each 500 microfarads, for a total of 1 farad. I never asked, but I assume this was the power supply filter. I was telling someone about this who commented that maybe they could have used a large storage battery instead. You wonder.
My first PC was a 1982 vintage original IBM PC with the original DOS (unnumbered, but 1.0 in retrospect). It came with 16 K of memory and no diskette drive, but our computing center quickly added one diskette drive (capacity 160 K) and 48 K of memory. Within a couple years, I had 640K of memory and two two-sided 360 K diskette drives. Actually DOS 1.1 changed the 160 K to 180 K with no change in the hardware and added support for double-sided drives. Five years later I got a new computer, something called Packard-Bell with a 10 M hard drive. Meantime, I discovered an early version of the editor I still use and tex. I have never used MS-Word although I did have a very short exposure to Word-Perfect. I started using a DOS improvement called 4-DOS quite early and I still use its successors 4-NT and TakeCommand that give me a command line that I use extensively so that windows is a small part of my computing experience. My exposure to early Macs soured me on them and I have never been tempted. I did try Linux on my office computer for a few years, but I could never get used to another editor than the one I started with 28 years ago.
Speaking of DOS, I’m too lazy to look it up, but what was the difference, if any, between the original and MS-DOS? I seem to remember the latter was used on the first IBM computers.
I used both, but my memory is not good enough to remember. My brain is down to about 5 KB now.
PC-DOS, written by Microsoft came out in late 81. supported IBM double sided 320K FD soon.
MS-DOS came out in 82. i don’t think did double sided.
[QUOTE=Voyager]
In 1977 or 1978 my adviser organized a “Problems of the 1980s” conference on computing in the next decade. … On the other hand there was a large contingent of IBMers who foresaw mainframes forever.
[/QUOTE]
Mainframes serving as the “master brain” to what we now call thin clients, or just that the big iron would live on for decades?
[QUOTE=That Don Guy]
…if you wanted peripherals, you usually had to go to “computer shows” that popped up every now and then (this was in the days before CompUSA was everywhere - I remember when the nearest one was 50 miles away)
[/QUOTE]
Whenever I think back 20 years, I wonder how we ever managed to find anything. So many of those shows were just silicon-based flea markets. I do remember buying a VGA monitor and video card from one of the Cow Palace shows and how my jaw hit the floor in awe of 640x480 graphics once I got the drivers, interrupts and whatnots configured properly. Of course, there was the “PC of Theseus” that saw every component other than the case replaced with parts bought at several shows over the course of two or three years.
Being only 47 years old, I’m a little too young to remember the punch-card era. However, my first job was at a direct-maiing newsletter that used magnetic-tape readers connected to photomechanical-transfer “offset” printers to generate the text, which then had to be run through developer machines.
The first computer I ever used was the Apple IIc (I think); however, I could not afford that in mid-1984 so I settled for a Commodore 64. It quickly became my computer of choice, especially after GEOS became popular.
By the end of the 80s the C64 lost a lot of its value. When I got tired of trying to repair mine, I simply replaced it. My first one cost me about $350, from a computer retailer (I don’t remember the name offhand). The third one I bought, in 1989, cost me all of $60 – from Toys R Us. :dubious:
Anyone remember **BYTE **magazine?
When I started reading it in the early 80’s it blew me away.
When they reviewed something they would really go under the hood.
Then they’d go into the chips.
Then they’d go into the registers and timing diagrams of the chips.
Then they’d go into the instruction set.
Fantastic articles on theory, mathematics, languages, how new ideas in chips are being implemented as well as ordinary product reviews.
All that and Steve Ciarcia’s Circuit Cellar too.
Even the millions of ads were amazing.
At the time it was all over my head and out of my price range.
By the 90’s it unfortunately became more about product reviews and bench test.
I got something out of all those ads too. 1984: I was a lab assistant in Hawaii, where we did research with dolphins. The boss was a jerk, and I was looking for work elsewhere. I finally caught on that there was nothing for me in Hawaii. I had background in computer operations, system administration, and some programming.
I got some issues of BYTE magazine and PC magazine, and sent my resume to EVERY advertiser. I think I sent about 400 resumes over a several-month period. Out of that, I think I got maybe 3 phone interviews. One of them concluded: If you move back to Ca give us a call.
Eventually I did that, and gave him a call. The job was still open, and I got it.
Yeah, the old CompUSA. I remember my first visit and being wowed. In an industrial park with warehouse style layout. Pallets of power supplies and HDs (20 and 40MB). That was a computer store.
I didn’t read Byte style magazines. My favorite was Computer Shopper. Practically phone book thickness. Almost all ads. Spending hours bookmarking ads, flipping back and forth, to find the lowest prices. And then Internet shopping came and it quickly started to evaporate.
There were a couple iterations of local computer user/buyer monthlies. Mostly ads again. Most of the shops where clustered along a couple blocks of one road not too far from me, so very handy. Some had bargain/used bins which were fun. But then along came the Internet, again, plus a Fry’s a couple exits down the road and most of that dried up.
I think you can win just about any conversation of this sort with just that line.
Heh! I agree, but your line would probably come in second place. 
Speaking of computer shows and stores, I remember going to one on a business trip, and finding a printer for my Commodore 128. Wow, I had not printed anything up until then. Dot matrix, remember them?
I loved the little shops in malls that were either some chain, or just ma and pa shop. There you could get anything for the innards of a computer, or any peripheral.
The thing was, there would seldom be more than a few geeks hanging around, and once you entered, we’d have an hour-long discussion of things computer. We all built our computers from scratch.
If some naif walked and wanted to buy a complete computer, we’d have to try not to laugh. Seldom happened.
Then along came the online stores, and eventually Amazon. .
5K? You need to upgrade that Z80 processor in your brain. 
Anyway, there were several different versions of DOS originally, each designed to support specific IBM clones because clones back then weren’t always true clones. However, the clone makers very quickly figured out that they needed to make their clones actually be clones (as close to 100 percent IBM compatible as possible) or they wouldn’t run all software and their customers would get pissed. So IBM and Microsoft partnered together (most of the DOS versions were based on Microsoft code anyway with just a few system specific tweaks) and PC-DOS and MS-DOS ended up being exactly the same thing with a different name. This was around the time that DOS version 3 came out, which was when most folks actually started using PCs, so by the time most folks switched to IBM (or clones) MS-DOS and PC-DOS were the same thing.
This continued for a long time. Then, near the end of the DOS days, MS and IBM parted ways. MS-DOS and PC-DOS remained mostly the same, or at least compatible with each other, with each version having its own custom utilities for certain things. When one came out with a new feature, the other quickly followed. There were a few different versions of DOS 6 by each company, and then DOS quietly died while Windows took over.
That’s my memory of it, anyway. I started using DOS at version 3.3, and I remember the common rule of thumb was that if you had an earlier version you needed to upgrade to 3.3. if you wanted it to actually work properly.
Ah, yes…they joy of going to the data center to retrieve your assembler program and getting it back…in a TRASH CAN, because they dropped your deck. That was when the “old guys” would just shake their head and give you a felt tipped marker and tell you to draw a diagonal line down the deck.
I worked on an earlier one of those.
One of the com interfaces was …wait for it …current loop.
So it could be used as a Telex machine.