My visiting sister-in-law, Nubia, and my wife demanded that I show them my old (1981) Osborne I computer. I was actually nervous about trying to boot it up because it has been at least twenty years since I had last done so. But I did boot it up and it works just like the first day, thirty years ago. All Nubia and Sonnia could do was exclaim about the tiny 5" screen and, truth be told, I could hardly read it myself. But it was fun running WordStar and SuperCalc and MS Basic. It may not have the power but I wonder how may of today's computers will still be running in thirty years.

Here is some information about the Osborne I:

Introduced: April 1981
Price: US $1,795
Weight: 24.5 pounds
CPU: Zilog Z80 @ 4.0 MHz
RAM: 64K RAM
Display:built-in 5" monitor
53 X 24 text
Ports: parallel / IEEE-488
modem / serial port
Storage: dual 5-1/4 inch, 91K drives
OS: CP/M

While the Osborne was a good deal at $1795, it also came bundled with about $1500 of free software:
* CP/M System
* CP/M Utility
* SuperCalc spreadsheet application
* WordStar word processing application with MailMerge
* Microsoft MBASIC programming language
* Digital Research CBASIC programming language

This machine was equipped with the dual density floppy drives which gave it a whopping 182 K per diskette. Now that was when computing was an adventure!