The Osborne, the First Portable Computer

[W. Gray]

Introduced in 1981, the Osborne personal computer was the first portable computer. The "cat's meow" weighed 25 pounds and cost $1745. It even had an optional battery pack, which must have taken the portability completely away.  The battery pack offered one hour of run time.

The screen was but five inches wide and could hold only 53 characters side to side, which meant that one could not see the entire width of a letter being composed, but one could scroll back and forth sideways to see the contents of the entire letter.  One could also only see 25 lines of data up and down, but could scroll up and down to see the entire letter.

There was no hard drive. Those two monsters on the sides of the screen are 5.25 inch floppy disk drives each capable of holding only 92,000 kilobytes of information on one side of the disk only. The later 3.5 inch diskettes for MS DOS and early Windows operating systems could hold almost fifteen times as much information.

The Osborn used the C/PM  (Control Program for Microcomputers) operating system and came with Super Calc spread sheet and Word Star word processor.

From its introduction hot Osborne sales reached 10,000 monthly but the computer was gone by the end of 1983, beat out by the IBM with its PC DOS operating system that later became MS DOS.

The last Osborne I remember seeing was in about 1988 thrown up on the top of a heap of government surplus computer equipment in an Air Force office.

[srkruzich]

i remember them, as well as the compaq portable 286 about the same size.

both used a jacobson modem 300 baud to dial out.