Thanks to the 3D printing wizardry of @trevorflowers@machines.social, I now have an adorably tiny replica of an Osborne 1 on my desktop!
The Osborne 1 was my first computer (well, my family’s)…and second, and third, as we picked up a couple more from friends as they moved on, allowing me to swap parts around to keep one running.
Two 5.25″ floppy drives, a 5″ 52×20-character green screen, ran CP/M. A “portable” computer, it was the size of a suitcase, weighed 25 pounds, and didn’t have a battery, but because you could flip the keyboard up and latch it onto the front to lug it around, it counted as portable!
I typed early school papers with Wordstar (which coincidentally doubled as early training for HTML, as it used printer control codes to tell our dot-matrix printer to print \bbold\b or \uunderlined\u text; when I discovered HTML, it was an instant “oh, yeah, this makes sense” moment), played Snake before it showed up on Nokia mobile phones, and taught myself the basics of BASIC by translating a Choose Your Own Adventure book into a simple text-based adventure game.
Though our full-size Osbornes were disposed of years ago, I’m ridiculously pleased to have this lil’ guy on my desk now.
