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All right kids, gather round. This here is an Osbourne 1, the first really successful portable personal computer. It ran CP/M, had 64KB of RAM and two 90KB(!) single sided, single-density 5¼" floppy disks, and provided you with a real keyboard and a 5" monochrome CRT display that showed 52 columns of ASCII text.

Yes, people actually used that tiny little screen. But there *was* an upgrade you could install so you could use a monochrome CRT monitor with 80 columns, or you could connect a real serial terminal to it and use it that way.

@mos_8502 I have one! Belonged to my grandfather and it's the first family computer we had! Still all works!

Aral Balkan

@vwbusguy @mos_8502 “Personal computer… belonged to my grandfather”… now I feel old :)

@aral @mos_8502 In fairness, it was his business computer. He tracked inventory and customer accounts on it for his machine shop business with SuperCalc and other programs.

@aral @mos_8502 I found papers I'd typed up in elementary school on the floppies, as well as docs where he used it for budgeting or trying to navigate medical and insurance issues towards the end of his life when he had Parkinsons (and trying to figure out finances for my grandmother after he was gone). He was still using this as his main computer up until around 2000-2001 when he couldn't type any more.