twhgbo (12/13/82)
Re: mhb5c.1025 : Info on Osborne wanted I have had an Osborne O-1 for over a year (the serial number has four digits, beginning with 1). The original keyboard was buggy--some of the characters were inaccessible when the CAPS lock was off, but this was fixed free in Janu- ary 1982. Once I had to clean up the contacts on the connector for the CRT yoke because the display was jittering. Aside from these items, I have had *no* hardware problems. The "silly little screen" is quite adequate for a single user. The characters are crisp and clear, and show no separation between the dots which make them up. The 52 character window is adequate for most things, and the window moves as you key more than 52 characters (up to 128) on a line. Also, there are con- trols which enable one to move the window to examine text with long lines. (I have heard that a local retailer is "sweetening" the sale of the Osborne by offering a standard b/g 10" composite-video monitor with interface as a "free" add-on.) The original documentation was pretty good, but the revised documentation is much better (although it still has some errors to be corrected, e.g., in the description of how to hook up a Centronics-style printer to the IEEE interface). The complete CP/M manual is *not* included--merely appropriate excerpts. I find that the full CP/M documentation is *very* helpful in doing assembly language programming. There is supposed to be a Technical Manual available, but I have not seen it yet. I would hope that it has details of the functions available in the ROM, and preferably their source code (am I a dreamer?). Support? Well, Osborne keeps in touch with the mailing list, but I have little occasion to call on the (a) dealer for help. I think they could be pretty good. A little annoyed by the "double-density" upgrade proposition. It's supposed to cost $185, but the installation charges make the total closer to $300, and my early version has to spend a couple of weeks in the factory (ugh!). The later production can be upgraded by your retailer, and the installation charge is low- er. I would seriously consider, today, buying a new one with the double-density factory-installed, if possible; the single density disks seem to fill up awful- ly fast (particularly since even a program taking 100H bytes of RAM reqires a 2K block of disk). There are now alternatives with similar bundled software available, but none that I know of with the kind of distribution which Osborne has achieved in a relatively short time. Ted Hildebrandt UNC-Greensboro