On 14 Aug 99, at 15:36, Jim Meagher wrote:

> I too, started with VC (and WordStar).... on a 50 pound Osborne "portable"
> computer with a 6" TV screen.  I thought I'd died and gone to heaven when
> they gave me a PC.  (You mean you can store data on BOTH sides of the
> floppy? <grin> A whole 360K???? WOW!!!!)

  The first useful machine I owned outright was also an Osborne I.  [I
believe my Dad still has four of them....]
  Although it certainly *felt* like 50 by the end of the day, the weight
was actually only 25 pounds (30 with accessories).  I took mine in a backpack
for 70 miles on the cack of a friend's motorcycle once; on arrival, we were
told that *anything* you would do with an Os I could be done as well with a
TRS-80 Model 3....
  The screen was actually 5", not 6".  Standard answer to "How can you read
those tiny characters?" was "They're the same size as on a typewriter."  But
that was before installation of the 80-/104-column card (base config showed
24 lines of 53 characters)....
  [And DOS 1.0 was 320K on a 2-sided floppy.  360K didn't come along until
later -- DOS 2.0?]

  The spreadsheet that came with the Osborne was SuperCalc, not VC.  I think
the last version I used was CA-SuperCalc 5.1A under DOS, then switched to
Quattro Pro.  [My nominee for worst spreadsheet product of all time would be
Microsoft's MultiLink.  Perhaps they were afraid VisiCalc would sue, but as
far as I know, they were the only ones to come to market with a cell-labelling
scheme that was just plain BROKEN.]


David G

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