Back in 1975, theMITS Altair 8800 was the first computer available for computer hobbyists. It came in a kit form that you could build yourself for $395, or a pre-assembled model for $495. This unit’s 256 bytes (not K or Megs!) was only programmable from switches on the front of the unit. Forget about a monitor as you read your program by looking at LED’s above the switches. There was an eight-inch floppy available for storing all of those long programs that had to be written in hex. There were no such things as a high level operating environment like Basic, or C++, until a couple of young hackers named Bill Gates and Paul Allen wrote a Basic compiler for this system. MITS was Microsoft’s first customer.

Since I was four when the Altair came out I really had no interest in it. I was taking apart telephones, tape recorders, and getting ready for my 75-In-One kit from Radio Shack. I also missed the awful attempts at a computer by Atari with the model 400 and 800. I did however, enjoy my 2600 gaming system by them.

It was not until the 1981 release of the Osborne O1 "portable" that I became interested in computers. I use the term portable computer loosely since it weighed in at almost 25 pounds and was the size of a sewing machine. This size was part of Adam Osborne’s genius; the system fit within the constraints of airline carry-on luggage. For the first time you could buy a computer that would work in the office, at your house, and on the road! On top of that, it was the first system where all of the software you needed, Word Processing, Spreadsheets, Database, Operating System, and Basic were all included with the hardware!

Now my father, an entrepreneur (or so he claims), thought this computer was the greatest thing since sliced bread since he could bring it home from the office at night. This was the early 80’s remember. Offices were just beginning to get computers, and homes most likely did not. His bringing the computer home lasted for only a little while once I got a hold of it. I could not wait for him to get home from work (sure dad, it was you I wanted to see, not the computer) and I would tinker with the system to all hours in the night. Dad was unable to get any work done on it at home, but he did get free technical support out of the deal! It was not until I started taking his system apart to see how it worked that he decided it was time for me to get my own Osborne computer. Plus he probably did want to get some work done at night.

Now with my own computer, I’m out of control. Osborne made a 300 baud (you think 28.8k bps is slow!?) internal modem that got me on the BBS systems in town. Meeting new friends at the Osborne and Kaypro computer clubs, and finding new worlds online, it was not long before I found a local attorney to "sponsor" a second phone line in my house. With this advertising sponsored line "The Missing Link BBS" was created. A faster 1200 baud modem brought joys of ANSI-art moving cursors and a newfound skill of reading at 1200 bps, plus the much needed touch-tone dialing rather than pulse!

Now remember, these are the days of 4 MHz Z-80 processors, incompatible CP/M operating systems, monochrome monitors, 60k of RAM with 4k of ROM, 185k 5¼ inch floppies and very slow modems. Hard drives were out of the question as they were more expensive than the $1795 Osborne system price tag! Funny thing is, with all of this low technology, my Osborne system boots in about 3 seconds from a floppy! I do not even want to time my 250 MHz K-6 machine with 64 Megs of RAM, and an Ultra/33 hard disk!

It was not until IBM created the 5150 PC in 1981 and everyone and their brother began to clone it that computing really took off. Before the IBM-PC every CP/M computer required DIFFERENT software, disk formats, displays and Basic. It was nearly impossible to exchange software or documents with a friend. We do not even think twice about this ability today.

Since these days of yesteryear I have had more computers than I can count: Commodore V-20’s, C-64’s, a Northstar Horizon, a Columbia IBM/PC Clone, NEC V-20 systems that were faster than 8080 CPU’s (sounds like the K6’s of today!), a PS/2 (IBM’s attempt to kill clones), 286’s (still use one with The Complete answering machine hardware for my voicemail), 386’s, 486’s (my fish cam), and now the Pentium revolution (I even use a dual Pentium system as my home file server).

So enjoy your multi-MHz computer, megabytes of RAM, and massive hard drive space of today, and think about how hard we had it when we started this computer revolution of today. It has come a long way since then. A friend of mine took a look at the Osborne literature with its $1795 price (just low enough to promote credit card buyers to purchase it) boldly marked on the specifications sheet and laughed. Today if a company put their price on literature, it would be out-dated before it left the printers.

We’ve come a long way baby.

Byte makes fun of my computer – This is a first revision model! http://www.byte.com/art/9509/img/505040c1.htm