The Osborne 1 is the first commercially successful portable microcomputer which was released on April 3 1981, by the group of Osborne Computer Corporation. The weight of this computer was 10.7 kg(24.5 lb) and cost was US$1,795 and run the CP/M 2.2 operating system. Directly powered from a main socket and it had no on-board battery. It was still classed as a portable device since it could be hand-carried when packed. In that time the computer shipped with large bundle of software that was almost equivalent in value to the machine itself, a practice adopted by other CP/m computer vendors at the time.
The Osborne 1 was developed by Adam Osborne and designed by Lee Feldstein. And it was first announced in early 1981. Osborne decided to break the price of computer. The computer where design was based on largely on the Xerox Notetaker a prototype developed at Xerox PARC in 1976 by Alan Kay.
The hardware used in this Osborne 1 are:
- Dual 5¼-inch, single-sided 40 track floppy disk drives ("dual density" upgrade available)
- 4 MHz Z80 CPU
- 64 kilobytes main memory
- Fold-down 69 key detachable keyboards doubling as the computer case's lid
- 5-inch, 52 character × 24 line monochrome CRT displays, mapped as a window on 128 × 32character display memory
- Parallel printer port configurable as an IEEE-488 port
- RS-232 compatible 1200 or 300 baud Serial port for use with external modems or serial printers
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