 Released in 1981 the Osborne 1 was considered to be the first true portable computer which runs on both battery and mains. It has a build in 5 inch screen expandable to 80 columns, two floppy drives, and came with plenty of business software ready to start. The keyboard is used as a cover to protect the monitor and the drives. The Osborne 1 was designed with transportation in mind. It had to be rugged and able to survive being moved about. It is also designed to fit under a passenger seat of any commercial airliner. A modem was designed to fit in the storage compartment under the floppy drives. Although the machine sold quite well the company failed to achieve what it had in mind and after three years the company went into receivership.
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| Osborne 1 |
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| $1,795 basic setup 2 SSSD floppy drives and 40 column screen |
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| A16536 |
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| 1981 |
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| Zilog Z80A CPU running at a frequency of 4Mhz |
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| 4 Kb Rom including Bios and 64Kb Ram. It was possible to expand the memory to 128Kb. The Machine does not use the full 128Kb, instead the extra 64Kb are accessed via memory banking. |
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| The Osborne case is very bulky and was designed in plastic with a white colour, very similar to a small suitcase to fit under an airplane seat. The Keyboard forms the bottom lid of the case, and protected the 5 -inch monitor with two 5.25 inch drives on both sides and two expansion/ storage cases underneath. All the external connections are located on the front panel and two ventilation slots are located one on top and one at the bottom where the carrying handle is located. Some machine had even a cooler fan due to the extra peripherals. Earlier versions the case was slightly different instead the dark blue cover face it was in black and the lock hinges instead on top they were located on the sides. The Keyboard is a full ASCII typewrite-style QWERTY layout which included a numeric keypad and cursor keys. |
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| Display Text at 52×24 in 2 colours mono chrome. The Osborne in order for the screen to show more information has a virtual screen scheme where the physical screen worked as a window to the virtual screen. The virtual screen has a resolution of 102×24. Osborne released a card which changed the resolution to 80 columns; it could also display graphic resolution. Another mod was a composite monitor port which was very popular. |
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| A Simple beeper driven by the CPU |
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1 x RS232 Serial Port, 1 x Parallel Port, 1 x Modem Port, 1 x Monitor port for external monitor, 1 x Keyboard Port.
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| Internal Power supply with +12v, -12v, +5v, -5v conn. |
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| Dimensions 480mm x 360mm x 300mm (W x L x H) Weight including Monitor Approx 15Kg |
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| More or less 10,000 units in USA and Europe |
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