Floppydays Vintage Computing Podcast

The Osborne 1 with Lee Felsenstein Welcome to episode 91 of the Floppy Days Podcast for May, 2019. In the timeline for personal computer introductions, we are now in the year 1981.  For this episode we are going to be talking about the Osborne 1. The Osborne 1 was the first commercially successful portable microcomputer, released on April 3, 1981 by Osborne Computer Corporation (OCC).  It was powered by the Z80 CPU at a blazing 4MHz, weighed 24.5 lb, cost US$1,795, and ran the CP/M operating system. It was powered from a wall socket, as it had no on-board battery, but is a portable device since it can be hand-carried when packed.  The computer shipped with a large bundle of software that was almost equivalent in value to the machine itself. The Osborne 1 was the brain child of Adam Osborne and was brilliantly engineered by Lee Felsenstein.  So, who better to have help me talk about the machine than Lee Felsenstein himself! For this show, we’re going to spend some time with Lee talking about the history surrou