Thanks! Yes, the Osborne effect...lol. I did know about that and considered mentioning it in the video but I was also aware of the "Osborne Myth" (further down in the same wikipedia article). Given that the Osborne effect is disputed, (and it would take time explaining it) I left it out. The pre-announcements may have been a factor, but it seems that Osborne just got out-competed by the likes of the Kaypro. Having both machines, I know which one I'd rather use. Terry (Tez) On Sat, Feb 8, 2014 at 12:48 PM, geneb <geneb at deltasoft.com> wrote:

On 02/07/2014 10:57 PM, Terry Stewart wrote: Its really about being first vs later and more refined. Having both I can say Osborne was first and also because of the publishing work better known is some areas. But as a machine it was old before it was on the street. Kaypro, was next generation and over the life of the Z80 based machine had it grow in performance plus it had a far more readable screen at 80 chars (VS osborne 50 char). The greatest limitation was the drives were slow and low density. FYI for those that have NOT used CP/M sure you could run a system with an 80K disk but by time you add utilities and desired programs your out of disk! Experience said that around 250K was ok and 360K was better (per drive). When you combine the above with market (business use and students with cash) It was the application and storage wars. By that I mean systems that were friendly to common and growing pool of applications that expected 80x24 screens plus enough floppy storage to hold more than a minimal system. Those machine were more likely to succeed over those that were marginal. This contributed to Osborne going down with Kaypro growing. Allison

On 02/08/2014 12:11 PM, Fred Cisin wrote: Roger the some meaning of "first". 50 or scroll it was tiny! Also for me scrolling was awkward at best considering I was from the 64x16 days (pre 1979 using PT-VDM1)! The bottom line was most popular software could do odd size screens but not near as nicely. Again roger that! As a by then ery long time use of CP/M (started as a V1.3 user) I found the keypro with 80tr 2 sided DD at roughly 780K to be "reasonable" with three drives of that. Advent Turborom and peronality card was nice. Then again by then I was spoiled by having hard disks systems and a AmproLB+ with SCSI disk. I tended to run near the bleeding edge of mass storage for a while. I was in there building systems with ROMDISK, Ramdisk and both were plagued with the same issue cost and to some extent space and power. The biggest move pre-hard disk I found useful was to get CP/M off the media! Booting to ram was both faster and saved disk space when disks were still a bit cramped. Now when I build a CP/M crate for fun CF, SD makes for more than enough bulk space and 27C010 and 28F parts rule the "rom space". I've long since phased out floppies on other than historical systems. Glad I didn't! Never did. Measured it and it was pretty painful at 12V CRT and video board ate 40W alone the rest of the system was about 100W. That meant your portable battery was a 18ah gell cell for about maybe an hour or two. If all the supplies were of switch mode it was maybe possible to get it down some but the CRT was killer. I did some early work in the make it portable arena (1980) when the Z80 2W alone! Add the usual TTL, DRAM, video and your in the 60W range and needed three voltages. Then you need display as the keyboard was not all that bad using 8048. CRTs of the day use 6.3V or 12.6 ad 150 or 300ma. thats 1.9W just making heat and the 12-15Kv to make light was in the 15W band. There were few lower power CRTs but not that much lower. Portable battery computing had to wait on CMOS and LCD to get down there. The first LCDs in the 80char range were not all that great to look at either. He believed his own hype. Got mine free many years later. Met him once back then, a pleasant sort that could sell cars. Got to meet many in the 76-83 window and most were either technically smart but business crazy or business savvy and devoid of tech know how. A few we still hear about were both technical and business aware. The rare ones had a solid feel for where tech was going and could do now and what the user needed to be useful. It was exciting times as often the tech and the software were evolving on what seemed a nearly daily basis. Allison