By Scott Colvey on Sunday, 02 September 2007
 Back in 1981, the state-of-the-art portable PC was quite literally the size of a suitcase. Yes, it had a handle, but at nearly 11kg (25lbs in old money), you needed the upper body strength of Lou Ferrigno to lug the Osborne 1 around.
Actually, since it required a mains socket for power, it was about as much use out and about to the travelling executive as a washing machine on a trolley is a roaming domestic (although it was still small enough to qualify as hand-luggage on a flight and an optional, enormous, battery pack was also available).
The Osborne 1 was the product of the Osborne Computer Corporation, founded by Adam Osborne, an American entrepreneur. Osborne was a regular attendee of the Homebrew Computer Club throughout the 1970s and early 1980s (Along with Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, of Apple fame), which is where he met a young electronics engineer called Lee Felsenstein. Osborne's business nous coupled with Felsenstein's technical prowess, (to mention the shared interest in the emerging world of home computers) led to the development of the Osborne 1.
The pair's idea was to build a portable (or 'transportable', anyway) computer, but the Osborne 1's design was hardly an marvel of miniaturisation. In fact, it was really just a case of gathering together some existing electronics components - chief among them two 5.25in floppy disk drives and a 5in CRT monitor tube - and finding a way to fit them all together in a neat and tidy package. The design incorporated a full-size keyboard that when not in use, fitted flush against the screen and drives, snugly enclosing the whole shebang.
Snug, however, didn't mean small - this was a computer with its own fuse box. The Osborne 1's 5" screen seems was minuscule even by old standards and while it could display up to 24 lines of text, they were only 52 characters long (though you could scroll left and write to see up to 128). A suite of business applications were also supplied as standard, including WordStar - the word processor that went on to become hugely successful, before being completely trounced by Microsoft Word.
The Osborne 1 apparently sold 10,000 units a month for the first year of its life. We say "apparently" because it's not so easy to obtain the accounting records of an American company that went bust 24 years ago. That's right - just two years after the Osborne 1's launch, the Osborne Computer Corporation was no more and the blame lies firmly at the feet of its founder. Adam Osborne famously revealed details of the next model long before it was due for launch, resulting in a catastrophic sales slowdown of the Osborne 1 as wary buyers waited for something better.
Released: 1981
Price: From US$1,800
Processor: Zilog Z80, running at 4MHz
Memory: 64Kb
Screen: 5" green screen
Storage: Two 5.25-inch single-sided floppy disk drives
Optional modem available for basic network communications, battery pack for portable use.
Size: 520 x 370 x 220mm
Weight: 11.8kg
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