Have a good Idea for this. (Osborne 1)

Okay, so I placed a bid on ebay for one of these but I'm not too sure what I want to do with it yet. I want to mod it for sure, I just can't think of anything. Got any ideas?

 

So no-one has any ideas, Crap.

I havn't thought of anything.
I guess I'll just take an item strike.

 

er, what about making it a working pc with the inside of an AA1?

 

Meh, Why make the one huge and virtually unportable?
LOL, ironic huh? I said that'd make the one not portable but by 1981 standards the osbourne1 was extremely portable.
So yeah, that doesn't seem too interesting. I got a IBMPCJR instead. Anyone have good uses for those?

 

I'd like one of those, but only if it's really cheap! A 4 MHz CPU and 650KB? Awesome! It would be cool if you got at least Windows 3.1 running on it!
It would be hard to mod one of those because where would you find a piece of hardware that would work with it? I mean you can't replace the CPU, RAM, Screen, GRAPHICS!! LOL!!, etc...
If you get my drift...

 

I bought one for ZAR50 way back in the early 90's lol
the Osborne 1 was never trully portable. Even in it's own day reviewers scoffed at the weight of it! You'll give yourself a hernia trying to carry the bloody thing! lol
if you remove all the insides, you'll have more than enough space for a full desktop box. The plastic casing has major shielding coating the inside due to FCC regulations of that era not having computer specific regulations. (the shielding will stop the microwave emissions of radar!!)
the floppy drives each contain a good stepper motor that could be used to build an xy scroller table.
The amber monitor would make a nifty oscilliscope display with a somewhat redesigned circuit to drive it.
But I still wouldn't pay more than fifty Rand for one. (actually, I think I over paid)

 

You paid fifty grand?

Damn, that thing was 12 dollars on Ebay.

 

He said fifty RAND - the south african currency, not grand as in thousand - although when the Osborne 1 came out way back in my youth, it was priced pretty hefty. Here in Denmark it was around the 45 grand in DKK - Around 8 grand USD at that time.

That was the time when "Portable" meant : "You can fly with it as luggage - But don't plan on taking anything else with you, unless you want to pay overweight luggage charges. And if we compare it with our Aspire One's today, you can use almost the same description : "You can fly with it as (carry on) luggage - And you don't need to bring anything else with you."
Just typical for us "airwarriors" that now when we finally have a true lightweight WiFi-enabled PC with enough batterylife for a transatlantic flight, Connexion by Boeing has been shut down. We can only hope that new In-flight ISP "Row 44" will manage to pick up the slack among the international carriers.

 

my mistake.