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*                                                            *
*                         CYBERSPACE                         *
*         A biweekly column on net culture appearing         *
*                in the Toronto Sunday Sun                   *
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* Copyright 1999 Karl Mamer                                  *
* Free for online distribution                               *
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Let's get one thing straight: old computers are not boat 
anchors. Moses Znaimer has demonstrated with his MZTV museum 
collection of forty-year-old idiot boxes that there's value in 
techno-junk. Following Moses' lead, I have been trying to spend 
the remaining portion of my single life collecting old 
computers. Before martial bliss forces me to abandon my man-
child ways, my goal is to acquire an Apple Lisa computer. 

A lot of die-hard Mac users don't know about the Lisa 
(circa 1983). Legend has it that Apple founder Steve Jobs 
thought the Apple ][ was the cathode ray tube's pajamas until 
he visited Xerox's fabled Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). At 
PARC, researchers were inventing (and Xerox marketroids were 
subsequently ignoring) the stuff that made Bill Gates a 
billion: mice, drop-down menus, desktop publishing, etc. Jobs 
was stunned that Xerox seemed to have no plans to market 
something like, oh, windows. On returning to Apple, he 
radically changed development plans and produced the Lisa. The 
press went nuts over the first commercially available computer 
with a graphical user interface. I think they just liked the 
trash can.

Despite great press -- the computer appeared in Time 
magazine and on the Today show -- biz guys balked at the price. 
The Lisa quickly vanished from store shelves and, it seems, 
human memory. I hunted the web for information on the computer 
but came up with zilch.
In my quest, I did discovered some interesting web sites 
devoted to preserving the history of the early micro age. 
Retrocomputing (http://techie.phys.sfu.ca/retromuseum.html) is 
a very witty Canadian page that covers a lot of dead languages 
like Logo (a generation of grade schoolers will remember that 
one).

A good hardware-oriented sites is the Obsolete Computer 
Museum (www.ncsc.dni.us/fun/user/tcc/cmuseum/cmuseum.htm). 
Exhibits include the Altair (the first PC) and the SpectraVideo 
(the first major piece of vaporware). The prize in the 
collection is the CP/M-based Osborne 1.

That there was never an Osborne 2 makes the Osborne 1 
very interesting. In the early '80s this creation of John 
Osborne was the ultimate portable. Back then, portable was a 
misnomer. A carrying handle was bolted to a sewing-machine-
sized monster which featured a tiny 3.5" monitor. The handle 
made it portable, you see. Despite a high lugability quotient, 
John "Popeye Arms" Osborne had the market stitched up until his 
hubris ran wild. He started shooting his mouth off about the 
even better Osborne 2 long before there was a product to ship. 
While buyers waited for the Mark 2, cash flow and the company 
vanished.

The Osborne 1 is of great historical significance because 
it offers two important lesson. One, keep your trap shut. Two, 
even if an operating system (OS) has a huge user base, it can 
vanish -- quickly. CP/M was the "standard"  back in the early 
'80s. The CP/M crowd figured there was too much invested in 
their OS for it to ever disappear. Right. If you want to find 
out more about this dead standard, point your browser to 
www.cis.ohio-
state.edu/hypertext/faq/bngusenet/comp/os/cpm/top.html and 
think of Windows.

    Source: geocities.com/lapetitelesson/cs/text

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