My first computer: the Osborne 1
My first sortie into computers was defensive. It was around 1982, and I had this image of a teenager, his face screwed up into a mixture of disgust and disbelief, and the words I imagined coming out of his mouth? “You don’t know how to use a word processor!?”
So—I had the time I was in Carmel Valley looking after my family—I sought computer lessons. As I recall, I found a young man, and he had an early Apple 1, or perhaps it was a 2, with a cathode monitor and a prompt, just like good ol’ DOS would soon have, though I knew neither, yet.
The young man typed in a command, and as I vaguely recall it caused the computer to repeatedly display a word across the monitor. I was underwhelmed.
It wasn’t until a couple of years later, as I was about to embark on my first book, that I saw the Osborne 1 in a showroom in New York City. There was that blinking cursor again. I walked up to it, not unlike the apes in 2001, and tentatively touched it. Something happened but not anything I understood. No doubt I just moved the cursor and received “Incorrect syntax” or some such. I asked the salesman what did it do. And he replied, “What do you want it to do?” Prick.
But it was portable — if by portable you meant lug-able, and I bought it. As I recall it had 96k of Ram, and the floppy discs held about 80k. There was no hard drive. They didn’t show up—for consumers—until a couple of years later, and if I remember a five megabyte hard drive was like $5,000.
The “program” disc went in the left and the “data” disc on the right. It had a miniscule 4 inch monitor that couldn’t even display a full column of “type.” But it had Wordstar and Visicalc, and dBase. And manuals! There were no help files because these was no memory. So i slowly learned it, and “C/PM” the operating system…the precursor to DOS (that’s another story).
I bought a daisy wheel printer, amazed that it typed in both directions. I began my book in a small apartment in New York. The cleaning lady, who would come in once a week from outside of Manhattan, watched me one morning as I was typing, and then asked, tentatively, “Can that thing see upstairs?”
ETHAN RUSSELL:AN AMERICAN STORY
