Check out these antiques.
http://www.oldcomputers.net/ads/ads.shtml
I actually owned one of those old Osborne computers. I can't recall ever getting it to do anything interesting, other than a word-processing program.
Oh my goodness. That takes me back!
Hubby was in school working toward his programming degree and I remember his buddies going on about their 'Trash-80's'. (Never mind that they were programming mainframes with punch cards at the time... :buggedout: )
About that time, or soon after, I worked for a software developer/publisher that specialised in the Timex-Sinclair machines (I got to test programs and games on the ZX 81 and TS 1000) and put out a magazine for owners. It makes me laugh when I recall that people said those keyboards were too small! If they only knew. After that, I worked for another small development house that specialised in Commodore (and soon branched into IBM PC's): the Amiga was touted as the 'big' thing just before I quit. I still have a full set of the discs we produced for the C64...oh my.
Yes; I am old...
Through the breadth of the 80s, I served loyally in the "Commodore"'s fleet...aboard the VIC-20, the 64 and even the Amiga(the USS Indiannapolis of Commodore's American line.) The Amiga was a bit ahead of its time, but quickly got lost in the next wave PC clones. There was a line of games the surpassed all others(on any machine). One house was DMA Design...who years later would become Rockstar, who will forever be enshrined thanks to their Grand Theft Auto games.
In high school, I cut my programming teeth on the (then!) cutting-edge Trash-80s! Tandy/Radio Shack was THE name in the suburbs during that first round of the home computer wars.
To paraphrase the country song, I was nerd, when nerd wasn't cool. One of the defining elements of that time was Bits & Bytes. PBS would jam the short episodes of this admittedly hokey show in after DR WHO or THE TRIPODS. It was where I honed my knowledge about things like "Bootstrapping DOS" and made sure I didn't embrarrass myself by confusing ROM and RAM.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Il4Z8s00Txo
[You may(I doubt it!) recognize Canuck singer/kids TV host Billy Van as the befuddled nerd-in-training]
All the while laughing at friends with IBM clones, with text games like Zork....folks who had to fork out cash for a card that gave them FOUR COLORS! With no thought of a future as PC slave. :teddyr:
Interestingly(or from my inner cynic, irritatingly!) there is still a thriving Amiga community in Europe. Even the 64 still gets a lotta love. It's like some kind of SLIDERS episode when I cruise the Commodore oriented sites from the UK...a universe where the machines took hold and weren't shortchanged by poor corporate management.
I had one of those TRS-80 color computers back in the day. In fact, I still have it buried somewhere in a box in the basement.