************************************************************** * * * CYBERSPACE * * A biweekly column on net culture appearing * * in the Toronto Sunday Sun * * * * Copyright 1999 Karl Mamer * * Free for online distribution * * All Rights Reserved * * Direct comments and questions to: * * * * * ************************************************************** 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.