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I recall going to an Osborne sales pitch with my Father. It was my first exposure to a spreadsheet. The machine was cool, but the screen and column limitations were telling. The price, however, was amazing.

I personally had much more success with an early Tandy Model 100, still one of most amazing machines created. I would pack it in my tank bag on my motorcycle, and travel "blog" with it on the road. Then upload the stories to the school BBS over its built in modem. With no moving parts, it easily handled the vibrations that typically accompany motorcycle travel. My cassette tapes, they're not so lucky. They'd almost always have to be rewound to retighten them up after a ride so they could be played.

I always loved the keyboard on that thing, I fashioned cool little feet to give it a nice tilt by cutting the eraser ends off of a couple of pencils, and it really did run forever on those batteries.

The best feature about the word processor was that when you upload the story to someplace else, you could tell it a different column to wrap the lines at (say, 72) vs its 40 column display. You just put the BBS in to "post" mode, and hit the send key, at 300 baud.

Worked like a champ. Simple, fast, light. It would be less bulky today, but it was tough and a real workhorse.

I haven't worked out the numbers for the Osborne and the iPad but I did give a lecture a few years ago at a local university wherefor I estimated how much larger a problem could be handled by a recent computer than a 1980s one. All interesting problems are NP complete so I assumed an exponential order of algorithm (processing time and memory) and found that the modern computer can handle problems about 40% larger than a 1980s computer. Not really a substantial increase for all that extra memory and processor clock speed.

The basic problem is the modern obsession with digital computers. Most interesting problems are either analogue or close to analogue and the idea of converting the problem into the digital domain, running an inefficient algorithm in that domain and then converting the result back will always place a practical upper limit on the speed of computing.

So, yes, the iPad is faster at linear things (adding up a grocery bill, compiling my latest program, etc.) than the Osborne but it's not much faster at interesting things. And, frankly, even most of the linear things (e.g., my word processor) are limited by my typing speed, for which the Osborne was fine.

But I agree that it is more portable.

I vaguely remember seeing Osborn in a store, I think it was Jordan Marsh, Boston Downtown. But the first portable, or better luggable I actually used was Compaq, it has CRT display and it was a dedicated Sniffer box. Pretty heavy, but actually fairly high quality.

One of my friends had an Osborne. I had a lot of fun with it. It had a chess program that I could actually *beat* ..... Good times!

"You could actually take a 1980s-level hardware infrastructure and layer some software with modern capabilities on top of it and get something really quite amazing. You could search for information with Google, keep up with your friends on Facebook, share your ideas over Twitter, collaborate with your colleagues using email and messaging, play an Angry Birds-like game, make a complex spreadsheet, prepare a presentation for a speech."

Being done as we speak, this is being made primarily for computers that need low power mainly for monitoring environments (e.g. water level in a Water tower) and has a wireless capabilities to talk to home. I believe they have a full TCP/IP stack for CP/M implemented.

http://hackaday.com/2009/01/10/n8vem-single-board-z80-computer/

Edited 2011-04-06 00:14 UTC

Personally, I would consider something like Epson HX-20 (1981) or Tandy TRS-100 (1983) as a better contender for the first true portable! Those machines had excellent autonomy and were very light.