[whartung]

Back in the day I got to go to a demo and presentation about the machine.

An interesting thing about the design was that it had a 5” screen, but it could only show about 50 columns at a time of the 80 column display. There was a knob you turned to pan the display.

In the end I think the Kaypro was a much better execution of the idea, even with its sharp cornered, steel, shin smashing design.

I certainly did enjoy his books however.

[wduquette]

I had a Kaypro-4 "Plus 88", back in the day. It had a bigger screen than the Osborne, full 80x24, with a VT-100-style keyboard, and came bundled with lots of software, just like the Osborne. The "Plus 88" in the name meant that it had an 8088 coprocessor board with 256KB of memory, on which you could run MS-DOS and dBase II....or you could use it as a RAM drive (remember those?), which is what I did.

Turbo Pascal 1.0 for CP/M-80 came out very shortly thereafter, and as a guy who'd previously used UCSD Pascal on PDP-11 and Apple Pascal on the Apple II (which was just UCSD Pascal), I was in heaven. Great machine; I remember it very fondly.

[MaggieL]

> Back in the day I got to go to a demo and presentation about the machine. > > An interesting thing about the design was that it had a 5” screen, but it could only show about 50 columns at a time of the 80 column display. There was a knob you turned to pan the display.

On mine it's keyboard ctl-left/right arrow. Paint is worn off the metal surround as a result. I don't recall a knob.