What Machine was YOUR First Programming Fun

Every programmer remembers that first machine they got their fingers on. Those clunky boxes and true floppy diskettes of yore. FairCom employees went in search of a past relic to present to our company president for Christmas.

The Osborne -1 Portable, vintage 1981. (And oh what stories it brought back.) Sporting a 4 KHz Z80A microprocessor, 64 Kb of RAM and a 5" monochrome monitor, this robust machine was designed for rugged environments. (Think hacker apartments and dark basements.) A truly portable, flexible (remember why they call them floppies?) workhorse, our president spent many, many hours glued to the enormous screen loading CP/M into the wee hours of the morning. Our specimen even came with the original WordStar on those floppies!

Barring any recent C compilers for this breakthrough machine of its time, we'll try to keep him focused on our next release.

What was your first love? Send us your stories! We love to hear from our users. And we're always looking for those original c-tree applications still running reliably everyday around the world. We hope to share the most interesting ones with you soon.