Osborne Executive

These two Osborne Executive systems were donated by Daniel Leonard Jr. of Amherst, NH, S/N 010505, S/N 018558.

The Osborne Executive was introduced in 1982 at a cost of $2,495. The system included two half-height 5¼-inch single-sided double-density 40 track floppy disk drives, a 4 MHz Z80 CPU, 124 kilobytes of bank-switched memory, a 7-inch 80 character × 24 line amber monochrome CRT, an IEEE-488 port configurable as a Parallel printer port, and an RS-232 compatible 1200 or 300 baud serial port for external modems or serial printers. It weighed 28 pounds, pretty hefty by modern standards. It did not include a battery so it needed to be connected to an AC power source for operation. The Executive included a cooling fan that was not included in the Osborne-1.

It was shipped with the CP/M 3.0 operating system, the WordStar word processor, the SuperCalc spreadsheet program, Personal Pearl database program, Microsoft Basic 5.22, and CBasic 2. The BIOS could automatically detect other format diskettes from Osborne 1, IBM PC under CP/M 86, DEC VT 180, Xerox 820, Cromenco Minidisk and UCSD p-System so that they could be read from CP/M.

The Osborne Executive could also run the UCSD p-System. This is a p-code based operating system written in Pascal.

This system was not shipped in large numbers because it was announced early and therefore dramatically reduced sales of the Osborne-1. The loss of Osborne-1 sales contributed to the bankruptcy of the company. This led to the "Osborne effect", a term referring to the unintended consequence of the announcement of a future product ahead of its availability and its impact upon the sales of the current product.

Double-click on the image for a larger view.

Double-click on the image for a larger view.

The cool display when CP/M 3.0 boots.

The files that are on the CP/M 3.0 boot diskette.