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__billylee
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Joined: Mon Dec 05, 2011 1:59 am

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Post by __billylee »

Hello everyone here at this site. I just joined and find the posts interesting. I've been an OSI buff since 1976 when I purcasaes some of Mike's bare 400 system boards and constructed a 400 system. It was a 1K unit with the 440 video board, the 400 CPU, and a 430 cassette I/O board. I built an ASCII keyboard from a Radio Shack ASCII Keyboard kit and I was underway. But no, from the first it didn't work. I fumbled with it for about one month. Well to say the least, needed Mike to help me out. Since OSI was in Hiram Ohio at that time and only a short distance from me, I drove up in the snow one January day in 1977 with the mass of boards on the front seat of the car. I went into the office at OSI, which was located in a one time Pizza shop. There I found Mike with dirty hands, sleeves rolled up, putting togeather circuit boards.
We got to know each other over coffee and while he "Shot" my system. None of the blame was OSI's fault. Seeing that I socketed all the ICs, some of the sockets were bad on the cpu(400) board. Having gotten the system up and running with Mike's help, I drove home in the snow happy to get into programming: something I knew nothing about. Those days were devoted to ML and boy did I have lots to learn.
As time passed, I expanded the unit to 4K of memory and purchased Tom Pitman's "Tiny Basic" for my unit. Tiny took hours to type in using the OSI ML Monitor. Tiny Basic got me out of the ML world for a while.
In 1978 I purchased a 500 CPU board and the Microsoft 9 Point Basic. This was the "CAT's Meow" and I learned lots of good stuff with that 500 attached to the backframe.
In 1978 Mike introduced the Super Board and the C1P and in April 1979, I purchased a C1P with 8k of static ram on board. The C1P was a very goor introductory machine. It was all there on a single circuit board. With the C1P I learned and became expert. I began to write articles for Micro Magazine about the OSI C1P. My articles appeared for many months in Micro and later I wrote for Compute Gazette.
I still have the 400 system boards, but my ASCII keyboard has was lost in some shuffle here in the "Cellar." My C1P is still running after 26 years. I always kept the docs, some are dog eared and frayed, for OSI stuff that I acquired. I have many of the Application Notes, news letters and Small System Journals published by OSI. I still have tons of Micro and other rags that published articles about the OSI systems. I'm not sure if I have any old cassette tapes mixed in with my junk.
Well that's all I have for an introduction. Maybe more later.
Bill
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