Ohio Scientific, anyone?

From: Starling <starling_at_umr.edu>
Date: Sat May 10 21:59:03 1997

Woo-hoo!!

I also have some OSI equipment... LOTS of it, in fact. However, it's
all in Texas and I'm in Missouri. But the good part is that I also have
a lot of documentation (boxes and boxes of it) and lotsa 8" floppies that
presumably go to it.

However...

I have only tried turning on one of the 3 machines (a C4 I think?) and
it's floppy drive was hosed. This is a little desktop unit that has
keyboard built in and has WOODEN sides. The other two are rackmount
machines that are heavy and ugly. I haven't tried turning them on
because they required a dumb terminal to see any output on them.

My plan is to graduate from College in a year and then after settled in a
job (and home with lotsa storage space), start restoring them. And in
the process make a web page consisting of all the documentation I have on
the beast. However, I'm afraid that in the mean time I can't directly
help you very much.

I can say, however, with a good deal of certainty that the OSI C1P is
_NOT_ Apple II compatable, although it probably does have a 6502 in it.
As far as I know, all OSI equipment ran CP/M or a kind of multi-user
CP/M. I have an OSI 8-something or another that was built to be a
multiuser system (like 2-8 users) with multiple processors (mixed Z80s and
6502s). Mine only has one 6502 in it.

Maybe I'll grab some of the OSI documentation when I go home to Texas at
in 2 weeks and start the webpage. However, my summer project is to
restore my Apple Lisa & document it.

Anyone be able to help me on this? :)


I guess if you have any specific questions/needs regarding the OSI stuff, I
see what I can do... good luck with it! It's a nifty machine. There
are a few other OSI owners on the net I've talked to, including a guy
somewhere in {Washington|Oregon|California} that uses his C4P Challenger
to control lights & stuff at a planetarium. The C4P was a hacker's dream
because it had lotsa serial, parallel, outputs plus a "experimenter's
port" which was actually like an external connection to the data bus I
believe. It also had sound and color graphics that allegedly rivaled the
Apple II in its time (perhaps before its time).

Like I said... good luck with it! I'll help out as I can, but all my OSI
stuff is in Texas.

chris starling
Received on Sat May 10 1997 - 21:59:03 BST