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From: rwelch@isis.cs.du.edu (Randy S. Welch)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.misc
Subject: Re: Ohio Scientific
Message-ID: <RWELCH.91Jun5080458@isis.isis.cs.du.edu>
Date: 5 Jun 91 13:04:58 GMT
References: <1991May21.210947.23057@endeavor.intel.com>
	<1991May22.202435.24605@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu>
	<RWELCH.91May22230850@isis.isis.cs.du.edu> <157796@pyramid.pyramid.com>
	<eric.676167523@zen.maths.uts.edu.au>
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In-Reply-To: eric@zen.maths.uts.edu.au's message of 6 Jun 91 00:18:43 GMT

In article <eric.676167523@zen.maths.uts.edu.au> eric@zen.maths.uts.edu.au (Eric Lindsay) writes:

  >In article <RWELCH.91May22230850@isis.isis.cs.du.edu> rwelch@isis.cs.du.edu (Randy S. Welch) writes:
  >>For it's day it was a decent system. 

 >Are we talking about the same machines here? I used OSI Challanger systems of
 >various flavors for three years, and they were just plain junk. Far inferior
 >to the systems you could get from Altair, Imsai, Processor Tech, or SWTPC at
 >the time of the C1P, and to the Northstar and Cromemco systems in the days of
 >the C4. Poor design, poor software, poor manufacturing. And I *liked* the 6502
  >processor. 
  ><csg>

  As I recall, the C1P was round $200-$300, at a time when everyone else was 
  two or three times that cost.  That made up for a lot of strange design 
  ideas, and lousy software.

I never had fortune/misfortune to use the C1 family of machines or the
'personal' machines running OS-65D. I spent most of my time working on
the C3 machines with hard-disks running OS-65U.  Granted 65U had it's
quirks until 1.3/1.4 of the 'OS', it wasn't bad.  Perhaps I was lucky and
we had a good hardware/systems person to take care of things like that.  

What I was mentioning in regards to not a bad system was what you got for
the buck at the time.  Not too many machines did time sharaing ( Cromemco
and SWTPC come to mind ) at that time and when most machine were offering
a 5 or 10 M hard disk you could get from 20-140M on the OSI.  Not to
mention the 6502 at 2Mhz could keep up and sometimes beat a 4Mhz Z80 or
even a 8088 you could live with the quirks... :-)

-randy

--
Randy Welch   Mail to :  randy@bldr.UUCP or rwelch@isis.uucp or 
Boulder, CO              rwelch@isis.cs.du.edu or (303) 442-6717
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