Last week I made a post asking if I should buy an old vintage monitor.
Well, I went back to the recycled goods store this week and it was still there, so $30 later I have it, and it seems to just work*
There’s very little about this monitor on the internet, so I’m thinking of documenting as much as I can about it, especially as it’s Osborne branded so there could be some interesting history behind it.
* The power button is stuck on, and it does an occasional unsettling arc sound and the image slightly distorts for a millisecond. I believe the latter is fairly common among old CRTs but I don’t know much more than that.
My grandpa had a monitor like this - it came with a Osborne computer he bought in the mid 1990s. It was either a 486 or Pentium 1 (can’t remember) and came with an Osborne-customized version of Windows 3.1 along with some floppy disks and CDs with Osborne software on them.
He was still using that same computer, with the same OS, until he moved into a retirement home in the late 2010s. He only really used it for writing stuff in some old version of Word, and playing Italian card games (Scopa, Briscola, etc).
I’m not sure what happened to the computer since it was all gone the last time I visited his house after he passed away. I live in the USA but he was in Australia so it was hard for me to try and keep on top of things like that.
I imagine a lot of these went that way unfortunately, including this one. They were difficult to use on Windows 95 onwards as far as I’ve found due to the SVGA resolution being interlaced, making them more tempting to toss once the Osborne PC became obsolete.
It’s quite amazing he continued using it up to the 2010s, but I suppose when you have a completely offline system that already meets your needs, then it can’t really go obsolete.
Yeah I’m surprised it lasted that long. He never used the internet or mobile phones and the Windows 3.1 PC was probably the only piece of modern-ish technology he used.