Talk:Ohio Scientific

Relevance of this page
Ohio Scientific was a great starting point for many of us... I learnt to program machine code and basic on a superboard at Ukarumpa_High_School. A very smart engineer had wired up an army surplus printer to the serial port. --PeterMarkSmith 05:56, 29 November 2006 (UTC)

Main page looks fine to me. Please someone elaborate on what is disputed - marcus bennett

NPOV?
Whoever questioned the neutrality has not cared to explain why. It certainly wasn't me!

--PeterMarkSmith 08:18, 8 February 2007 (UTC)

Article issues
There are so many things wrong with this article, I wouldn't even know where to begin. If I wasn't casually familiar with the subject at hand, I'd probably tag this for AFD.

I've never used one, and the casual familiarity comes from being into Commodore machines back in the day, where you'd sometimes find a casual reference to OSI.

There are no references, and while the external links section may satisfy documentation, ''unusual design practices. Most every design was minimal, uncluttered, feature-scant. Think of their hardware and software along the lines of a Model T'' need to be cited. The POV is skewed. One single example All in all, a cheap and fun system for the real hard-core hacker, but not a warm and fuzzy end-user system, like the Apple II. The article is written like someone actually owned one of these, and was woolgathering while writing this article Even so, the disk was a blessing, being much handier than reading and writing cassettes at 1200 baud. Yng varr  13:46, 30 November 2007 (UTC)

OSI article is close enough to what it can and should be
I worked at OSI as a technical writer and application programmer in the early 1980s, leaving with some regret as it began its final, sorrowful tailspin. This article seems accurate as far as it goes; it was probably written by a longtime user or perhaps a developer who worked there. I must agree with Yngvarr's comments, but on the other hand, little could be added that would be of any interest.

For example, the article could note that much of what OSI did began when they got a BASIC interpreter somewhere and wrote a whole operating system in BASIC, using PEEK(adrs) and POKE(adrs, byte) to perform bit-level operations not usually associated with BASIC programming. That let them jump ahead of the competition, but it didn't have much of a growth path. Then they lost the last copy of the source code, which they were struggling to recover by reverse compilation as the curtain began to fall. Like all other small computer efforts, OSI was exterminated by the Apple Macintosh and the IBM PC. Unpleasant dysfunctions occurred as the end drew near.

Little of this story could be neutrally described, and little if anything is available that could serve as a reference for it. For example, I probably have the last copy on earth of the OS-65U Reference Manual, having written pieces of it, but I scarcely think it is worth putting online. Such as it is, the article probably says as much as deserves to be said, and despite Yngvarr's generally valid comments I think the article should remain available. It does no harm, and is definitely better than just saying nothing about this small but not irrelevant piece of the history of computers. Ornithikos (talk) 18:14, 25 June 2011 (UTC)

New information supports improving the article
82.35.98.72 added a big block of information, but it needs copy editing, and the collection in which it is embedded, which had little structure, now has less. When I have more time, I plan to restructure the article to be more organized, and hopefully less like a memoir, as the comment atop the article requests. I won't change any factual statements, which I'm not qualified to do. I'm glad to see someone else knowing about OSI and wanting to see it remembered. I retain for OSI a lingering affection that I can't explain, given that I never saw a company blow its feet off with more enthusiasm. Ornithikos (talk) 05:22, 30 July 2011 (UTC)

Getting the lineage straightened out
The only sources I've found are not chronological, and mention various models and sub-versions in essentially random order. From what I can tell there were three generations. The first was the OSI 400/Superboard, which was a single-board machine with no keyboard etc. I know there was an OSI 500 and 600 after that, but the sources are very confusing on what models mapped to these designs. For instance, it seems that the Challenger II was based on the OSI 500 and the Challenger (no II) was the OSI 600? And the various C2P-4 etc seems to follow no logic.

I'd really like to line up the models with the generations in the History section. If anyone has some sort of chart that lines all of this up, I'd greatly appreciate it.

Maury Markowitz (talk) 15:41, 25 December 2012 (UTC)

Floppies unreadable on any other system.
The article seems to criticize the machines for not using a standardized floppy disk controller. Did standardized controllers even exist in 1978?--Drvanthorp (talk) 19:04, 13 January 2013 (UTC)


 * Disk operating systems; their controllers; the magnetic format of the disks; and even the physical format (hard sector -v- softy sector) were far from standardised in 1978. One of the big mistakes that OSI made was to produce disk operating systems that were not even compatible with each other.  Putting aside their CP/M (which was for the Z80 processor), OSI produced OS/65D and OS/65U.  OS/65D(eveloper) was intended for a development environment, and contained the disk operating system; BASIC interpreter; assembler and an extended monitor.  Once an application was developed, it was intended to be run by the end user under OS/65U(ser).  This just contained a disk operating system and a BASIC interpreter.  The problem was that the two products were not even compatible with each other, and once the application was developed on OS/65D, it then had to be patched to work with OS/65U's slightly different disk operating system.  Even the BASIC interpreters provided with the two products were not quite the same as their I/O handling was different.  86.150.66.211 (talk) 17:18, 21 October 2013 (UTC)