One of the big things which I have been eagerly waiting to share about I finally can. As of yesterday I am officially an owner of an Osborne OCC4 "Vixen". The previous owner and I have been in talks about the purchase for awhile now and finally having a good day to go out for the 2+ hour drive I finally have my hands on this awesome piece of hardware. A few things to also note from this is that it came with a box of disks and what seem to be the original manuals/documentation for the system, while the system is in good cosmetic condition there seem to be some cracks at the hinges of the system which I am currently thinking of ways to repair in a form of lightly applied epoxy or something more unnoticeable, I do not want to do any massive changes to the look/feel of the system more so just want to clean it up and fix any potential weak points. Finally the previous owner mentioned that some disks might not work which he is not sure is related to disk rot or maybe the floppy drive heads need cleaning, Because of that I was thinking on bringing it to the next Workshop for that reason. Aside from those issues the system is quite immaculate, comes with the original back panel still and I even obtained an Epson dot matrix printer that was fitted to work with it. I cannot wait to dive into this system and I hope that any little bit of help from others who know of the system or may actually have the system (Such as Mike L. or DJ) could share any tips for maintaining the system long term and what to watch out for. Here's hoping a fun start on a unique system. -Lou
On Sun, 17 Jun 2018, Lou via vcf-midatlantic wrote:
One of the big things which I have been eagerly waiting to share about I finally can. As of yesterday I am officially an owner of an Osborne OCC4 "Vixen".
Nice find! There aren't too many of these around.
Finally the previous owner mentioned that some disks might not work which he is not sure is related to disk rot or maybe the floppy drive heads need cleaning, Because of that I was thinking on bringing it to the next Workshop for that reason.
Do you have a way to use ImageDisk to create diskettes from IMD image files? If you do, Dave Dunfield has the system disk images on his site: http://www.classiccmp.org/dunfield/img/index.htm Also, Bit Savers has a number of image files, including the demo I was running at VCFE: http://www.bitsavers.org/bits/Osborne/Vixen/_floppy_images/ Engineering drawings and schematics are here: http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/osborne/vixen/
I cannot wait to dive into this system and I hope that any little bit of help from others who know of the system or may actually have the system (Such as Mike L. or DJ) could share any tips for maintaining the system long term and what to watch out for.
I'm planning on attending the workshop at the end of June. If you don't have a means of making diskettes, I could bring some with me. Mike Loewen mloewen@cpumagic.scol.pa.us Old Technology http://q7.neurotica.com/Oldtech/
participants (2)
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Lou -
Mike Loewen