The Osborne 1 debuted in April 1981 with a price tag of $1,795 (which, adjusted for inflation, is close to $5,000), but portability was a real privilege back then, and you had to pay for it. Today, restoring an Osborne 1 is a complicated and almost prohibitive process, so an alternative (that purists flatly reject) is to replace its components with a modern solution while keeping the exterior intact. That brings us to the OsPi project, which removes the original Z80 in favor of a Raspberry Pi running a CP/M emulator and an Arduino interface for the keyboard.
A Matter of Debate
Restorations of computers can be a source of admiration or heated debates on the web. At the end of the day, everyone has their own way of doing things, and practices that some consider positive are condemned by others in record time. One of the first examples that comes to mind is Retr0bright. Its purpose is supposedly to eliminate that nasty smoker-yellow-orange color from ABS plastic. There are dozens of videos on the web proving its effectiveness, and over time other similar techniques have been discovered, but its detractors basically say it weakens the plastic, is temporary, and "removes the character" of the computer or console. If that's enough material for a flame war, imagine a gutted Osborne 1:
Inside the OsPi
Just as its name suggests, the OsPi project only preserves the case and keyboard of the Osborne 1, replacing the original hardware with a Raspberry Pi (model 2 or 3), a 5-inch LED panel instead of the small CRT, and an interface based on the Arduino Micro (or, to cut costs, any clone with the ATmega32U4), programmed with a matrix derived from the code that turns a ZX81 into a USB keyboard. On the software side, we have a basic Raspbian environment loaded with a CP/M emulator, and some tweaks so it starts up with the system every time, without forgetting that it needs a 4:3 aspect ratio on the screen.
The Verdict
The OsPi has two positive aspects: a drastic reduction in weight (the computer weighed 10.7 kilograms), and much simpler maintenance, courtesy of the Raspberry Pi and its memory cards. On the other hand... barely any of the Osborne 1's spirit remains. Personally, I wonder what internal failure occurred. The power supply problems in the Osborne 1 are well documented, and the solution is to install a new capacitor kit, but if there was major damage to its PCB and floppy drives... maybe this is better.
