I have two of these boards - they appear to be almost identical. 1983 Microsoft - I thought they were serial boards. I probably pulled them out of my first Microsoft computer. I also have two microsoft 'Green Eyed' mice. One appears to VERY vintage. It has a steel ball in it and the connector looks like they bought parts at a Radio Shack store and built the end connector. I think I'm going to put them up on eBay with my Victor 9000.

I read on this board that these are unobtainable, 🤣. My first job after college was in 1981 at an insurance company, in 1982 or 3 I was asked by the SVP of Marketing to write basic programs that would generate the clients insurance agents policies on their 'luggables' instead of requesting them from our mainframe division. It was a huge success. The mainframe group could no longer charge us $9 a policy because now the agents would do them on their own computers, paper AND best of all - immediately. I saved my boss over $300,000 the first year in overhead. So they gave me a secretary and a new office, and they gave me a large board room - and in that board room in a row down one wall was every microcomputer and 'luggable' that our agents were using. The company let me purchase about eight different computers. This included the original Apple IIe, the first IBM, the Victor 9000, a Kaypro, a Lisa and an Apple III, Osborne 1, and of course a Trash 80 Radio Shack - which was really not a fair epithet as it wasn't a terrible computer. But of all of those the Victor 9000 was the bad boy. Well - maybe the apples too - although I never was an Apple guy. My main workstation was a Xerox 820, with two 8" disc drives. Running CPM-80. The big upgrade was when we got a motherboard that ran CPM-86. And the floppies doubled their storage as I remember. I also had a 20 megabyte (yes, megabyte) CORVUS hard drive. About the size of a LARGE briefcase that weighed about 80 pounds. It was 'networkable' - by using flat cables. Almost all of those computers had their own basic language - which actually generally only varied in very little ways - but in order to get the massive programs I was writing to both work properly and be able to generate the media I was mailing out to the insurance brokers it was easier to have all of these computers. I also have some very early versions on 8" floppy of some of the software - like an Ashton-Tate dBaseII disk that has the serial number "00218" or something on it. I loved dBase-II. I tried Knowledgebase, and a piece of crap called "Personal Pearl". When Clipper came out (compilable dBase II!) I dived in completely and became a rock star in the 'local programming world'. At one point I was invited by the Clinton Campaign to come aboard and create their datasystems for the first campaign. I said no, as I had just become a partner in a new (and very successful) mortgage banking startup. Yes - we were the ones that collapsed the economy in 2007, 🤣. Not really - most of us were mad that Slick Willy deregulated Fannie and Freddie - and we knew what the outcome would be. So many stories, a fun time to be involved. I remember being in Dallas for a big computer convention and going to see Bill Gates speak. Must have been the middle or late 80's. All of sudden we heard and saw this MASSIVE chopper fly overhead and land on the roof - at that moment it suddenly became clear to me just how big these 'little machines' were going to be - it was Gates of course and his entourage. I was able to sit on the front row for his speech which was interesting, but he wasn't. I enjoyed sitting courtside in the Atlanta Hawks arena about four spaces away from Ted Turner and Jane Fonda. That was cool.