OSI and Byte Magazine

[billdrom]

I got to wondering when did Ohio Scientific first start to advertize in Byte magazine.
I decided to research the first year of Byte. But what is the first year of Byte? Byte's first issue was published in September 1975 which means only four issues in 1975 and there was only one OSI advertisement in December. So I looked at every issue from 1975 and 1976, 16 issues in all.
I always thought that OSI started in Hiram, Ohio and then moved to Aurora, Ohio later on. It turns out that the first two ads gave an address of Hudson Ohio.
The first ad was in issue #4 on page 102 of the December 1975 Byte. At the time they called it the 6000 Series Computer Family and you could get a 6501 CPU chip and the bare superboard for $49.00. The superboard is also known as the OSI-400 board. This was a quarter page ad.

The second ad was in issue #6, February 1976 on page 73. In this ad they introduced the OSI-300 computer trainer along with the 6000 series, Still in Hudson, Ohio.

The OSI-400 System was featured in the "Whats New" column of issue 13 in September of 1976 on page 74 and their new half page ad was on page 75.
It says Meet the New OSI-400 Computer System. They are now in Hiram, Ohio.

The fourth ad was the same as the third. It appeared in issue #14 in October 1976 on page 29 of the magazine.

Their fifth ad on page 17 of issue #15 in November, 1976 is OSI's first full page ad with color where they introduce the Challenger computer.
They offer the Challenger 65 and Challenger 68, the CPU expander board with Z-80 and IM6100 and single and dual floppy drives.
They spell their name wrong by leaving the final s off of Instruments. The photo of the computer does not have Challenger written on the front panel.
It only has OSI on the left hand edge of the label.

The sixth ad in issue 16 of the December 1976 magazine is on page 4 and is the same full page ad as the fifth from last month.
Name is still spelled wrong.
The ads seem to be getting closer to the front and larger as time goes on.

[billdrom]

I am replying to my own post so I can bypass the three attachment limit and post the last advertisement.
This is the final ad from December 1976 Byte magazine.

[nama]

Some great insight into the early beginnings of the company...good find.

[dave]

Very interesting! I had never seen those ads. By the time I heard about OSI, they had just introduced the 500 board, although I remember their SSJ was full of 400-series references.

I find these old Byte magazines just as fascinating now as I did back then, although for different reasons. What's most amazing to me, looking back from 2011, is how much trust and patience people had to send off a check and a clip-out (or photocopied) magazine back-page order form to somewhere in Ohio to get something as expensive and complex as a computer (or kit) sight unseen.