This mini forum is intended to provide a simple means of discussion about the OHIO Scientific  CHALLENGER 4P computer. If you want to share your own experience or memories, or add relevant information about this system: post a message!

The very first program I ever sold, was to a guy named Cam. He paid me 20.00 to write it while I was still in college. Written for the IIP I think. I still have a cassette of it. Sneaky Snake. The basic premise was a random number popped up on the screen in a random spot. you had to move your snake with the arrow keys to get to the number and eat it. Then the snake would grow by 1 segment. The snake always followed it''s track, so as you moved it I had to locate and erase the last segment of the snake. The goal was to get the snake as long as possible. I especially loved the tank characters. This machine had a set of characters in the character set that were a tank, oriented in 8 different directions. It made writing tank style games really nifty. I obtained one of these from a friend back in the late 80''s. It, along with some other ancient machines, is still sitting in a box in my storage trailer....
One of these days I''m gonna dig it out and see if it still runs. Still one of my favorite old systems.

Bought a C24P in 78...was a far superior unit to the Apple but they didn''t help out with program development and that was their downfall..along with not supplying them to colleges and universities like apple did...brilliant marketing move on their part... 19 years later walked into the control room for a nuclear fuel processing site and about fell over when I saw about 20 of these units humming along with the monitors displaying every move they made... turns out they had been controlling the operation for 10 years with no shutdowns of the plant...they were controlling every piece of the operation... temps, valves, switches, etc.... according to them the machines were bullet proof with extremely high reliability, etc.. a shame the company went belly up... I would have loved to see what they could have developed...

exacte e-mail

i start update my c4p >> c4pmf and i
searche the us65u or us65d
for 505b board

I had a C2-4P unit in 1980. I recall it had 24K of RAM, and the floppy drive unit (that was a box which sat on top of the Challenger case). My unit was sold by a Washington, D.C. dealer and procured by a relative who was a major investor in the dealership ... so the unit I got was damaged. My father, an EE, was able to discover that the motherboard had a UART already installed and ready to go with the snipping of a few jumpers. I wonder how many owners found this out? It was an abysimal system ... the floppy drive was so difficult to use that I essentially didn't touch it. I was able to learn rudimentary 6502 machine code on the computer, so it was of some value to me -- but I really wanted an Apple ][!

Certain things indicate that the C4P is basically an OSI model 600 with a case. Can anyone verify this?