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Portable Pioneer Adam Osborne dead at 64
douglips writes "Yahoo News has the story. He's best remembered for the blunder of announcing that his next version of the Osborne portable computer was so much better, that nobody bought the current version and the company died quickly. I'm sure everyone in the Slashdot community will miss him - even if you didn't enjoy his work, there's no denying his contributions to popular culture. Truly an American icon."
I hope Sharon,Kelly,Jack and of course Ozzy will be able to go trough this with force and pride.
Je t'aime Stéphanie
But I really hope when I die I'm not best known for what I did wrong =/
but heard about it a lot. especially in Dilbert Comic Strips. :(
definitely sad news
Consensus is good, but informed dictatorship is better
Much like these handy dandy computers.
Just for a minute there I thought this was one of those "(name) dead at (age)" trolls you always see when you browse at -1!
It seems fitting, in a nerdish way, that he should die at 64. There is a certain symmetry somehow.
Boobies never hurt anyone. - Sherry Glaser.
If he's an American Icon, and I'm an American, and I have no idea who the !@#$ he is, something seems wrong with that description..
First Lynne Thigpen, now Adam Osbourne. But seriously, I, and I am sure many other slashdotters would love to hear stories from some of the "old-timers" around here about their experiences working with Mr. Osbourne. Hopefully nobody told him about the afterlife, would probably make life less worth living.
I hate sigs.
Does anyone have a link? I've been listening to the radio all day and haven't heard anything about it.
I had a couple of Osborne 1s. I met a lifelong friend in an Osborne computer club. I upgraded to a Northstar Horizon and ZCPR/3. Some great days...
Anyway, I saw an Osbourne as late as 1988. I was over at a friend of a friend's house, and his mom did her word processing on one. I was amazed. I impressed her by knowing how to copy files with PIP. ;-)
The little screen was so tiny, and it was so heavy. Just a few years later, Toshiba would show people how to do portables right.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
"...even if you didn't enjoy his work, there's no denying his contributions to popular culture. Truly an American icon."
Wait... We're talking about the Computer guy, right, not the pop/metal/goth singer, right?
IBM had PL/1, with syntax worse than JOSS,
And everywhere the language went, it was a total loss...
>> Truly an American icon
Well, the Americans get *partial* credit for this one anyhow.
Writing the manuals for the Intel 4004, the very first single chip CPU.
Rest in peace.
-----
Believe me, I'm as surprised by my comment as you are.
"My reincarnated self is going to be waaaaaay better than this.
Most people thought it was a sewing machine.
I have family photos with him back from the early 80s. I was just a tot when he and aunt Barb divorced, so I don't remember him. My mom has told me that I called him Uncle A-O (since my name is also Adam).
But a few of my extended family members still have Osborne 1s in their basements/attics/garages. I played with one last year at a family reunion. The article is correct, it's almost exactly like a portable sewing machine.
So long, Uncle A-O!
He came to my school while I was in the MBA program. He gave us a little speach on what it meant to be an entrepreneur.
He said, "An entrepreneur is the kind of guy that walks into a bar with friends, and notices the one woman that is too hot for anyone to consider making an approach. The entrepreneur is able to walk up to that woman, begin a conversation, and have her under his thumb before the evening's end."
He then went to speak of a lawsuit against is VP line of software. He had a spreadsheet and was in a lawsuit against Lotus.
He said something like, "Who care if I lose. Any publicity is good publicity. When I'm at the press conference after verdict, I'll announce my new line of Artificial Intelligence software."
Just thought I'd share with you.
RIP Adam.
If your woundering heres a Picture of it. man i thought my kaypro was ugly and old.
Gadzooks how could one resist? But for a lot of folks who needed a computer not bolted to the floor (like reporters), the Osborne1 fit the bill.
You can see the 4116's on the left:
Osborne MB
I think the poster of this story is the one who used to type in the "Stephen King Dead at 54" troll posts. The wording is the same.
Wasn't trying to funny, but I'll accept it. I'm juts kinda geely when it comes to powers of 2.
Boobies never hurt anyone. - Sherry Glaser.
You have been trolled.
Not only did he premier his suitcase computer, he also premiered the monsterous software bundle along with the machine. CP/M and a slew of the top applications.
It was a funny little machine, with its 80 character console on a scrollable, 50 character, 4" monitor.
The closest, most pure competitor was the Kaypro.
He also was behind a lot of early technical books. I think I still have a book on the 8080 from his company.
For old farts like me, he was a notable personality back In The Day of every body trying to make a mark in the computer market.
Sad to hear of his passing.
"Nobody will ever need more than 64 years of life..." Yet another shortsighted designer :(
I find it very funny that the first site that comes up when you search for "Adam Osborne Biography" on Google goes down moments after Slashdot posts his obit. Even if slashdot hasn't linked to it.
All the karma-whores rushing out in their titbit scavenger hunt.
-------
Believe me, I'm as surprised by my comment as you are.
You're a sharp one, aren't you! Now back in your cage before the scientists come back, okay? :-)
...he's an ex-icon. His kept telling everyone that his next life was going to be so much better that nobody paid attention to his current one.
If you know someone from the early days of the computer industry, now's a good time to jot down his/her stories and recollections. There's a lot of history that could vanish otherwise.
but still, sorry to see anyone die that young...
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=58306&cid=5587 623
You make light of this machine's accomplishments, but in its time, it was truly a wonderful machine. Just the thought that there was this computer and you could actually take it with you on a trip so you had it available where ever you were going was just fantastic. While there were a few that pre-dated it (there was a similarly sized APL machine, the IBM APL 5100), this was truly a revolutionary machine. It was such a shame when they announced the Osborne 2 prematurely and EVERYONE decided to stop buying the current model and buy the new one when it came out. But, out of this disaster people realized just how powerful the idea of a computer you could haul around really was.
Cool. Give us your IP and E-mail once u are up. Oh, wait. You have already sent e-mail to everybody in the world giving us maps of the war. And you kindly shared your money with Some account owned by an Al Qaida guy.
I'm 40. Back in the day, I worked at the Tyson's Corner ComputerLand store, where they sold the Osborne I. It had a Z-80, it ran CP/M -- the precursor to what could have been DOS if only Kildall hadn't been out flying his airplane the on the day IBM knocked on his door. The bundled software with an Osborne I included PacMan, adapted for the 16x64 text display, and I played that on the floor demo a lot.
Looking back now, it seems to me that the Osborne books were the logical O'Reilly Associates of that era. I was particularly fond of "Introduction to Microprocessors" and their various assembly language introductions. My copies were majorly dogeared. The only one I hung onto was my 6502 Assembly Language Programming by Lance Leventhal.
About ten years ago, some friends of mine gave me an Osborne I, which they picked up for $7 at a garage sale in Colorado Springs. I turned it on a few years ago and it still worked... was thinking of Ebaying it but I think I might just hang on to it now. Osborne will be remembered by me mostly for the Osborne I and those great books he published.
never ask a question you don't want to know the answer to
I worked with Mr. Osborne during the late 1980s at Paperback Software (I was the Tech Support Manager). He was a brilliant, charismatic leader with enough ego for four people. A member of MENSA, he had a beautiful house in the Berkeley Hills (spared from the Oakland Hills fire by feet, IIRC), a lovely wife, and he threw marvelous parties.
Paperback Software was a great idea - cheap versions of popular software sold with paperback manuals for $99.00 or so (I think VP-Expert sold for more). VP-Planner was the Lotus clone, VP-Info was a dBase clone, VP-Graphics was a standalone graphics program, VP-Expert was an expert systems program, and there were a couple more I don't remember off the top of my head.
He was a good person to work for and with, and always knew how to make a splash and cause a ruckus. And it was fun to go out for Indian food with him, since he spoke Urdu and Hindi.
Rest in peace, sir.
read the article...
At the ripe old age of 33 I still remember with fondness a time when the computer ecosystem was much broader - more than WinTel. Gosh it was nice to have a choice in platforms (IBM, Commodore, Tandy, Apple, CP/M, etc.). Whatever it's faults, the Osborne was the first mass market portable (that I remember anyway) and the forefather of the Kaypro and the Compaq Portable. Adam Osborne shouldn't be remembered for his blunders but for his innovation. RIP my friend.
Everyone's waiting for the new and improved version....
As I recall, Osborne first came to public attention by starting a software company that gave away its product. Income was supposed to be derived from selling manuals. The software side of this company didn't work out, but the publishing side found a niche -- which is why there's still an imprint called McGraw-Hill/Osborne.
We had (and still have) a Zorba. Same Z80 4Mhz deal, but a much larger 7" screen. Zorba info.
Personally, I think the Kaypro II looks pretty sweet.
Escape Pod Films: Sketch Comedy and Web Series
error: 'void *' : unknown size
Now, a guy in Redmond announces a product which is known to basically not work, and people go in droves to buy it....
"He who laughs last, didn't get the joke."-Cap
Do we know anything about the fabled Osbourne 2? I'd like to know what was supposed to make it so much better than the first, if we know anything. Did the thing even exist on the planning board (other than "the O1 is making money, let's make an O2!") at the time?
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
We have our finger on the pulse of Slashdot, Crackmonkey, the Internet, and the world. We know how and when you think, and when you don't. We are in charge, we have the power, and never forget that. But... be nice to us and we'll be nice to you. Usually. Just for reference, here's a list of the people on this list who DON'T SUCK: 1. Mae Ling Mak 2. Kieran John Hervold 3. Open Source Man 4. Nick Moffit The following people *DO* suck: 1. Rick Moen (on and off) 2. Deirdre only-a-moron-would-remember-her-last-name If you're not on either list, that means you're not important enough for me to remember. Sorry. Better luck next time! Good luck to all.
A friends dad was a junk collector, picked one up from the discards while working on a school as an electrician. I ended up with it, I think it works fine, powers up, screen presents a cursor, but I don't have any disks for the thing.
Are we helping the evil company by saying the DRM, Palladium, etc of the upcoming Windows Longhorn will royally suck more than English class itself!? If so we'd better go back to saying that NT3.5 was perfection and M$ has just continued to screw it up since then.
In all seriousness, this is a good example of why developers and engineers shouldn't be in marketing. I am always bragging about the features in the unstable version of FlameCalc, but I never stopped to consider that if I was selling this for a profit without free upgrades I'd be hard pressed to keep any customers. (And not just because loops, conditionals, and code objects are still in the unstable branch!)
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
n/t
BITCHSLAPPED!
For those interested, the Vixen is the system that was pre-announced and caused the demise of Osborne Computer due to the ensuing cash flow crunch.
Having an Osborne 1 at the time and active in FOG I remember lusting over the Vixen. How times have changed...
>Truly an American icon
Apart from the fact that he moved to America from England AFTER he'd finished University, so he must have been at least 20 years old at the time. He's English by anybody's standards - if you're going to be patriotic, at least use subjects from your own country.
American patriotism is better summed up by the "patriot" missiles which are constantly shot at allies accidentally.
I seem to recall that some brave (foolhardy?) reporter took an Osborne to Afganistan to cover the struggle of the rebels with the USSR. It actually served the mission, but the best part of the article was when the reporter told the Pakistani customs officer that it was a "Hollywood Typewriter" - they sniffed disdainfully and passed him on.
Or a newbie.
Your choice.
However, nobody bothered to inform the guards that the company manufactured portable computers--a new idea at the time--and many of the employees walked an Osborne right out the door, carrying it like a briefcase. The guards had no idea the company's precious assets were being removed right under their noses.
I believe the Osborne I only had a 64 character wide display ....
Infuriate left and right
Almost word-for-word what I keep hearing about Stephen King.
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
The first reason is the obvious portability.
But the second reason was the Software Bundle. For $1795 you got the computer, but you also received copies of WordStar(with MailMerge!), Supercalc and Microsoft BASIC. At the time the software bundle alone was worth over $1,000.
That was a new concept in the industry at the time and contributed largely to the intial success of the machine.
My first experiences with computers was with a CP/M system my father bought as a home computer back in 1982. The Morrow MD-2, it was a competitor to Osborne only it was a more traditional desktop case rather than a portable. Computers were a heck of a lot simpler back then, although not nearly as useful.
Jerry Pournelle wrote a nice book about the early CP/M kit computer culture. The hacking nature of it would seem real familiar to those /.'ers steeped in Linux.
"The User's Guide to Small Computers"
If you can hunt down a copy, it has a lot of material about Adam Osborne and his company written from a current events perspective back in the early 80's.
I had a Kaypro 2+ (my first real comp, i'm 33) and it came with a copy of the Pournelle book. Very educational and a lot of fun. True, he still names his computers back then, but Chaos Manor was a lot more poignant and 'with it' in 1984 or so.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
He also wrote some of the books that helped bring people like me up to speed with this strange new thing called the microcomputer. I'm certain that his books taught me some things so well that I no longer remember learning them--it's as if I always knew them.
For years, the Osborne/McGraw-Hill imprint put out some excellent books. Adam Osborne helped form a computer book division at a major publishing house, at a time when books about computers seemed like very esoteric stuff, indeed.
When all you have is an axe, everything looks like a grindstone.
A friend of mine had an Osborne 1, that was some of the first paid work I did with computers, getting his Wordstar and Mailmerge cranking out direct mail, and stuffing envelopes. I can still feel the eyestrain from working on that dinky TV monitor, and the mental strain of trying to do word processing in a 40col environment.
One of my first real professional gigs was as an Osborne technician. I was a specialist in getting the floppy drives working, which was a lot of work getting the guts assembled and disassembled correctly, it was so jammed together it was a tech's nightmare. And they got bashed around a lot so everyone needed a lot of service on the floppies, which weren't built for that kind of abuse. I still have videotapes of osborne service procedures, they were recorded on some odd video format, IVHS, and we had to buy a special player to use them. Apparently this was some early form of copy protection.
People loved their osbornes, I had a lot of clients that attached the early Corvus 20Mb and 5Mb hard drives, and just unplugged for portable use. It was nice kit, but Kaypro aggressively moved into low-end CPM portables and ate up that market. When the Compaq came out, it pretty much killed any market for CPM portables.
What I remember most about Adam Osborne was as a writer. I first learned programming and digital circuitry from Osborne's early microprocessor books, I still have the books and now they're collector's items. I remember buying his business memoir "Hypergrowth" for 99 cents on the remainders shelf, and thinking how ironic that was. Osborne was a model for early information businesses, they aggregated money around people with ideas and the ability to publish them and mass produce. And he was also a parable for the dotcom era's excesses and of drinking too much of one's own koolaid. I still remember Osborne's story of shutting down the production of the Osborne 1. The announcement of the Osborne II killed the prior model sales, causing a premature cash crunch as they tried to dump the last of the old generation. Since that day, the damage caused by prematurely announcing new models and cannibalizing existing sales has been known as "the Osborne effect." Some quantity like $150k of motherboards were left over when the old line was killed, but they'd run out of plastic bezels and case parts, so the $150k of PCBs were left in stock, unused, with no way to turn them into complete machines. Some middle manager got the idea to order new bezels, but the dies had all been discarded. He authorized new production, and by the time his activities came to light, he's spent some insane amount like over a million bucks making new dies so he could make bezels to make those $150k of motherboards into a salable product. Product nobody wanted anyway. Ooops.
Seems to me much more useful to think of the country someone moves to as how to describe them, that is the kind of person they want to be, or the kind of person they consider themselves. If someone moves FROM Britain TO America, seems like Britain has not offered what they want, that their mind is already American.
...
Whatever "American" means
Infuriate left and right
Damn, dude, you better read up on your industry history. I don't know the origin of what you posted about Osborne, but I think you'd have a good shot at finding it with the help of a good proctologist and a flashlight. :-)
Osborne got his start working for Intel. He wrote the docs for their first microprocessors.
For a while he had an industry-gossip columns (at least one was called "From The Fountainhead," IIRC) in Interface Age and InfoWorld magazines.
He self-published a book called An Introduction To Microprocessors. One of the cofounders of IMSAI was so impressed with the book, he struck a deal with Osborne to include a copy with each IMSAI machine sold.
That IMSAI deal provided the means for Osborne to start his own publishing company, which produced computer books. He would often go to Homebrew Computer Club meetings with boxes full of his books, and leave with empty boxes and wads of cash.
He eventually sold his publishing company to McGraw-Hill, for millions.
The money from that deal was what he used to start Osborne Computer. The Osborne I was designed by Lee Felsenstein, another prominent name in the history of the Early Days.
These Osborne facts and more can be found in the excellent book Fire in the Valley, by Paul Freiberger & Michael Swaine.
~Philly
Definitely, especially since it wasn't even voluntary to get two of them in a row :(
This is either Mike or Rajiv. Get a life, losers.
we all find humor in the above ;o)
6502 Assembly Language Programming by Lance Leventhal
Damn that is a good book. Cannot bring myself to throw it out, although I don't expect to program a 6502 ever again. Glad to see I'm not the only nutty dude keeping one around.
Down here in New Zealand, the Osborne was the first really "affordable" CPM personal computer.
:-)
All the other CPM-based microcomputers were priced at well over $5,000 (and that was when a $ was really worth something) so the Osborne's $1,600-$1900 price-tag was a real breakthrough.
I wrote some debtors/invoicing software designed specifically to work around the limitations of the tiny screen and very limited disk space -- it sold a heap and made me a respectable amount of profit.
I suspect that the Osborne was responsible for introducing a *lot* of people to the wonderful world of computing -- and the somewhat less wonderful workd of DataStar and CalcStar -- although I still have a soft-spot for WordStar [eyes glaze over, breathes sigh of nostalgia]
Hell, the fact that the guy behind this machine has died makes me feel real old!
The only question I have to ask is: Why was it him and not Bill Gates who had to die?
your sig really sucks. bah.
my mom used it for word processing.
there was a tiny green monochrome display built into the box, but it also had output to out monochrome amber monitor. but the printing was the most interesting--we used an existing electric typewriter (smith corona? i don't remember) which was, at the time, miles ahead of any dot-matrix printer. i was impressed, at least. but it was extremely odd to send a document to the typewriter, and have it clacking away for a minute or two with no one at the controls. like a player piano, more or less.
Pop? Goth? Jeez, kids today...
Ironic, maybe. That was before the Osborne computer company went bust. So he knew the dangers of blazing a trail.
Wellvis said:
I can verify the brilliant part. I heard him speak a couple of times. And I can verify the marvelous parties too.
I got taken to a party he hosted in his suite at a computer show in October 1979. He was there to speak, and his publishing company had a booth. I talked with a fabulously, memorably, beautiful, friendly gal at this party, one of his employees. All three of the workers from his publishing company that he brought with him were absolutely stunning. Jon Draper (aka Captain Crunch) and Ted Nelson (another American icon, the guy who invented hypertext.) were also at that party.
I introduced myself to him when he was speaking at another computer event at York University in Toronto, about eight months later. (He blew me off. Well big deal.) But the thing that struck me was that he seemed to have lost about thirty pounds. He had been lean and handsome before. By the summer of 1980 he looked ill.
That would be about fourteen years before this mysterious, long illness. What a horrible way to go. I've got a morbid curiousity about it.
Before the Osborne I, before the Sol 20, before any microcomputer except maybe the Altair and the Imsai, Adam wrote and published a book called, iirc, "An Introduction to the Microprocessor", which was one of the more influential books in my life. It was really an introduction to computing technology in general, using the 8080 (or maybe Z80) microprocessor as a model. It got into subjects like binary number systems, how the registers and the CPU in a microprocessor chip work together, how memory is accessed, and how computers do basic arithmetic. It was very clearly written and, to me, incredibly enlightening. It was the combination of Adam's book and Ted Nelson's "Computer Lib/Dream Machines" upside-down twofer that stimulated me to buy a Sol 20 that a friend had assembled from a kit and start learning Assembler.
Richard
Everything possible to be believ'd is an Image of Truth - Wm. Blake
Stpehn King dead at 55
:-)
Oh no! Not Stpehn King the famous typing error?
Say it isn't true!
What a sad day indeed
Osborne 1& ie= ISO-8859-1&hl=en&btnG=Google+Search
http://images.google.com.sg/images?q=Osborne1+
In case anyone's interested in seeing more of the Osborne 1 itself, you might like to check out my Osborne 1 site, which has LOTS of pictures of the unit and various associated paraphenalia, some small mpeg movies of it in operation (including the great "disk grind" sound), and scans of the O1 Technical Manual, Field Service Manual, and a few others (though not the User's Manual, which is very large). And yes, it still works, although I've lost a few disks to bit rot... I get the feeling I'll have to dust it off after work and give it a spin, just for old time's sake.
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum viditur.
Well since you asked....
I suspect that the old supplies are using simple linear components. The typical design calls for voltage regulation to be done by an active element. This causes some(a bunch) waste as heat disipation.
Newer technique: switching power supplies. The output is actually across a capacitor. It's voltage is sampled and if it diverges from the desired, the pulse width of the square wave it is fed by is modulated. Essentially, you give the capacitor more charge if the voltage drops. Capacitors tend to resist a change in voltage across them. There is less heat lost using this scheme since the pulse is either on or off.
Yeah we had a PC, but this was the first computer I had unrestricted access to. The first I programmed on.... It was a great "portable" computer. And such great ASCII games! Nice work Mr. Osborne!
My uncle gave me an Osborne for Christmas this year, and I think it is great. He used to run a software library over usenet back in the day for Osborne software, CP/M+ and stuff if my memory serves me right. He has owned a bunch of Osbornes over the years, Osborne1's and Execs, and even got ones for his kids for college. The one I have my aunt used to write a book, which I consider quite a feat with its 5" screen. I love old(er) compters and this is really an amazing peice of history. The one i have would actually be in a museum right now, but my uncle upgraded it. Thank God he did because I get to keep it now. It's too bad the company fell apart. My uncle showed me the promotional packet for the Vixen, the machine that killed the company, and i can see why everyone was so excited about it. It would be interesting to see the state of portable computers if Osborne was still making computers
Actually, I didn't buy them when they were new. I believe I owned a 286 12Mhz or 16Mhz computer already at the time I made my Osborne purchase.
I was in a used computer store, looking for interesting stuff, when I stumbled across one.
I believe I purchased it for around $175, but the store owner threw in a second Osborne 1 in rather beat-up condition as part of the deal. (Supposedly, it was so I'd have spare parts for the good one if I ever needed them - but most likely, it was just an opportunity for them to get a hard-to-sell item off their shelves.)
The amusing thing I remember was a 3rd. party accessory that came with the unit; a magnifying glass on a metal rod that velcro'd to the top of the case. With the magnifier sticking out in front of the little screen, it made it a little easier to work with the system.
I recall it having an internal modem (300 baud, I believe), and I was lucky to find a BBS in town that ran and supported CP/M systems - so I downloaded a bunch of freeware and shareware, 90% or so of which worked properly.
Even though it was already a discontinued product by the time I bought mine, I got a fair amount of use out of it. As big as it was ("luggable" we called it, as opposed to "portable"), it was still pretty cool for the time. (The only thing cooler I remember was my friend's Corona portable 286 computer - and those puppies were expensive, and just as big as my Osborne.)
I just want to make 2^8
Among the many old computers tucked away in my garage are a few of the Osborne Ones that I got plenty of mileage out of in their time. The portability of this suitcase sized computer allowed me to do in the field what I nowadays use a laptop for. Heck, I was using it to program specialty equipment. Those machines don't owe me anything.
And I remember Adam Osborne. He was a lot of fun to be around. After the computer company went under, he got involved in computer books. Osborne/McGraw Hill if I recall correctly.
He shall be missed.
Nope, not 64, my meory is failing :-(, 50 or 52, I see from various other places. Sorry about that!
Infuriate left and right
Damn, for such an arrogant SOB, Adam sure made some incredible contibutions to the industry. Wonderfully informative publications, portable computing, the choice of Microsoft and Non-Microsoft Basic. A true visionary. We will sadly miss him. His orignal machine was one of the first to provide true value to the masses in computing.
"To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
I had Osborne's Introduction to Microprocessors, and it is still a book a lot of today's "programmers" (who have never written a line of assembly code) could benefit from reading. A later book specifically on the Z80 is also a great read. They still hold a hallowed place on my shelf along with a couple of books by Rodney Zaks ("Programming the Z80" and his CP/M programming book).
I had an Osborne 1. It was the first computer my old man and I bought. (We built our first from scratch, doing S-100 bus wirewrap boards). My first significant piece of programming was the BIOS for CP/M for our homebrewed hardware. Couldn't have done it without Osborne and Zaks (southgoing, or northgoing I always wondered).
I also seem to remember a book about the collapse of Osborne that was essentially a "prequel" to the dot-bomb era. It was called "Hypergrowth" or something like that. Anyone remember that book?
Osborne's rep was gone after that.
He's an important figure, but more for fueling the hobbyist movement which really created the microprocessor market. Nobody took these devices seriously until people started making home computers, and that was largely a homebrew phenomenon for a brief shining moment.
That feeling is what Linux had that the other "free" OSes didn't. The hobbyist mentality. It fosters creativity. Between IBM and Microsoft it had almost ceased to exist. Hobbyist, entrepreneur, establishment, repeat. I wonder what it will be tomorrow.
They were heady days. Signetics catalogs, Ciarcia's Circuit Cellar, Dr. Dobbs Journal of Computer Calesthenics and Orthodontia (Running Light Without Overbyte) -- yes, that's what the magazine used to be called --, Heathkits (God! Heathkits! Does anyone else here remember the H11? Sure, they had the CP/M machines, but they had the kit clone of the PDP-11! Complete with paper tape mass storage!)
Of course I wouldn't want to go back. But sometimes, just sometimes, I miss the chomp of the sprockets and the subtle squeak of the pinch rollers. I miss front panels and "LOAD" switches.
When my dad died, I came across our homebrew S100 bus Z80 machine. Sadly, the electrolytic capacitors had leaked and ruined several of the boards. Thomas Wolfe was right: You can't rewind to load point again. He didn't put it exactly that way, but close enough.
Adam Osborne was an imprudent maverick. He was an egomaniac whose company failed. But, damn! It was fun while it lasted. I, too, say rest in peace.
I had to get my Osborne 1 out of our building late one night. Security stopped me, wanting to know what I was carrying. Rather than tell them it was a computer and having to go through considerable hastle, I just told them it was a portable sewing machine. No problem.
The cliche about Adam is that he preannounced his DOS followon machine and this caused sales of his current product to fail, driving the company into bankruptcy. I was there and saw what happened, and that's not what happened.
The proof is this. First, everybody with a CPM machine was promising a future DOS version--that's what the market demanded. Everybody. Adam warned that his DOS machine wouldn't ship for at least six months, and would be more expensive than his price-sensitive $1795 Osborne 1, so waiting for that model didn't cause his super-price-sensitive customers to stop buying the existing available cheap model. That just doesn't make sense.
Instead, a month after his "preannouncement" (during which month the machine continued to sell at the rate of 10,000 units per month), the company (now run by the replacement team of "professionals" Adam had brought in) announced the Osborne 2 -- The Osborne Executive. It was this machine which killed the company.
Reason 1: It was priced $200 more, at $1995, not cheaper (as the tiger team working on the Vixen wanted). THe new executive team realized that at $1795 the company wasn't making money, so they priced it higher hoping brand would carry the day. The O2 had a 7 inch screen instead of the old 5 inch--but the Kaypro, priced at $1595, had a 9 inch screen. The O2 had CPM 3.0--which meant zero to Osborne customers (and until and unless software was written to it, would never mean anything), so that was valueless. It also included upgraded software--which the first-time-buyer Osborners didn't know what it meant, so THAT didn't justify the price. Finally, the O2 looked EXACTLY like the O1--so with the lid closed, you couldn't tell your $1995 model from the cheaper $1795 model--no racing stripe, no new color, no nothing.
When the O1 was selling for $200 more than the Kaypro and for a smaller screen, Osborne outsold Kaypro because the Osborne brand was so strong. But when the premium was raised to $500--the price-sensitive market just took a dive. The month following the announcement of the O2--April of that year--O1 sales went from 10,000 a month to 2,000. In May, when the O2 shipped, sales dropped to zero.
Zero.
In case you think this was a lagging case of the Osborne Effect, the final proof comes in the fact that Kaypro sales doubled in May; and stayed higher than the Osborne's old record for the next year. This despite the fact that Kaypro also announced, and eventually shipped, a DOS machine. Funny, no Osborne effect then!
Osborne was killed by management who ignored the super-price-sensitivity of this new market, and crashed so fast -- the company declared bankruptcy in September -- that there was no time to react. They shut the rockets off, and cratered before they knew what they were doing.
Adam almost went to his grave thinking he had killed his own company; he even said so in his book. But a year after that book came out, I talked to him and made my argument, as given above, and of course he lit up. Even he hadn't realized the cause of the demise of the company he had just turned over to "professional" management....
The final reason the Osborne Effect is unreal is that even in the hightech business we are all in, this case is unique--announcing new versions is done all the time, and while sales often slows, nobody's company keels over from it. It's a fact of life in a fast-paced electronics world.
So the next time somebody tells you that hoary old cliche about how Adam Osborne killed his company by preannouncing his new product--tell them they are completely wrong. If the Osborne 2 had been a $1595 machine to compete head to head with the Kaypro on its own ground--Kaypro would have died, and Osborne would have lived to fight again for another year.
You may have been right. At least, I've not been able to find any other mention of his death on CNN, CBS, MSNBC, NPR, etc.--in fact, the only on-line reference to his death that I have been able to find is the ./ article and the the Yahoo story it mentions (by following the link); I'm not even sure how you'd find the link if it wasn't provided, since it doesn't seem to be showing up on the main pages. I'm not saying that he isn't dead, I'm just saying I wouldn't recomend burying him without a tad more evidence.
-- MarkusQ
indian (colonial british) actually... RTFA!
POKE 61440, 127
That'll put a dim rectangle in the upper left corner of the 52x24 screen. Too bad no one ever asks me that in an interview these days...
As I sit here, I hold in my hand the Osborne I User's Reference Guide. I don't have the computer, but I kept the book for fun. It reads like an old school user's guide, with complete references for BASIC, and a chapter titled "IEEE-488 Implementation". Very useful for users.
Some specs:
SCREEN SIZE:
DISK CAPACITY:
Double-Density:
- 200K bytes per diskette
- 185K bytes of data space using CP/M
- 40 tracks of information
- 5 physical sectors each track (soft-sectored)
- 1024 bytes per sector
- 40 logical sectors to CP/M (128 bytes each)
- 1K-byte extents maintained by CP/M
- 3 reserved system tracks
Single Density:SERIAL PORT:
IEEE-488 PORT:
I'll stop typing now before I get to the memory map... :)
..Perhaps they should've consulted the British Intelligence Ministry before assigning pilots to that Tornado.
It helps when you realize that, yes, you have to set your IFF system correctly, or you're not considered an ally.
Except he was born in Thailand.
- Ois
PGP KeyId: 0x08D63965
Is there anybody out their still using them (IIRC the Osborne was one). Their used to be lots in the UK (Amstrads) - but I was wondering if anyone out there was still using them (ie any CP/M machine)?
my funeral will be massive. a procession of a million geeks from around the world will follow my coffin. Bill gates will gfive an eulogy. Its gonna be frickn marverlous. When i get to heaven i'm either gonna take over or set up a new one :^)
love, peace & light my followers
Before adopting WHATWG, read the moonlight.NET EULA [http://www.microsoft.com/interop/msnovellcollab/moonlight.mspx]
except that he naturalised (I guess that should be naturalized) as a US citizen, so he was American, like Einstein.
"Truly an American Icon"..... ....except he wasn't American, of course !
Like so many innovators / inventions throughout the years, he's got wrongly labelled as an American.
You are right though - definitely an innovator and great influence of his time.
Welcome to the dark side, Chrisd!
is ya chance for doin tha hump
I owned two Osborne's. Great computers!
To this day I still tell people about Osborne's first rule of computing, "When in doubt, do something!"
I did not know it, but he was born in India. I guess the joke's on both of us :-)
Infuriate left and right
My dad bought it for me when I was a junior in high school in 1983, and Osborne went out of business a month later.
I'm 36 now.
I spent many delightful hours programming in basic on it, and then took a programming course at the University of Pittsburgh where I learned pascal (my high school had a thing with the university for intersted students.). Man I worked hard unlearning my bad BASIC habits and learning how to think in Pascal. I bought Turbo Pascal so I could practice from home and I also used a 300 baud modem with the Osborne to connect to the computers at the University to run my finished pascal programs.
I used the Osborne for pascal programming till around 1987, when I bought a leading edge PC.
The Osborne was a great computer for its time and it was there for me to practice programming at a critical time (end of high school and beginning of collage).
Thank you, Adam, for creating it. You will be greatly missed.
It's sad to see him go, but I do have to say that at the height of his game he was one arrogant SOB, and proud of that too. I saw him speak on a panel discussion in 1982 with Bill Gates and a few other folks. The panel was about the future of personal computing, sponsored by the now defunct Boston Computer Society. Adam stole the show, brashly predicting that Osborne Computers would dominate the industry. I can't help thinking of that evening as my personal "Dead Zone" moment, as I got the opportunity to chat with Bill Gates for several minutes after the show. But history can't be changed post facto, so I can't dwell on missed opportunities...
...Nothing interesting here. Just move along...
and the epitaph on his tombstone a magnifying glass to read. A little bit of morbid humor here, but "portable" back circa 1980 meant about 30 pounds and a five inch CRT screen. Still in that era when a PC cost almost as much as car or 2-3 months salary, many people couldn't afford to have more than one at the home and office. And portability meant the whole setup quickly assembled into a single package for transport.
An American Icon does not mean the person(s) must be a born US citizen. It doesn't mean he had bbq cookouts and enjoy a hamburger and fries.
Heck, Einstein's an American Icon, but he's from Germany. Von Braun, from Nazi Germany era, and he's an American Icon (led to the first man on the moon, saw his dream come true).
An Englishman can be proud of their English Icons b/c he's born an Englishman and was brought up the English way. An American is essentially someone who fulfills his dreams on a land that recognizes him for his accomplishments. The US has always been a land of immigrants.
And the patriot missle comment, well maybe you need to be at the front lines and understand what your words mean to the soldiers fighting this war.
Poor dude, he died in a town called Kodiak-anal married to a woman named bur-dick?!?
Sitting in my parent's house, in what used to be my bedroom closet, lies dormant the Osborne 1 I purchased with $2000 of bar-mitzvah money in 1982. (And now I date myself.)
Like another poster above, I spent many hours programming it in CBASIC, Pascal, and FORTH. (The FORTH interpreter was a great programming environment at the time. JRT Pascal wasn't so bad, either, but I didn't have much to compare it to.)
I did all my freshman year papers in Wordstar using that and my good ol' C-Itoh printer (still in use by Mom for her packet radio stuff, I think). Then someone introduced me to TeX, and I haven't opened up the thing since...
What? Oh, sorry, was just daydreaming about The Good Old Days there. Did I ever tell you about the eight-hour marathon TRS-80 programming stories back in 1977?...
I am the Lorvax, I speak for the machines.
...but I intend to follow in his footsteps: when I die, my age will also be a power of 2.
Ahhhhh...if I can make it past 64, I'll be at least 128 or mybe 256! x--
We are dying young, cuz we are out of shape, we must put an end to this and get in shape. Watch what you eat, work out, cut your body fat down and remain very fit. Workout is not for sports types/jocks, workout is a life style.
Ahhhh, those were the days.... The pioneers of the computer industry are starting to get old and forgotten. Rest well, Adam. You made your mark, and to some of us, you will never be forgotten.
The number 1 problem of working in a cubicle - 23 power cords, 1 outlet...
He's in his 40s, right?
I have an Osborne Executive (the promised one that killed existing sales and thus the company) and a Kaypro 4 bought at firesale closeout prices well after the PC era. Both were very useful in my business at the time. There was also the Osborne Vixen, which was an Osborne One in a package less than half the size. Those were almost all sold by the contracted overseas manufactuter in the years after Osborne Corporation was gone.The original Osborne One case WAS a sewing machine case. The computer was built into the cover and the keyboard was fitted in the what would have been the base of the sewing machine. The sewing machine was used "keyboard tray" down.
Ever dream you could fly? Get up from the Flight Sim. I Fly
i remember calling mr. osborne's machine a 'lug-a-long', because its power supply was very heavy. :)
an osborne computer was used as the down-payment on my first house. it ran on cpm, using dbase ii, word star, 1200 baud external modem, an external 5Meg hard drive(nick named the 'corvis wine-ing shoe box because of its size and noise that it made when powered up), 16K-RAM, calc star, the printer was a 9-pin dot matrix, and c-basic. i remember then that 'menu driven systems', and 'modular' programming were emerging methods of good programming style. both seller, and myself thought that we both had a good deal.
... what I remember about the Oz 1 is that it worked. You turned it on & with very little wait, away you went. Today: I drink too coffee during boot-up/pre-crash while waiting for marginally improved word processing. All the Oz 1 really needs to become competitive again is a text-only browser & to lose 25 lbs. But ain't that true of most of us?
--- Attorneys Assisting Citizen-Soldiers & Families -
I never knew Adam of course but I fondly recall his computer. I was a student at OSU at the time and I remember going weekly into the local computer store and gawking at the Osborne there trying to figure out some way to work up enough money to buy one. Twin disk drives (floppy 360Ks WOW!), a computer that you could actually pick up and walk away with !(something I fanatsized about at that computer store) There were no IBM PC's out at the time ( though I had a Bell and Howell Black Apple at home) so Adam's computer was the latest and greatest out there.
The man was a pioneer of the comoputer age and deserves to be remembered.
Pax Requium Adam.
----- In Your Cubicle No One Can Hear You Scream...
... he'll be buried in a luggable coffin, with a small amber screen at one end.
He started some software company after Osborne Computers failed. I went to Comdex that year and I saw him standing behind a little table in an obscure corner of the show floor, peddling his wares all alone. I remember thinking how sad that he had fallen so far. Still, he flew high for a while and that's more than most of us will ever say.
Be with God.
The original Osborne One case WAS a sewing machine case. The computer was built into the cover and the keyboard was fitted in the what would have been the base of the sewing machine. The sewing machine was used "keyboard tray" down. The thing that struck me the most about the Osbourne 1 was the screen. At 4", it was very small and hard to read unless you practically glued your eye to it. The first Kaypro machines had much nicer screens.
In those early days I hooked up with fellow Osborne users and we banged away on our machines. In an hour or so we all had red, bleary eyes from using that tiny screen. But as the resident Osborne guru with us said then, "Right. My Osborne has a tiny built-in screen. ...and just what size screen is built-in on your computer?" In those days there weren't any others. Compaq came along with a PC compativble version with a 9 inch screen many years later.
Ever dream you could fly? Get up from the Flight Sim. I Fly
Actually, Compaq did it first, in 1982, but kept it to themselves. Phoenix did their own in 1994 that they licensed to the world. So yeah, you're right, it was actually Phoenix who really started the true compatibles off.
BTW, this and lots of other good info about the history of the PC, Bill Gates and Microsoft comes from "Gates", by Stephen Manes and Paul Andrews. Very interesting book, great, evenhanded job of describing it all. The pictures are especially interesting - Bill Gates doing deals with IBM and Radio Shack, looking about 16; Steve Ballmer in a plaid jacket in 1987, pointing his finger at the audience like a carney barker ("Do anything to get the business, get the business, get the business!"). Some things never change.
What if life is just a side effect of some other process and God has no idea we exist?
I had one that I lugged around for work, it was heavy as hell (all steel) compared to the Compaq luggable (all plastic with aluminum frame).
I also sold these things for a while and worked on them too. Come to think of it, I never really worked on one. I knew how but never saw one break. CPM was freaky being that I got my start on IBM DOS 1.0
I never could get used to the HDD being drive A !!
Damn, 64 is too young to die. What a shame.
I will always have strong memories of the Osborne, it was one of the first. I wish I still had that old box. I could prop it up on top of my Columbia just for old times sakes. I used to play Zork on an amber Taxan monitor on the Columbia.. Damn, those were the days!!
(note to moderators, need to add "trippy flashback" to mod list..)
I learned on the Osborne I. I still have it in storage and the last time I tried, it still works.
well sure thing yahoo got the place's name in south india all wrong! The village is KodaiKanal and its near to chennai (Madras).
I don;t know if i can now believe Yahoo with spelling of places any longer!
No