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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."
Writing the manuals for the Intel 4004, the very first single chip CPU.
Rest in peace.
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Believe me, I'm as surprised by my comment as you are.
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.
- 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 was.That's the "hip/funny" part of the story that got it selected over the other submissions.
Sick.
-- @rjamestaylor on Ello
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...
Yes, it was known as the Vixen. The specs I was able to dig up are:
Osborne Vixen
Built in 1984
Price: $1,300 USD
CPU: Z80A 4 MHz
Memory: 64KB RAM
Interfaces: RS232C, parallel
Monitor: 7" Amber
Text Resolution: 80x24
Graphics Resolution: 640x240
OS:CP/M 2.2
FDD: 2 x 360 KB FDD (DS, DD)
Keyboard: 61 Keys
Size: (WxDxH) 32cm x 41cm x 16cm
Weight: 8.2 Kg
Languages: MBasic
Options: 10 MB HDD ($1,500 USD)
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?
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.
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.
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... :)