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."

Comments

He also should be remembered for. . .

[Fritz Benwalla]

Writing the manuals for the Intel 4004, the very first single chip CPU.

Rest in peace.

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MAn i thought my Kaypro was old

[eadint]

If your woundering heres a Picture of it. man i thought my kaypro was ugly and old.

Back in the day...

[john82]

The Osborne1 was the hot piece of technology. And to give you an idea how desperate the situation was, consider this.

• It had a 5 inch screen that was monochrome (amber I seem to recall).
• It weighed a freakin' ton. Okay maybe 30lbs. But the brochures highlighted that like it was impressive (Only 30 lbs!).
• There were two 5.25" floppies (360k?)
• 64 kB of RAM!
• And last, but not least, a 4MHz Z80 CPU!

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.

The computer that did Osborne in

[mpthompson]

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...

My first computer was an Osborne I

[beej]

Rather, my parents' first computer was. I learned to program it as a kid before moving on to the c64.

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:

• 32 lines of 128 characters maintained in RAM
• 24 lines of 52 characters shown on screen
• dim, normal, underlined video supported [through bank switching for dim/brite--there was a bank of shadow RAM under video RAM...underline was just bit 7]
• 32 block graphic characters predefined
• uppercase/lowercase text display [Whooo!]
• video emulates TeleVideo terminal
• external video available via edge connector

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:

• 100K bytes per diskette
• 92K bytes of data space using CP/M
• 40 tracks of information
• 10 physical sectors each track (soft-sectored)
• 256 bytes per sector
• 20 logical sectors to CP/M (128 bytes each)
• 2K-byte extents maintained by CP/M
• 3 reserved system tracks (See notes, page 760.)

SERIAL PORT:

• 1200- or 300-baud, software-selectable
• 2400- or 600-baud, jumper-selectable
• uses 6850 chip, all parameters memory-mapped
• standard female DB-25 connector provided

IEEE-488 PORT:

• standard IEEE-488 implementation
• may be configured as Centronics parallel port
• 26-pin edge connector provided

I'll stop typing now before I get to the memory map... :)