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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."
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.
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.
By this argument, many of the USA's early Presidents and other statesmen can't rightly be called Americans: they were born British subjects. George Washington was well past 20 when he led the American armies.
In any case, I believe Osborne's company was incorporated in the USA, and his machines were designed and built here. So it's not an unreasonable association.
You may be missing an important point about US culture, which is that anyone who comes here and becomes a citizen gets to be American. Suppose you moved to China -- would you ever be regarded as Chinese by the Chinese? Probably not. I don't know if Osborne became a citizen or not, but the point is not just "Americans taking credit for everything". It's that just about anyone can join our little club, and so we think in terms of "anyone who's here must be in".
Or at least that's how we think at our best. At our worst, we fall far short of that ideal (and many others).
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.