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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 =/
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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Believe me, I'm as surprised by my comment as you are.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The Osborne 1 was a such a cool machine.s borne/
http://www.obsoletecomputermuseum.org/o
It was based on a Zilog Z80A processor (same as that used in the Sinclair ZX Spectrum and the Colecovision console, and similar to that used in the original Gameboy), but curiously, used Motorola peripheral chips.
It came bundled with a wide selection of software - Supercalc, Wordstar, an operating system called CP/M (the blueprint for DOS), and a BASIC interpreter by a small software company called Microsoft.
One of the really cool things about the Osborne is that it was sold with a manual about 500 pages thick. There are chapters on each of the software packages, but also a great deal of technical information on the machine itself - memory maps, details on the types of peripherals and that kind of thing.
It was clearly the product of a man and a company who loved computing, released in a spirit of openness and innocence for a hobbyist culture. Sadly, that culture died soon after, and stayed that way for some time.
It was the first computer I ever had, which started me off down a road that eventually led to me earn a degree in Computer Engineering. When I first heard about Linux, it was that same hobbyist culture that immediately appealed to me.
I think I'll boot mine up tonight. Thanks, Adam.
garethw
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...
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.
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.
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.
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).
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
we all find humor in the above ;o)
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?
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.
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.
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.
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... :)