Although the Osborne 1 was not my first computer (it was preceeded by the TRS 80 and Commodore 64 in my house), it was easily my early favorite. I bought a pair of them for about $800 each on close-out when my correcting Selectric died and I needed a typer for my business. I still have them up in the attic somewhere. I also added a pair of Gorilla external monitors for $99 each and a 300 baud modem for $150: imagine watching ASCII text transfers crawling across the screen!
Long after they were replaced by an IBM PC and then an AT&T (Olivetti) with the blazing fast 8086 chip, my wife continued to use Supercalc to keep the PTA books.
My favorite memory was visiting a Bell Labs site where I was working on executive speeches in 1984 and using my tiny Osborne to drive some of the biggest line printers I have ever seen before or since. The dot commands used by WordStar were close to those used by the flavor of VI in those days that I was able to fake my way through transcribing those speeches on terminals as part of that visit.
Sorry to hear of Adam Osborne's untimely demise: I think he will be remembered more as a pioneering visionary who changed forever the way personal computers would be sold than one who made a bold and humane marketing error.
Jobs are interesting things, the product of capitalism and industrialism. The important thing to remember is that jobs are owned by the bosses not the workers. And although they come with attractive bait, i.e., decent paychecks, privileges, benefits, etc., they are still totally temporary and can disappear for reasons known only to the owners.
The work, however, is owned by the workers! This is not new. But after some five or six American generations in which a huge proportion of the population - especially the highly educated population and more especially the highly privileged population - have relied on jobs to provide their opportunity to work, it is difficult to unpack the work from the job.
Those who manage to keep the job separated from the work will also manage to find satisfaction regardless of the conditions of employment. It isn't easy. But it will liberate you from anxiety over why your boss is such an obvious fool.
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Although the Osborne 1 was not my first computer (it was preceeded by the TRS 80 and Commodore 64 in my house), it was easily my early favorite. I bought a pair of them for about $800 each on close-out when my correcting Selectric died and I needed a typer for my business. I still have them up in the attic somewhere. I also added a pair of Gorilla external monitors for $99 each and a 300 baud modem for $150: imagine watching ASCII text transfers crawling across the screen! Long after they were replaced by an IBM PC and then an AT&T (Olivetti) with the blazing fast 8086 chip, my wife continued to use Supercalc to keep the PTA books. My favorite memory was visiting a Bell Labs site where I was working on executive speeches in 1984 and using my tiny Osborne to drive some of the biggest line printers I have ever seen before or since. The dot commands used by WordStar were close to those used by the flavor of VI in those days that I was able to fake my way through transcribing those speeches on terminals as part of that visit. Sorry to hear of Adam Osborne's untimely demise: I think he will be remembered more as a pioneering visionary who changed forever the way personal computers would be sold than one who made a bold and humane marketing error.
Jobs are interesting things, the product of capitalism and industrialism. The important thing to remember is that jobs are owned by the bosses not the workers. And although they come with attractive bait, i.e., decent paychecks, privileges, benefits, etc., they are still totally temporary and can disappear for reasons known only to the owners.
The work, however, is owned by the workers! This is not new. But after some five or six American generations in which a huge proportion of the population - especially the highly educated population and more especially the highly privileged population - have relied on jobs to provide their opportunity to work, it is difficult to unpack the work from the job.
Those who manage to keep the job separated from the work will also manage to find satisfaction regardless of the conditions of employment. It isn't easy. But it will liberate you from anxiety over why your boss is such an obvious fool.