I think this is a correct way to put it, but FWIW on HN: the person who actually designed the device (not just the hardware) was the legendary Lee Felsenstein. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lee_Felsenstein
Yes. As I cover in the piece, it's Felsenstein he singled out to physically design it. The two men knew each other from Homebrew and Osborne collared him at the West Coast Computer Faire, bringing him onboard for a share of the company and a basic subsistence salary until they could ship.
It had previously been reported (and exposed here) that the "Osborne effect" wasn't what killed the company, but (IIRC) quality issues with parts (floppy drive?) that delayed the Executive. Regardless, essentially the fall of the Osborne Computer Corp. is the age old story of a company growing faster than its organization and eventually collapsing.
I get into it as much as I can at the end, but the Osborne Effect absolutely plays a part. It's just not in the way that got press at the time (i.e. the Executive being announced too early).
Basically Adam repeatedly triggered mini-Osborne Effects, with product variants. None of which should have been enough to take the company down. But bad financial management had killed the company's runway, they'd exhausted funding from their VC backers, and they had no ability to raise covering loans from banks until they could IPO.
So what should have been a minor ripple in their finances ended up just taking the whole company down.
I honestly think, based on my research, that if they'd managed to secure the IPO - having sorted out their accounts first - then they'd have survived the IBM PC-clone transition. They were already pivoting to deal with it.
I think this is one of the benefits of raising prices to match supply with demand, that never gets talked about, and instead we bitch about 'greed'.
If I charge more I can keep my warehouses from emptying out. If a whale customer really needs a replacement, I've got one to spare instead of making them wait two weeks. I have ways to bribe critical path employees to show up (everything from good food to comping babysitting costs or buying them replacement tickets so they can stay and fix an issue). I can hire more people and be pickier about their initial skill level. And I can get experts (paid or from vendors) to come tell me what I'm doing wrong.
Vendors who think you have more money to spend or will take away the money you're already spending are often willing to throw you a little extra attention to keep you on the hook. That can be better rates, better maintenance, or a couple hours' worth of advice from one of their greybeards who has set up fifty other companies that work a bit like yours.
"nobody had anything near as convenient as the Osborne 1."
I had/still have an Osbourne 1 and would occasionally lug it from home to work. At almost 25 lbs it was a workout. 10 minute walk to the Seabus and then another almost 10 min walk to the office in downtown Vancouver.
I implemented a threaded interpreter [0] on it where the source was spread over 3 floppies. To assemble it I ran the 3 floppies through a small basic program that stripped all the comments out wrote it to a single floppy.
In the office it was occasionally referred to as 'the nose burn' since the 5" screen was rather small and some had to get close to the screen to read it.
It was sufficient to write resumes for myself and a sibling.
> I implemented a threaded interpreter [0] on it where the source was spread over 3 floppies. To assemble it I ran the 3 floppies through a small basic program that stripped all the comments out wrote it to a single floppy.
>
I had keyed the machine code to the CP/M version of figForth in on my Xitan Alpha. I sent it over a serial line to pip running on my Osborne after I bought one. Patched the console vectors and it was up and running.
Back in the day I got to go to a demo and presentation about the machine.
An interesting thing about the design was that it had a 5” screen, but it could only show about 50 columns at a time of the 80 column display. There was a knob you turned to pan the display.
In the end I think the Kaypro was a much better execution of the idea, even with its sharp cornered, steel, shin smashing design.
I had a Kaypro-4 "Plus 88", back in the day. It had a bigger screen than the Osborne, full 80x24, with a VT-100-style keyboard, and came bundled with lots of software, just like the Osborne. The "Plus 88" in the name meant that it had an 8088 coprocessor board with 256KB of memory, on which you could run MS-DOS and dBase II....or you could use it as a RAM drive (remember those?), which is what I did.
Turbo Pascal 1.0 for CP/M-80 came out very shortly thereafter, and as a guy who'd previously used UCSD Pascal on PDP-11 and Apple Pascal on the Apple II (which was just UCSD Pascal), I was in heaven. Great machine; I remember it very fondly.
> Back in the day I got to go to a demo and presentation about the machine.
>
> An interesting thing about the design was that it had a 5” screen, but it could only show about 50 columns at a time of the 80 column display. There was a knob you turned to pan the display.
On mine it's keyboard ctl-left/right arrow. Paint is worn off the metal surround as a result. I don't recall a knob.
In 1981, where the article starts, Steve Jobs biggest competitor was Jack Tramiels Commodore. VIC 20 was the best selling computer at the time, and became the first computer to sell one million units. The year after the C64 came out and continued to outsell the Apple 2.
Why Commodore is left out of history is a mystery...
> VIC 20 was the best selling computer at the time
So subject for anti-monopoly investigation.
At that time already happen ATT case, GE case. So IBM, Intel and all other big companies tried to establish semi-rival, like AMD for Intel in 1980s, or to make things look like total freedom (IBM PC, lot of S/360 clones).
Commodore was not successful in making semi-free market.
That particular statement seemed very clear, and not true. There were no anti-trust investigations into Commodore because they were never in a remotely dominant enough position for it.
If you have a clarification, make it instead of breaking the site rules with insults.
EDIT: I see you've made the suggestion of anti-trust issues in another comment too, and there's simply absolutely no basis for that. At the time Commodore reached its highest ever revenue it wasn't even close to even half the market, much less any position where theyd be at risk of antitrust, and Atari, which you also implicated elsewhere was a near bankrupt non-entity (soon to be bought by Tramiel for a pittance), and that was the largest Commodore ever got.
Don't worry, he's just a crank with an axe to grind and not enough facts or imagination to support his argument. Don't worry, anyone who took a minute to think about what he said knows you're right. And calling some someone a 'coward' while flinging poo from behind an anon nick...chef kiss.
I'm mostly curious where this very strange misconception might have come from. As much as I was a diehard Commodore fan as a child, at no point did I labour under the misconception that they were dominant enough to be in some kind of monopoly position. After all, the entire period was defined by a vast range of different home computers, at a level not seen before or since.
>Osborne announced his "Executive" machine with superior features at a Personal Computer World Show in London in 1982. This killed sales of the original machine, but the much-hyped new model failed to appear in any quantity before the company went belly-up in September 1983. Compaq inherited the design and produced their first portable machine in 1983.
Didn't know about the Compaq point, although I remember reading about the Compaq portable.
Compaq gets credit for the first true IBM compatible PC by virtue of creating a compatible BIOS without exposing themselves to IBM's published source code. Was this also inherited from the Osborne design?
The Osborne wasn't an MS-DOS machine but an 8-bit CP/M machine, which was the standard for generic computers at the time (Apple, Commodore, etc. had their own non-compatible systems, but you could for instance buy a Z80 card for an Apple to run CP/M on it and the Commodore 128 likewise had a Z80 built in for running CP/M besides its native 6502 and OS).
The Commodore 128 was first in 1985. But there was also a CP/M cartridge for the C64 released in 1983[1], which I think was the first Commodore CP/M compatibility play. It is very disturbing (as an old C64 user) to see CP/M running on the classic blue/light-blue C64 display.... Of course the C64 version suffered from the additional problem over the C128 version that it only had 40 text columns. Lots of other issues with it too apparently.
I only mention it briefly in the piece, but Osborne were already working on an IBM compatible machine (codenamed the 'Wayne') when the company went under. It wasn't one of the things Osborne himself managed to retain the rights to. He kept the 'Vixen' design and eventually released a variant of that to limited success.
As usual, Osborne had spotted the direction of travel and was preparing to adapt to it through IBM Compatibility. But by that point the company (and R&D within it) was such a mess that the Wayne wasn't very far advanced.
Wouldn't surprise me if some minor elements from its development ended up in future Compaq machines - or at least were used to cross-check their own work - but not much.
Really loved the article. Have been in computing for along time and never heard this story in such detail. Looking forward to the upcoming articles you mention....
There's a guideline about this, at least in spirit:
Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents, and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data.
If you feel so strongly about it, email the mods with your suspicions. Repeatedly posting this kind of thing, based on effectively nothing at all (lots of people write general audience articles without indexing every bit of research they've done) is just lame and rude. You owe the author an apology.
No, I don't owe him anything, and it is not "based on nothing" -- it's based on its being a piece with no original reporting. And he says "out of print" as if to excuse the lack of any content from those books.
And as for "without indexing every bit of research they've done" is just gaslighting, or something. How about anything that a casual web search wouldn't turn up?
Absolutely none of this supports your accusation that this was 'generated by AI'. It's a completely unfounded aspersion. It's a little rich to be reaching for 'gaslighting' when you just made something up about an article and keep repeating it.
I talk about sources in the piece. I own Osborne's books. The only picture in it is one that's credited to me, a photo of my personal copy of Hypergrowth. I have done interviews with people who knew him. I quote a number of people who did. I've spent many years trawling old issues of Byte, Infoworld and more on this era (because a lot of this stuff outside of the common Apple/Microsoft narrative is obscure or badly covered in modern books - if at all).
I don't know why AlbertCory reacted that way to your article, but I loved it. One correction: Pournelle showing off the Osborne to others covering the Voyager encounter with Saturn occurred at Caltech, not at NASA's DC HQ.
In 1977, the "trinity" of dominant home computers was the Commodore PET, Apple II, and TRS-80, and Microsoft was a tiny startup.
Microsoft didn't enter the OS space until 1980 - before that they sold and licensed BASIC interpreters, and they were small enough that Commodore/Tramiel infamously managed to buy a fixed price (single payment) license that they hung onto for many years to avoid having to negotiate a new deal for newer versions. They got in the region of $50k or something like that.
In 1980 they licensed Unix and launched Xenix. It was first in 1981 PC DOS/MS DOS made its appearance. At that point they had only 100 employees. By 1983, Microsofts revenue finally reached $55 million.
In 1981 Commodore saw an explosion in their unit sales with the VIC-20, while Apple milked far higher revenue per unit instead.
For comparison to MS $55m in 1983, Commodore had revenues of $125 million in 1980, $186 million in 1981 and $681 million in 1983, before reaching its all time peak of $1.2bn in 1984 (they exceeded $1bn again once more in 1990)
Apple had $118 million in revenue in 1980 and $1.51B in 1984.
It was first towards the end of the 1980's that Microsoft became dominant.
Gates and Jobs were not at all rivals during the short time Osborne Computers existed. I don't think there even was an MS-DOS back then; IIRC, the Osborne 1 ran CP/M.
(I almost wrote "Osborne-1" but conveniently there is an Osborne 1 sticker on my desk and I happened to glance at it!)
Microsoft sold a BASIC interpreter to Apple, they wrote some games (Olympic Decathalon!) and even sold a 16KB RAM expansion card and Z80 coprocessor for a while.
A short while back someeone asked what Hacker News would be arguing about, if it existed in 1976. My answer was "Bill Gates' famous 'An Open Letter to Hobbyists'".
I think this is a correct way to put it, but FWIW on HN: the person who actually designed the device (not just the hardware) was the legendary Lee Felsenstein. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lee_Felsenstein