Tech pioneer Adam Osborne dies at age 64

SJ Mercury News ^ | 3/25/03 | Reuters

[NormsRevenge]

Adam Osborne, whose successes and failures pioneering the first portable computer became one of Silicon Valley's great cautionary tales, has died at 64 after a long illness.

Osborne, a British immigrant and long-time Berkeley resident, died in his sleep in Kodiakanal, a village in southern India, last Tuesday, his sister, Katya Douglas, told Reuters on Monday.

[Arkinsaw]

I wanted one of those Osborne computers soooo bad. I would go down to the computer store and look through the manuals and admire it. Never got one.

[Spruce]

CP/M lives!

[beckett]

...that caused him to suffer an endless series of mini-strokes.

I think they ended.

Not trying to be glib about the guy's death, but I couldn't resist pointing out the logical flaw in a report about a man's death which calls his illness endless.

[Arkinsaw]

Look at that cute little screen. What a piece of tech.

[Spruce]

Wow! That take me back. Is that yours? Does it boot?

[Arkinsaw]

Wow! That take me back. Is that yours? Does it boot?

No, I just drooled over them, never could afford one at the time. This one is from the Internet Obsolete Computer Museum. You should check it out, it has nearly all of the old machines pictured.

[D-fendr]

Kaypro II lugable was my first computer. Looked a lot like that Osborne, except the screen was bigger.

Had one of those keyboard covers with the format commands for WordStar like that one too.

Two floppy drives (what's a "hard" drive?), for discs that really were floppy. One drive for your file disk, one for the program...

32 lbs. of CP/M processing power.

[Spruce]

That machine is the first "luggable' ever. Worth a fortune(if it boots).

[Spruce]

Osborne. 64. How appropriate.

[Arkinsaw]

Kaypro II lugable was my first computer.

I hated the Kaypro. It killed the Osborne dead when they put a thermal type printer on the back of it.

[Paleo Conservative]

Kaypro II lugable was my first computer. Looked a lot like that Osborne, except the screen was bigger.

My first computer was an original Compaq Portable with two floppies, 256K RAM, Compaq DOS 1.11, and WordStar 3.3. It still works, but is not worth using.

[billbears]

I remember the 5 1/4 floppy drives. Until I got one of those I had to load programs by a tape deck

[Cacique]

God I just realize how old I am.

My first machine was an APPLE // clone a LASER // with 64 megs of ram. I quickly dumped it when the APPLE //C came out.

At grad school we were using a DEC VAX 100 mini mainframe to run stats and simulations.

It seems like yesterday.

[HAL9000]

My first machine was an APPLE // clone a LASER // with 64 megs of ram.

I'm sure you meant to say 64 KB of RAM. A megabyte of RAM would have been incredibly expensive back then.

Back when I was using my Apple ][, we were also installing some 4 meg memory modules in an IBM 4341 (a small mainframe) - it was the most expensive thing I've ever held in my hands.

[Hank Rearden]

Thanks, Adam.

I've still got my Osborne Executive and cut my teeth on an Osborne 1 my Dad had. My Exec (with a 10mb hard drive I installed myself) still boots and runs fine - I can't believe I started two businesses with that thing and it changed the direction of my life.

I met the man several times as a Bay Area Osborne dealer just a few miles from the factory ("Liked it so well I started the company", or something like that) during the period of attempted rebuilding. An interesting, pioneering kinda guy. Pre-announcing the Executive (I still have the magazine that article appeared in) was fatal; who knows where he'd have gone without that blunder?

Thanks again, Adam. Those were fun times.

[Cacique]

Correct, I meant 64K, the APPLE //+ came with 32K and could be boosted to 64k, the //e hadn't come out yet. The //e could be boosted to 128K and shortly thereafter the portable //c came out with a standard 128K.

We have been thinking in megs for so long now that it's hard to imagine there were computers out there with miniscule (by today's standards) memory. The commodore 64 was the best selling model in those days and for people on a budget there was the Timex Sinclair with a masssive 16K of memory.

[quietolong]

Had a girlfriend who went to work for Osborne. Got to play with one of the first ones. But all that up/down back & forth scrolling. Was like looking though a peephole.

[Erasmus]

Had a girlfriend who went to work for Osborne. Got to play with one of the first ones. But all that up/down back & forth scrolling. Was like looking though a peephole.

Analogous to the first-generation mechanical scan TV. You got to look into a little 2" square magnifying glass at a neon orange image with 60 to 120 lines of vertical resolution.

Hmm.. a bit like looking at a realvideo feed today.

(^B[>

[quietolong]

Hmm.. a bit like looking at a realvideo feed today

Your right !

http://www.tvdawn.com/recordng.htm

http://www.mztv.com/televisor.html