6 ms·

The Rise and Fall of Adam Osborne

121 points by dshipper 3y ago

AlbertCory 3y ago
[flagged]
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
aqme28 3y ago
Would have thought that Steve Job's biggest rival was Bill Gates.
- Max-q 3y ago
  In the early 80s Bill Gates sold some basics and DOS. His world dominance started 10 years later with Windows 3.0 and 3.1.
  - garius 3y ago
    So at this time, Gates actually has a DOS deal in place with Lore Harp over at Vector Graphic - one he'll renege on when IBM come knocking. That'll come up in the next piece, as I'll be looking at Lore and the Vector 1. But yes. Agreed. His real rise to dominance won't occur until the IBM PC explosion.
    - joezydeco 3y ago
      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'".
- gumby 3y ago
  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!)
- vidarh 3y ago
  Later. Not then. 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.
- joezydeco 3y ago
  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.
KerrAvon 3y ago
[flagged]
- wesleychen 3y ago
  Why do you think that? It reads like a magazine article to me.
  - AlbertCory 3y ago
    [flagged]
    - garius 3y ago
      I mean, I'm LITERALLY here. And I wrote 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). But sure. Maybe I'm a robot and just don't know.
      - TMWNN 3y ago
        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.
    - pvg 3y ago
      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.
Max-q 3y ago
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...
- ethbr1 3y ago
  Because victors write history. And in 2024, Apple's PR budget is a lot bigger than Commodore's.
- simne 3y ago
  Looks like anti-monopoly regulations. > 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. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._AT%26T https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._AT%26T https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._General_Electric_Co https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._General_Elect....
  - vidarh 3y ago
    I have no idea what this is meant to have to do with anything. > So subject for anti-monopoly investigation. No, it wasn't.
    - simne 3y ago
      And because of your non-understanding you minused my comment, coward?
      - vidarh 3y ago
        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.
gumby 3y ago
> Adam Osborne, creator of the Osborne 1 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lee_Felsenstein
- garius 3y ago
  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.
  - FullyFunctional 3y ago
    The piece is brilliant and gives great insight. 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.
    - garius 3y ago
      It's really complex. 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. They just ran out of time.
stevage 3y ago
What an amazing article. I'm fascinated that anyone has the time and resources to write articles like this and get paid somehow?
fuzztester 3y ago
https://web.archive.org/web/20090326232813/http://www.naturalscience.com/ns/news/news44.html https://web.archive.org/web/20090326232813/http://www.natura...
- fuzztester 3y ago
  >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.
  - joezydeco 3y ago
    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?
    - fuzztester 3y ago
      I don't know.
      - garius 3y ago
        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.
fuzztester 3y ago
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adam_Osborne https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adam_Osborne
JSR_FDED 3y ago
Fantastic article, great to see the personality, drive and passion of these early microcomputer pioneers. Same vibe as Halt and Catch Fire. I like the unifying theory of needing both the waves of publicity to succeed, as well as building a functional well-run business at the same time.
zubairq 3y ago
I loved this article about Osbourne. Also, the quote (paraphrased), "The past is an explanation of the present"
whartung 3y ago
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 certainly did enjoy his books however.
- MaggieL 3y ago
  > 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.
- wduquette 3y ago
  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.
Sn0wCoder 3y ago
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....
earleybird 3y ago
"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. [0] https://sinclairql.speccy.org/archivo/docs/books/Threaded_interpretive_languages.pdf https://sinclairql.speccy.org/archivo/docs/books/Threaded_in...
- MaggieL 3y ago
  > 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.

121 points by dshipper 3y ago

AlbertCory 3y ago

[flagged]

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

aqme28 3y ago

Would have thought that Steve Job's biggest rival was Bill Gates.

Max-q 3y ago
In the early 80s Bill Gates sold some basics and DOS. His world dominance started 10 years later with Windows 3.0 and 3.1.
- garius 3y ago
  So at this time, Gates actually has a DOS deal in place with Lore Harp over at Vector Graphic - one he'll renege on when IBM come knocking. That'll come up in the next piece, as I'll be looking at Lore and the Vector 1. But yes. Agreed. His real rise to dominance won't occur until the IBM PC explosion.
  - joezydeco 3y ago
    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'".
gumby 3y ago
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!)
vidarh 3y ago
Later. Not then. 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.
joezydeco 3y ago
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.

KerrAvon 3y ago

[flagged]

wesleychen 3y ago
Why do you think that? It reads like a magazine article to me.
- AlbertCory 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - garius 3y ago
    I mean, I'm LITERALLY here. And I wrote 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). But sure. Maybe I'm a robot and just don't know.
    - TMWNN 3y ago
      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.
  - pvg 3y ago
    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.

Max-q 3y ago

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...

ethbr1 3y ago
Because victors write history. And in 2024, Apple's PR budget is a lot bigger than Commodore's.
simne 3y ago
Looks like anti-monopoly regulations. > 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. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._AT%26T https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._AT%26T https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._General_Electric_Co https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._General_Elect....
- vidarh 3y ago
  I have no idea what this is meant to have to do with anything. > So subject for anti-monopoly investigation. No, it wasn't.
  - simne 3y ago
    And because of your non-understanding you minused my comment, coward?
    - vidarh 3y ago
      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.

gumby 3y ago

> Adam Osborne, creator of the Osborne 1 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lee_Felsenstein

garius 3y ago
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.
- FullyFunctional 3y ago
  The piece is brilliant and gives great insight. 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.
  - garius 3y ago
    It's really complex. 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. They just ran out of time.

stevage 3y ago

What an amazing article. I'm fascinated that anyone has the time and resources to write articles like this and get paid somehow?

fuzztester 3y ago

https://web.archive.org/web/20090326232813/http://www.naturalscience.com/ns/news/news44.html https://web.archive.org/web/20090326232813/http://www.natura...

fuzztester 3y ago
>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.
- joezydeco 3y ago
  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?
  - fuzztester 3y ago
    I don't know.
    - garius 3y ago
      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.

fuzztester 3y ago

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adam_Osborne https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adam_Osborne

JSR_FDED 3y ago

Fantastic article, great to see the personality, drive and passion of these early microcomputer pioneers. Same vibe as Halt and Catch Fire. I like the unifying theory of needing both the waves of publicity to succeed, as well as building a functional well-run business at the same time.

zubairq 3y ago

I loved this article about Osbourne. Also, the quote (paraphrased), "The past is an explanation of the present"

whartung 3y ago

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 certainly did enjoy his books however.

MaggieL 3y ago
> 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.
wduquette 3y ago
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.

Sn0wCoder 3y ago

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....

earleybird 3y ago

"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. [0] https://sinclairql.speccy.org/archivo/docs/books/Threaded_interpretive_languages.pdf https://sinclairql.speccy.org/archivo/docs/books/Threaded_in...

MaggieL 3y ago
> 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.